Last week I received a gravid adult female Nyctoporis carinata from my friend coniontises, (author of the Splendid Unknowns Blog), which he had caught as a dying, crippled adult, and rehabilited to the point where she was laying eggs for him! He kindly offered to send her my way, and I accepted that offer, as this is a genus I've been wanting to breed, and document what the larvae and pupae look like. 😁
She is missing a lot of her tibiae, and moves quite slowly, in sort of a hobble, but despite this she just keeps on trucking, and I think I've seen her exhibit oviposition behavior, so fingers crossed I get larvae! 🤞
I have her set up in a lidless 24 oz container with a mix of sand and coconut fiber as the substrate, about a CM deep. According to coniontises, this female has oviposited in plain paper towels, so this species probably isn't picky about their oviposition medium at all, thus I probably could have used plain coconut fiber, but sand and coconut fiber is a pretty standard, foolproof oviposition substrate IME.
I'm keeping a third of the substrate moist, the rest dry, and she's got bark pieces and half a cardboard roll for hides. I'm feeding her chick feed and banana, (the latter I'm only providing because I worry if she can even eat the hard chick feed in her state). I've also thrown in some crushed leaf litter here and there, for the larvae if I get any. I'm keeping her at around 75F°, as this should help get her laying eggs faster.
Anyways, here are some pictures of the female:
A very cool looking darkling beetle, hopefully she lays a decent amount of eggs for me and I can rear said larvae up to adulthood! I believe this particular species has been successfully bred in captivity before, but I can't find pictures of larvae or pupae online, so I would love to photograph them and post them here on the blog for future reference. 🙂
Well, that's gonna do it for today, big thanks to coniontises for this interesting new addition! 😀 I hope everyone enjoyed, thanks for reading, stay safe, if you're in the USA please VOTE, and I'll see you all in the next post! 😉
Hi, I am on a hike and just found one of these and IDed it through iNaturalist. Most unusual beetle— so fascinating that I had to find out more about it. I do believe that the one I found changed colors from a sand color to very dark grey when I moved it off the road. Please update me about the larvae!
ReplyDeleteSadly I never got larvae, the female expired before producing any, she was quite old... :(
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