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OK, so I'm not exactly new to the invert world, and have done my fair share of packing and receiving roaches, centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, and scorpions... I recently had an issue with receiving a large lot of A. tesselata that included several gravid adult females, and wondered if anyone else had had similar experiences. First of all, the packing job was *ok*... I generally frown on shipping inverts in cups with loose substrate (shipping millis or other sub-terrestrial inverts in a FULL cup of substrate is ok), and most of these roaches came in 8oz deli cups with loose substrate accompanying them. This means they were getting banged around a lot, so I'm sure that didn't help. Regardless, it wasn't enough to "squish" them or anything, and ALL 50+ nymphs were fine. However, there were three gravid adult females that just simply stopped moving in the following two days after I received them. They looked like they were having seizures or something similar... kind of a loss of motor control and spasms when they tried to move. And then they just stopped moving, stone dead. All adult males are fine, and two of the other gravid adult females are fine as well. Is this species especially sensitive to shipping stress? Does their being gravid affect their sensitivity to a greater level? Has anyone noticed shipping sensitivity in other large-bodied adult roaches (B. giganteus, B. fusca, B. colloseus, etc.)?

I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Manchester. For my final year project I'm going to try to compare sexual size dimorphism and male-male behaviour in all four species of the genus Gromphadorhina. We already have a population of G. portentosa in the labs at Manchester and I think I've found a source for G. oblongata but I'm having real trouble finding places to purchase adult G. grandidieri and G. picea. I thought this would a be a great place to ask! Thanks, Roberto