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Diapheromera femorata ova care


Ralph

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Has anyone incubated and hatched these before? I have around 40 eggs and want to know what's worked.

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  • 8 months later...

Well, they hatched! Over the weekend, while I was at the other house, as my bugs love to do. But 36 are still alive, and some are eating, so I'm thrilled.

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They've been eating rose and blackberry. The mortality rate is huge, although that could really be due to the fact that they starved for a day or two until I got home... Five or six appear to be thriving though.

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Good to know, I might have to try hardier foods for a few days if this cold keeps up.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Are you gonna update us with picks Ralph? :D

Were in the midwest are you?? here in south florida the best way to avoid a frost over of your plants is to cover them with a plastic tarp or visqueen and just sorft of balloon it over the bush your using.

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I'll get some up soon, when I'm not on the iPod! Put them up on Facebook but forgot about here. :P

Anyway, I'm in Iowa (Quad Cities). I'm down to two of the little guys, and even they seem to be declining. Had been eating well and behaving normally, sitting on the walls and plants in characteristic walkingstick poses. These two now seem to be having difficulty climbing and spend most of their time near or on the floor... They also frequently arch their bodies and wave their legs lethargically. I'm still holding out that they'll improve and shed, and I was hoping that this update would have been with better news!

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Down to one today... I'm confused.

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Plastic with screen lid, like their parents were kept in.

I know a lot of the die-off is due to the unexpected hatching, but I wonder if the foodplants were insufficient. The wild population was found on some low plants around an apple tree, and they ate rose and blackberry after I took them in. But I wonder if some nutritional deficiency happened with these nymphs. The reason I didn't feed them those un-ID'ed wild plants was that they haven't grown in yet...

In what may be a related incident, I once raised some Microcentrum katydids on maple alone, and compared them to ones which were fed a variety of foodplants. The maple group ate a basically equivalent amount of foliage, but grew much more slowly and experienced "random" deaths which didn't occur in the group which ate several plant species.

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I honestly don't know about food and its values...But I really think the trick with difficult ectotherms "Inverts and herps" is in the design of the enclosures and preventing or slowing down dehydration.

Good luck next time around :(

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Yeah, that seems likely. I'm not going to try again for a couple years, so hopefully I'll have some better ideas by then!

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