WJSTLL?!

Oooh, debatable, sir. Jitterbug is a pretty spiffy looking Male if I do say so myself. ^_~ Even if he IS supposedly just a pest. (Put it this way--I have a plentiful supply of potential pets in the kitchen during the rainy season every year...and every tropical storm that comes by yeilds a sudden swell of adventuresome critters...) It's like a dream come true... Assuming you like American Cockroaches. (I think I've mentioned before that this is usually a less common thing for girls without any lizards/snakes to feed them to, or for girls in general as far as I've noticed. ) Oh the bright side, if I ever move into a dorm, or a third-rate apartment, I'll probably be even more deliriously happy. AND you don't need a humidifier or all that fancy stuff you poor peopel suffer through further north--the only thing is egg cases don't seem to hatch inside at room temperature. They need about outdoor temperature so... ...Seriously all you people ought to reture here and live happy and bountiful lives with our ample "pest" population.

YES! JUST AS PLANNED! *airpunch* Someone knows the song... But of course, living in Florida means you basically have only two seasons:rainy and dry...so there really ARE trees and flowers and chirping birds all the time. (Slight truth there! But sadly, I can't yet twiddle my toes...) Aw, hey! The only problem with the german cockroaches is that they're a bugger (Oh the puns!) to get rid of. ("Might as well blow up the building" kind of thing in some cases...) I mean, they're the LITTLE ones. I always laugh when people from further north complain about their eensy cockroaches and how much they gross them out. It just makes me want to put a palmetto bug an inch and a half long on a cabinet and watch the person's react as the thing dive-bombs their head s the next-tallest object in the room. (Maybe that's a little heartless, but it's usually totally worth the headmovies...) People don't really feel sorry for the things down here (except for me) because of the relative size, I assume. (Nice big American Cockroaches and all...) There's a rather noticeable difference between the cockroach you find in your cereal bowl in Miami, and the cockroach behind the toilet in Hershey. (Watching my aunt squeal over a roach no bigger than my rather bitten-up pinky fingernail rather highlighted this difference for me... )

Understood, but I checked all my roaches pretty carefully before deciding who went in what cage. I originally had two males and so had two cages. Until recently, I assumed I had ONE male... And it's usually pretty easy to tell which one's which in this species at least...so...I still don't know what happened... I can't explain it, but the cockroach in question didn't have ANY of the features of a male, and now, suddenly "she" does. ...I mean...Unless one of my many siblings swapped out my roaches (Which I don't find that likely) it doesn't make sense to me that this should happen either, but I've watched my little group pretty closely, and now the entire "chemistry" of the group is a lot more agitated as well. It's a fairly small cage, and I suppose weird things happen no those cases, but generally spontaneous sex-changes are a new one to me. A few of mine have molted before, and my populace is small enough that I can differentiate all my roaches by sight. I'm really quite sure Ravenous didn't have any back-prongs. I wasn't checking consistantly, but I DO keep an eye on the abdomens and the antennae as a primary way of telling a few of my roaches apart... ...Uh...Do you think I wasn't looking carefully enough? (Oh my...how embarassing... ) Ravenous has always been the father fast and nervous one I suppose... (AND HERE I WAS HOPING FOR AN EXCITING AND DRAMATIC FIRST POST! *melodramatic reel* XD)

Malaysia! My goodness, that's far! (And you're islamic? "Salaam?") I can't wait to see what YOUR roaches look like. Technically Florida, where I am, in the United States, is supposedly the place to be for "tropical" bugs... I'm curious...how big are the roaches over there?

Hullo. I am one of those crazy people who live in Florida, where roaches are the state bird, and the environment can only be described as "palm tree rich." So a while back, I started catching teh "pests" in the house and raising them as pets. At the moment, this legacy has passed on to my five little friends, Kafka, Jitterbug, Ravenous, Mehitabel, and Misa-Misa. And they live on in a predator-free environment as my strange pets. (Strange? Yes. It's typically rather strange when a girl decides out of the blue to keep roaches. Especially when she works for an exterminator... But of course, logic works for a select few in this universe...) Why do I do this? Well...I like the way roaches look. I like the way they react. I like watching how they behave with one another, and what body language they have... And I also like when men twice my size and rippling with muscles are standing on a chair screaming, and I like being the one who goes over to the roach, looks at it and then says "Ah. Just an american cockroach" then squishing it properly before someone has a heart attack.

Actually, my cockroaches ate Cilantro. (Mine are American cockroaches though, so I can't speak for the "fancy breeds") And my cockroaches also eat carrots, but only when I don't give them apples or such. I've avoided citrus, because though they love it, it goes moldy like nobody's business. My cockroaches have different favorite foods, too. One of them will eat the icing off of kitkat wafers... I also have seen them eat paper and soap. In fact, they all prefer brown paper over the nasty white stuff. More or less, you just triple wash your veggies before popping them in, just in case.

Right...So... I recently went off on a rambling and lovely search of the internet to find out life's answers to pressing questions. In my case, this included the qeustion of what just happened to my cockroach. I am one of life's happy weirdoes in that instead of stomping on household pests--which down where I live, include American Cockroaches about the size of my thumb--I catch them and keep them in cages as inspiration to a range of bizzare art projects. So far, I've had this habit for almost a year and a half...in fact, my first little darling, a female cockroach by the name of Kafka has been in my care at least that long. (I explain this uncommon lifespan with my lack of knwoledge of how to feed my roaches. Pretty much, I accidentally semi-starved the poor thing for nutrients and she's had long life because of it.) Currently, I have five roaches all in a little plastic-bottles cage of my own design, with plenty of airholes, lots of paper to hide beneath/eat, and several differnt compartments to live in/lay eggcases in. And until about last week, I carefully controlled the environment so that my only male, Jitterbug, had access to his four lovely friends. (Actually, three. Misa-Misa is underage.) Then my other yougn cockroach, Ravenous underwent the transformation into an adult, and suddenly she had "male prongs" for lack of a better word, on "her" abdomen. Not only this, but Kafka and Mehitabel also seemed to notice and all sorts of undignified canoodling occured. Jitterbug and Ravenous seem to have some evidence of fighting over the two eligable females in the cage since they've been wing-biting and I'm reasonably sure that they should be getting enough protein otherwise. My question is, did my darling and nervous Ravenous, the only roach in the cage to enjoy swimming in the waterdish, actually just have a sex change, or do the sexual attributes ("male prongs") of cockroaches only show up once they reach adulthood?