dovey

Yeah, long story short don't even ask, I put my dog tooth through my phone camera lens cover the other day in a tarantula escape "need both hands and immediately!" emergency. Remember when your dentist said not to use your teeth as a tool? Well it's not very good to try to use them as a hand either, apparently. I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow, but they won't be very good. The majority of my starter strain came from Texas A&M laboratories. I also got a group from a breeder in Michigan, but this was years ago. I think the trouble came from a local breeder here in Phoenix, however. We swapped about 100 males in order to enrich both of our gene pools about a year and a half ago. Are you telling me my dubias may have a sexually transmitted disease? And yes, the blisters are filled with hemolymph. Gross. As I said, that condition is a rare development, but once is enough!

Yes well, that's the common line; but I know the difference between dubias and orange heads, and these ain't orange heads. I would put money on not having two species of roaches living together, but I'm going to put some time into figuring this out if I have to separate out every single suspicious character, individual by individual. In fact, I would love to be wrong, to be able to pull out the miscreants and have my awesome normal dubia colony back again! I can certainly say, however that the nymphs that grow into these bizarre gold red "dubia roaches" are not--emphatically not--orange head nymphs, whatever it is they turn out to be. They look nothing like Eublaberus posticus nymphs. Rather, they look like especially lusterless, dun-colored dubia nymphs with malformed wing buds all out of proportion with the size of the nymph. And the males have really tragic problems with their ultimate molt. I get males that come out looking like bats or stealth bombers, their wings are so badly out of alignment. I get crinkly wings and paperie wings and sometimes no wings at all, just a bit of wing cover. And I also occasionally see this horrible blister looking condition on these odd adult males, sometimes within a wing filament, sometimes within a prosoma: a quarter or half inch blister filled with fluid. Absolutely revolting. This only occasionally happens, and has only occurred since I started noticing these wing variations in my adults indicating that something was wrong. I have truly exceptional husbandry where my dubias are concerned. I put a lot of work into keeping their bins in top condition. Believe me: this is not a result of sub-standard living conditions or humidity parameters outside of those optimal for dubia roaches. Can you think of a species of roach that resembles a dubia but has these sorts of issues with molting, wing chewing, and conceivably with humidity needs that fall outside the parameters of those appropriate for dubias? Because finding that guilty species is the only thing that is going to convince me that I don't have some sort of hybridization going on here. After all, taxonomists have been wrong before about genus designation. Lord, have they! I can hardly go a month without having to rewrite a label for one or more of my tarantulas species. Don't even get me started on the whole Avicularia/Caribena issue, and if you really want to see a tarantula keeper go off like a rocket, just ask them if they honestly think that's a pure-bred Grammostola pulchra they just spent so much money on? On second thought, don't. They might actually strike you. I know I'd like to hit somebody when I think about the cuckoo in my pulcra nest! At any rate, thank you so kindly for your help with this issue! I'm tentatively willing to go with the idea that I have two species, but I've got to find a better candidate than the orange head. I'll make a point of keeping you up-to-date as the saga continues. And if I'm wrong, the Mea Culpas will come raining down like, well, RAIN.

I had a really lovely collection of genetically pure dubias for a long time, but at some point when I have introduced new breeding stock, someone has sold me some hybridized dubias. Suddenly, I have a strain of really beautiful red-gold roaches, which would be fine, except for the fact that they have great difficulty with their final molts and a very high rate of physical deformity, along with the fact that they are wing-eaters, when this behavior was unheard of in my bins before now. > :-( Just FMI, what species is the likely culprit? This isn't the end of the world since I am primarily breeding feeders, but it just really bothers me that now I have bins full of wing-eating little misfits that just begin to look terrible in short order!