njohns

Thanks All About Arthropods, I will definitely do that!

I have kept roaches for most of my life, and have never had any problems, except for these species, and I was wondering if any of you could try to help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. I keep them in 10-gallon aquariums with about 2-3" coco fiber, and vertical pieces of bark. The substrate is mostly dry, but I try to add water every once in a while. I keep the room at about 80 degrees with a space heater. I feed them what I feed my other roaches: fruit, vegetables, bread, and cereal. I feed my other roaches cat food occassionally, but they don't seem to like this. A couple things I was thinking is maybe they aren't getting enough protein or maybe the humidity is too low? I live in Montana, and it's really dry here. I have a humidifier in the room, but even that only raises it to about 50%. The reason I don't keep the soil moist very often is because I keep getting mites...

You can do it, but I've found that they don't do as well or breed as well. I had a bunch of Halloween hissers with my peppered, and the hissers slowly died off. Cockroaches are very social, and like to be among their own kind

It was canned vegetables

Is this OK? Maybe I'm just paranoid or whatever, but I'm just thinking about the preservatives and everything...

hmm yeah they might be falling. It's just hard to watch them all the time to know for sure... idk like I'm trying to use screen on the sides of the tank instead of cork bark, but maybe it's not working as well. Maybe I just gotta shell out the money for cork bark

Well unfortunately no one's replying... OK well I think it might actually be the humidity. On Roach Crossing it says that humidity doesn't matter, but maybe he just means that they can SURVIVE at any humidity...

So most of my Shield-spots aren't developing their wings well when they molt. I have vertical spaces for them, and I think the humidity is ok. What's going on?

Yeah that seems like a good idea too.

lucky

Yeah dude I'd really like to see that. Something else I just thought of is to use that screen mesh to hang on the sides of the tank. The main thing is I need vertical spaces for them to drop their wings when they molt. The thing with this is that you'll still be able to see into the tank... But yeah, I've found that you really need completely vertical objects in order for their wings to really develop well...

Thanks, that would be awesome!

Alright thanks. I guess tat's kind of obvious I actually don't have a lot of oak where I'm at. Is Aspen or Cottonwood ok?

This stuff seems kind of expensive, but I'd like something a bit more natural than just egg carton flats Anyone have any ideas?

They're really easy to hatch. You don't need to do anything. I haven't kept track of how long it takes for them to hatch, but I think it's probably a couple weeks...