Dorylaea orini Attempt #2!!!

The other day I received a surprise package from my good friend Sebastien, (or "Santa Cockroach"), which contained 8 Dorylaea orini oothecae! 😁 They all seem rather healthy, and when I first got them, I placed them in a small, shallow container with moist substrate in it for incubation until I got around to making them a bigger, proper enclosure. I figured I had at least a few weeks until they started hatching.

Well, the next day I opened the enclosure and several black nymphs came running out and either jumped out of their container onto my bedroom floor or ran around the rim just like in this video I took last year. I was not expecting them to hatch so soon! 😆

So I rehoused them and the rest of the oothecae into a bigger plastic container with coconut fiber as the substrate, and bark pieces and dead leaves for hides. I will be keeping them a lot more moist than I did last time, and with slightly less ventilation, as I think that lack of suitable moisture and too much ventilation may have been the main reason my previous oothecae never hatched. Also, according to both Sebastien and Kyle Kandilian, this species likes to eat moldy food, and thus old food should not be removed, (unless of course it becomes a breeding ground for mites). Following these new care perimeters, I hope to be successful in both rearing these nymphs to adulthood and in breeding them as well!

Anyway, here are a couple pictures of one of the nymphs:

This species has rather large hatchlings (like Drymaplaneta), that are surprisingly very dark in color, they look brown in these pictures with flash, but in person under normal lighting they look black. I can't wait to see them develop their characteristic stripey coloration! 😊

Well, that's gonna do it for today, a big thanks to "Santa Cockroach" for this lovely surprise, stay tuned for my next post, which will be about yet another new addition to my collection! I hope everyone enjoyed this post, will see you all soon! 😉