Bittersweet Pyrophorus News...

Well, unfortunately, it happened, five of my Pyrophorus noctilucus larvae have decided to pupate prematurely... 🙃 I kinda suspected they would, as they all ate very little to nothing in my care, compared to the other two that have been chowing down on everything I've offered them, seems the five that pupated were probably quite close to doing so before I even got them... This kinda sucks, since they're going to be very small adults, but hopefully they'll all be fully functional and I'll get a pair or two out of five and get them breeding.

Luckily the other two larvae both seem to be doing well, one just molted into a larger larva actually, fingers crossed I can rear these ones up to the normal adult size, though it's possible the damage could have already been done in terms of stunting. I've just moved them to even larger enclosures than the ones they were in, which hopefully in combination with frequent feedings, will get them growing to a normal length.

However, I accidentally disturbed one of the five pre-pupal larvae and destroyed the pupal cell it had scratched out, usually they do this against the bottom of the enclosure, but this one did it right in the middle of the substrate, so I couldn't tell it had made a pupal cell without digging it up... 😅 So I removed it from the cell, put all the substrate back in the deli cup, compressed it and smoothed out the top by hand, and placed the larva on top, where it pupated successfully..

So here are some pictures of a Pyrophorus pupa:

The tail end is illuminated by my flashlight a bit here...

Again, partially illuminated by flashlight...

So yeah, kinda sucks in terms of the size, but hey hopefully I'll be able to breed them anyways, wouldn't mind seeing adults now anyways, and getting some more larvae from them now would be awesome too! 😁 Would be awesome if I could get the remaining two larvae to reach full size and get a pair outta them too, fingers crossed that with some TLC, that best case scenario becomes a reality! 🤞

Anyways, that's gonna do it for this post, thanks for reading everyone, I hope you enjoyed, stay safe, and I'll see you all next time! 😉