You can really see the nice coloration of the nymphs in these pictures, I love their striped legs!
In a recent post, I said that I thought only had one female Panchlora sp. "White' left, and that the rest were males. Well I'm happy to say that I was wrong, after digging around the enclosure and sexing the nymphs properly, I found out that two of the "male" nymphs I had were actually females that were one or two molts behind my other female. 😁
And that folks, is why no one should ever sex roach nymphs based of size alone! (which is what I was doing, since they all seemed to be growing at the same rate, and my other female is quite a bit larger than the other two, it was a novice move on my part). Anyway, I feel a lot better about the future of this species in my collection now, I can't wait until they all mature!
So, I suppose I never actually said anything here on the blog, but the eggs that my Meracantha contracta female laid all hatched, and I've got quite a few larvae now! 😊 They have been growing, slowly but surely, and now some of them have gotten to the size where I can take some pictures of them!
Here are some pictures of one of the larger larvae:
Surprisingly, they are doing pretty well on a substrate of just coconut fiber with a little bit of leaf litter mixed in, (which they don't seem to eat as fast as other Tenebrionids I've kept). I thought the larvae of this species would need rotten wood in their diet to survive and grow, and was prepared to move them to a rotten wood substrate should they start dying off, but so far it doesn't seem to be a necessity for them! Of course that could change as they get older, they are still rather small right now, so we'll see...
Anyway, that is going to do it for this post, I hope everyone enjoyed, will see you all next time! 😉
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