BrinAlex

The humidity is usually between 60-70%

10/22/17 UPDATE: 1. I took the heat rock out last week as advised and for a couple of days we appeared to have no new "deaths." Thursday morning however I removed 3 roaches from the tank, and another 2 on Friday morning. Even when flipped back onto their bellies the don't appear to have much control of their legs and they just stumble around until they flip over again. 2. This morning (Sunday) I noticed a couple more with white legs, at least 5. I pulled them and have set up a "quarantine" tank. So far these guys are only exhibiting the white legs, but I'll be checking in on them in the morning.

Hi, thank you both for such quick responses! I'll take the heat rock out of the tank today, so here's hoping that will help. I did separate the two inflicted roaches yesterday into a separate enclosure and this morning they appear to be STILL ALIVE, curled up, and still twitching. Even if I flip them over, they get themselves on their backs again. UPDATE: I just pulled another roach from the tank with the same curled up position and twitchy legs. He seems a bit better than the other two, when I flip this one over he can walk a bit...but it looks nothing like the regular 'roach walk' that I've seen. It's almost like they don't have control of where it's going. That's three now, and none of them have appeared to actually DIE yet. The fact that they are still twitching (for the two its been 24 hours now) and haven't died seems a little weird to me, and that they are on their backs. We've had some roach deaths before but they've never curled up or been belly-up. UPDATE #2: Pulled the heat rock out of our tank, while I was doing that I noticed that several of the roaches had white legs... Which is what prompted me to start wondering about that first guy. Like I said in my first post, we haven't had a large colony like this for long, so I'm not sure if it's normal for some of them to have white legs? Seemed a bit strange to me.

Side note; if anyone is interested: Here is a nice photo I did take a couple of weeks ago, of the new colony: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-6rucYA4h13WXYwZTgwY0ZCMmM/view?usp=sharing And a nice close up of some cuties: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-6rucYA4h13Q25IRXJCMGhDak0/view?usp=sharing

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