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Largest captive colonies?


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Hey all! Some of you may remember me if you frequented Arachnoboards back in the day... potentially not fondly lol. However, I took a break from the hobby for a few years for grad school and kids, and now am building a new collection of various species that are "child/hand friendly", and the kids seem to love cockroaches. :) I am building several colonies of larger species (B. giganteus, A. tesselata, B. fusca, B. dubia) and some lateralis for fun. :)

It did get me thinking though, as i'm building the colonies of larger species 10-40 individuals at a time, that there doesn't appear to be anyone who has an abundance of species like these... I'm thinking here of the giant Blaberus species primarily, and other such as tesselata. Any "feeder breeder" who has dubia for sale could have tens of thousands without even trying hard, but it seems even keepers who have solved the breeding issues for these other large roaches still aren't creating large colonies? I understand the difficulties with getting large Blaberus and tesselata to reproduce consistently, but it seems like if someone had "cracked the code", as it were, that there should be at least a few people out there with say, a colony of 1K B. giganteus or A. tesselata...?

So, what are the largest colony sizes you all know of for some of these harder-to-breed species? First-, or second-, hand information is fine haha. :)

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A thousand Blaberus giganteus would have to have a ton of room... Unless they consisted of mostly nymphs. I know a person that has well over 3,000 Blaberus craniifer and it isnt Kyle ;)

I have gotten my lats to start breeding and such (please dont say "wow these are super easy and everyone can breed them without trying" I have had SOOOOO many problems with this species it isnt funny...

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Yeah, I know the space issue is a major limiting factor... but, there are people in the reptile hobby who build giant custom enclosures for big snakes... one person I read went so far as to convert a bedroom as an enclosure for a ~20' reticulated python! So, I was wondering if there were some similarly-infatuated roach hobbyists who have daisy-chained the giant "Christmas tree Rubbermaids" or used a dry powder freight shipping container, or something similar to house a giant colony of giant roaches. :) B. fusca seems pretty hardy, and I would think you could hav a 3K-5K colony in a few years no problem if space wasn't an issue... and they wouldn't need quite the space of B. giganteus, for example.

It does kind of make one wonder, though, what such an enclosure/environment would have to look like to sustain a large colony... it would be an interesting challenge. :) I saw a picture once of a hisser colony in the thousands at a museum that utilized a hollowed-out tree I think... that would be a huge step in the right direction for giganteus on that scale...

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Bronx zoo is what you are thinking. I have seen a video if a person that dedicated a closet to a chameleon!

If you were to dedicate a whole room (for more of a tropical species) I think you would have to add plants and have a little Eco system which would be cool

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  • 2 weeks later...

There's a vid of a guy somewhere that tuned 1/2 a room into an enclosure for a rather big water monitor cpmplete with plants logs and a water feature. Looks really nice and I wish I had 1/2 the space.

In my poking around on You Tube etc... I've never really com across someone with a "large" display enclosure. There's a lot of vids from breeders for the reptile et al trade where there's a room lined with bin after bin, but I don't think thats what you're looking for.

Thats a good question, even tho we're fans of roaches and inverts, I wonder if it's the "creep" factor...?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Well huh... those are certainly candidates for the largest captive colonies in the world (never mind that Traditional Chinese Medicine is a complete fraud). I'm a big fan of fools being separated from their money though, and kudos to that guy for turning it into a $160K a year business! :)

Maybe I'm asking about the largest non-commercial colonies of large species then... specifically, the large Blaberus, I would guess. I wonder if there's a Guiness record for it yet? :)

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About two or so years or so ago my colony of Periplaneta americana numbered around 5-6,000... But seeing as I didn't need that many I just didn't feed them for almost a year. Their numbers are in the low hundreds now, much more easily managed. Being an exterminator I've seen houses infested with B.germanica in the hundreds of thousands. It's actually some of my favorite work dealing with numbers like that. Haha.

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About two or so years or so ago my colony of Periplaneta americana numbered around 5-6,000... But seeing as I didn't need that many I just didn't feed them for almost a year. Their numbers are in the low hundreds now, much more easily managed. Being an exterminator I've seen houses infested with B.germanica in the hundreds of thousands. It's actually some of my favorite work dealing with numbers like that. Haha.

I dubia colony that numbered around 5000 as well, until one day a freak environmental toxin came into the basement and wiped out 2/3 of them, and killed one of my snakes! I suspect the village was spraying something and a freak air draft near the sill plate of the house carried it very precisely, leaving everything else unharmed. It's the only explanation other than massive coincidence, which is also possible I suppose.

The only way I discovered it was to open their Rubbermaid container to find literally a 3" deep mass of dead bodies. I had only been maintenance feeding them once a week, so they had been rotting for several days, the smell was atrocious!

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  • 5 weeks later...

Im still new to breeding but i just took an out of control Dubia colony off a guys hands to use for feeders for my Bearded Dragons. i would guess ihave 20 to 30k. I have 2 35 gal totes i keep them in for breeding and a 20 gal tote at the moment im putting small nymphs in for food. I had a smell but i think i have figured it out. i did a clean out to freshen up the totes took all the small ones out for food probably had 5 to 10k small ones.

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  • 4 months later...

Building large colonies of A. tesselata, dubia, and fusca are easy. But B. giganteus needs a lot more space than those species and they have random die offs (not like dubia do) and are more prone to cannabolisim than other species.

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