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Peppered roach comments ....


Matt K

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...(feeding habits) roaches in general and Archimandrita tesselata:

Most of the roaches I have seen in the wild forage to some degree, eating fallen fruits or feeding off the thousands of tiny plants/flowers that grow on the sides of tropical trees, or eating the debris from the forest canopy that has fallen to the leaves below by cleaning the leaf. Roaches are like a clean up crew in the wild. Exceptions are that some roaches have been seen going up into the tree canopy to feed, others travel from fruit tree to fruit tree, and still others stay within the leaf litter.

In the tree hollows, the adults stay there during the day and roam about at night. In Costa Rica, it was not too unusual to find nymphs of Peppered roaches in the debris in the bottom of the hollow. You would know they were there by the pile of stuff looking "mixed" together instead of dropped into a layered pile. Soil, leaf bits, bug bits, and bat droppings all mixed into a pile, and at night the nymphs antennae would be waving around up from the pile. The loose mixed material was relatively damp and about 9cm deep. The thing that interested me the most was temps in the tree stumps were normally between 65 to 76 degrees F depending on location of the tree.

In contrast, in central Africa roaches were most often seen in dense grassy areas or places where there were lots of decaying leaves. There the temps were 28 to 33 degrees C at the time I was there, and it was just before the real rainy season so it was humid but fairly dry.

***Note to everyone: don't leave you digital images on one memory card, and dont leave it in the camera when it goes through the scanner equipment. I have repeatedly done this and lost loads of pics.

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