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My hissing cockroaches are dying!


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Hi all, I just registered here so forgive me for making such a hasty post, but I seem to have a problem.

A few months ago a friend of mine gave me 5 adult hissers, they're awesome! I have 3 males and 2 females. About a month and a half ago one of the females gave birth to about 30 babies, I think they're on their 4th molt or so now. On Sunday (8/25/07) I noticed one of the adults was on his back and not looking very healthy, that night I went camping and came back at about 3 PM the next day to find the rest of the adults looking pretty bad as well. At this point (8/28/07) about half the babies are dead, all the adults seem on the verge of death, they lie on their back and just twitch, almost convulsive looking. I suspect the problem is that I treated my apartment for fleas the previous Wednesday (8/22/07). I moved the roach aquarium into the kitchen area, used two canisters of flea powder on the bedroom area, and used liquid spray stuff on the carpet in the room where the roaches were. The whole time I was applying the stuff, and until the following morning, I had a fan in the window where the roaches were not, the room where I used the powder rather than the liquid. The powder was floating around in the air a lot, burning my eyes and nose, but thanks to the fan I assumed it would mostly be sucked out the window and not float around too much into the room where the roaches were. This was a total coincidence, I didn't imagine it would do anything bad to them. It also seems odd that it would take almost 4 days to start affecting them.

Their terrarium is just a 10 gallon aquarium with a screen lid with about an inch of peat moss in the bottom, some egg crates and a piece of a log from the pet store that's hollowed out and made for lizards and things to hide under. They eat a diet of mostly cat food and fresh carrots/apples/potatoes. Could the flea treatment have caused them to die like this? Is there anything I can do at this point? Also the night before I noticed the first one, Saturday, I took a couple of the males out and let the neighbors see/hold them, I've done this before but it didn't seem to hurt them. I have a van parked outside where I can move the aquarium to, but it gets pretty hot in there sitting in the sun. It's been getting up into the 90s lately. Any advice would be appreciated.

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I'll try and do that tomorrow, I'll probably take them to work and leave them there until I get the fleas under control. They've come back in the room where I used the spray, the powder seems to have done a better job in that regard. I changed their bedding about 3 weeks ago, and it doesn't smell moldy. I can't believe I killed the little guys, arg. Thanks for the reply.

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