Hello all,
I work in a children's museum and we have a colony of G. Portentosa. We've been taking care of hissers for about 2 years now and about 6 months ago I became the official bug handler. We originally had four females to begin (Big Mama, Greta, Elvira, and Stump) and those four are doing great! Recently (about 2 months ago now) we adopted a scoopful of roaches from a larger museum in our area and so far they have been thriving in their new environment...
However, yesterday I found a friend who had white legs, like they had molted recently but everything else was dark, normal coloring. Today I came in and found the same one on his back, slightly curled and twitching a lot. [https://photos.app.goo.gl/0kO22jHhz6A8WxBm2] About an hour later, I found another friend with the same symptoms (minus the white legs). [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pR500_CTMdwTbWX9QCrLuRmIb9LSWwZuGA/view?usp=sharing]
I feed them a mixture of dry cat/rat food and washed vegetables every other day or so. Lately they have been going NUTS when I put a slice of apple in there, it's consumed within a couple of hours! We've been using a mixture of coco fibre and cypress mulch for substrate. They have a heat rock and an overhead heating lamp when needed, which is often (its cold here).
I really love these bugs, so any info or help on the matter is super appreciated!
Thanks,
Brin