varnon

I like the size, but I still think L. subsincta is the prettiest of the glowspots.

Great pics! I hope you end up with many more. I also got some a while back from roach crossing. I didn't do so well with their humidity and a few dried out, or did not molt well. Now I have only four roaches, one female, one male, and two almost adult nymphs. The male just hit his adult molt. They are so pretty! It is also interesting how they tend to play dead when you first dig them up. I like the little behavioral differences between roaches.

I've got a video I'll post eventually of my orange head roaches chasing after isopods and banana roaches. It is bizarre to see, but they are pretty efficient at catching other bugs. The banana roaches that escaped for a while were not consumed, I think they start to smell like the orange head colony. Actually, I think this thread might have been the reason I got the orange heads. They are fun roaches.

I had one that got out a few times. I would find it on the other edge of the room covered in hair. Never had one hop UP the stairs though!

I think in addition to individuals cleverly figuring out how to reach a nice spot, I think they are attracted to each other. If I don't check on my hissers for a while, and the vasoline barrier at the lid is old, some nymphs will escape. They end up under random things in my animal room. The interesting thing is, they are always together. I've found several under one object, but never individuals scattered around different objects.

Very cool. I am moving in a few months, and I have been thinking about implementing something like that with a Propeller microcontroller. I will be setting up a bug behavior lab with roaches and bees. Stanislas, have you considered publishing this set up? I know a few labs that are becoming more and more interested in roach behavior. I think there would be an interest in something like you described.

In my experience, vinegar smell usually means rotting roaches. They have a little bit of a smell to them anyway, but it is very noticeable when some die.

Try it with a few individuals, and tell us what happens. They may not be affected by it. Bees for example, I believe are not.

I made a little roach motel for my banana roaches out of balsa wood. It lasted for about 2 years before being completely consumed. I think they like wood and cardboard, but I don't think they need it. I wouldn't go too far out of my way for something special. Panchlora seem pretty flexible.

Yeah maybe. I'll think about that. I'm still messing with some various ideas.

Oh I like the idea of plastic egg crates. I recently tried stacked pvc pipes for hissers to crawl on and in. But they are a little too smooth even hitting them with a light sanding block, and I think horizontal stacking just makes cleaning harder.

I think I've fed mine just the rinds of oranges I ate. They clean everything off of them, but I don't think they eat the rinds. Its the same for apples actually, they eat everything but a tiny thin translucent layer of skin. I didn't know what it was at first.

Hey I never said I knew they were safe to eat! I'm still alive though.

I did it. I was cooking some stuff, and after I was done, I froze some banana roaches (adults and nymphs), sow bugs, mealworms, and baby hissers and then fried them with whatever leftover grease was in the pan. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. They tasted kind of nutty, and the exoskeleton bits reminded me of the little pieces of popcorn kernel shell that sometimes get dislodged from the test of the popcorn. Some of the bugs maybe had a bit of juice in them, but it wasn't a lot. In the end, I don't feel like I have a need to do it again. They weren't gross in taste or texture, but they weren't amazing either. I think the meal worms and sow bugs had the best texture. I could see those being sprinkled in dishes for flavor and texture like dried shrimp is sometimes used.

The general answer is that laws are sometimes made by people that don't understand the concepts the laws are about. I see a lot of silly laws regarding animals. It make sense for Florida to have such laws. Tennessee is far to cold for that to be a concern, at least until global warming increases temperature substantially.

I've never had them... but we eat other invertebrates, so why not roaches? And actually, in the grand scheme of things it sounds very practical. Any idea how the roaches in that video are prepared? the hissers were clearly gutted or something. I Imagine there should be a process you can use to clean them.

Awesome. Related:

I've seen that with my hissers a lot. If I give them something like frosted flakes, they will pick them up and carry them away. But they end up going back to their log, where all the other hissers want a bite too. So maybe some roaches do it to eat in peace, and others do it to feed their friends, or maybe the friend-feeding is accidental. There is just so much we don't know, but they are really interesting.

Am I right as in somebody has breed yellow or blue P. nivea? That would be so cool!

I think very little, even with humans can be used as solid, direct evidence of consciousness. The best approach we have is to gather a lot of weak evidence from different areas that points in the same direction. We have a lot of studies with humans that don't *prove* what is going on in the mind. But they all make similar suggestions, so I think we can come to a reasonable conclusion about the mind. I don't think we have that kind of research for invertebrates yet, even for bees. But as for you specific example. It is interesting. It looks like a deliberate action, but its hard to say if the roach thought about it, or if it just did it. If something like this is a behavior that can be reliable produced in some species, it would be a *very* good topic of study for insect "intelligence","conscious","tool use" or whatever you want to call it. And I'm not really sure right now the way I would approach it. I think for now I would be inclined to take the parsimonious approach and say we know the roach did the behavior, but we don't know what, if anything, it was thinking. Next I would want to find the conditions in which the behavior would and would not occur. Eventually, to show consciousness, you want to be able to rule out any other simpler explanation so that you have no choice BUT to conclude consciousness. But you have to start with reliable demonstrating it, and isolating when it does and does not happen. Really cool observation though. Eventually I want to start getting into stuff like this with Hissers. I especially think their tendency to sometimes pickup and run off with food is interesting. Might be something there.

Hey, I've been to Dauphin Island! Wasn't super into bugs back then to check for local species though.

Oh right, I don't know why I forgot about those. So, some of the Elliptorhina may be the same species (from each other and other genera), but people are at least suggesting, based on behavior in captivity, there are at least two species. And of course the flathorns are very likely a distinct species. I rarely hear anything about Leozehntnera, and I've never seen any information on Ateloblatta. Any thoughts on those as being distinct genera?

Oh yes, ligers too! I forgot about them, I think they are also often fertile. This debate just makes me want to go to Madagascar and flip logs for hissers (just for pictures). Would that be great to see them in the wild? Its so rare to find actual pictures or anything about them from the wild.

I dig the artwork!

That is true. It is also true of many taxa when you study them closely. Defining "species" is a tricky thing. For example, north american snakes of the genera Patherophis, Pituophis, and Lampropeltis can all interbreed successfully (with fertile offspring) in captivity, but they don't in the wild, even when their ranges overlap. They are *behaviorally* isolated. I can't recall the exact species or location, but some populations of salamanders have been shown to be unable to interbreed from the extreme ends of their range, but populations can interbreed with adjacent populations. So there are potentially two different species on a continum across the range. It can be very hard to pin point what a species is. For the hissers, I imagine the Gromphadorhina species, and the Elliptorhina species, may represent somewhat isolated populations at different parts in their range. In captivity, they are functionally morphs. In the wild, there may be some populations of that cannot interbreed, so we may have partial speciation, but it does not appear this is represented in the captive breed populations. So maybe the consensus is *functionally* three species in captivity? Gromphadorian sp., E. javanica, and E. chopardi?