Magnificent Beasts 2022 Package Series Pt. 1/3
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Got an amazing package from my buddy Brandon Maines of Magnificent Beasts. 😁 He's preparing to get back into the game and start selling inverts again, so hopefully he'll start taking orders again within a month or so. 🤞😄
In this post I'll be discussing species of roaches I just got from him that I used to keep before (and one I was already culturing currently).
I've got my two adult females, ~8 small nymphs and two viable ooths in a very well ventilated container with a few inches of coco fiber as the substrate, with leaf litter on top. I'm keeping half the enclosure humid, half dry, and keeping them fairly warm (75F°). I'll be offering dog food as the staple diet, in addition to the leaf litter. Hopefully these will pull through and breed just fine for me, though I may have to sex the nymphs from a fairly young age and cool the males to sync them up with the females. 😅
He also sent a couple adult females of another Arenivaga species, though one I already own, Arenivaga sp. "Mt Ord". Reason being, despite the fact he's 95% sure these females were in the presence of several adult males, and look quite plump and gravid, they just will NOT lay oothecae for him. I know the feeling, as I've long had the same issue repeatedly with A.tonkawa (a curse I have recently lifted though! 😁), hopefully I can get these females to breed for me.
I've dumped the females in with my other nymphs, specifically the container I have my female nymphs and one subadult male nymph in (the rest of my male nymphs I have in a different container, they're being kept cooler than the main culture since the males of this species seem to grow quite a bit faster than the females). So worst case scenario, within a month that one subadult male will probably be mature, and can mate with these adult females if by some small chance they're not currently fertilized.
Here are some pics of the females:
Such a pretty species, fingers crossed these females pop some ooths out for me soon! 🤞 😅
Next, I got a starter colony of Plectoptera poeyi "Big Pine Key, FL", the Florida Beetle Mimic roaches! 😁 The ones I sent Brandon last year have bred quite well for him thankfully, he's the only person I sent them to who had success with them.
Evidently the key to his success is just not having a million springtails get into their 32 oz deli cup, which has a cloth mesh lid. Thankfully he had some of those delis to spare, so I asked him for one along with the starter colony, so I can set them up identically to his. 😅 Hopefully round #2 goes better for me with this species, and I can get them past a couple generations in my care!
I also got a starter colony of the beautiful Panchlora sp. "Costa Rica - Yellow". Just because they were my second favorite Panchlora species to keep (the first being sp. "White"), and they do well for me. Not a ton of people have them ATM so figure it can't hurt to have another colony out there. 😄
I also asked for a couple Deropeltis sp. "Masai Mara" ooths, a species that has done very well for Brandon but I can't hatch for the life of me... Brandon's been keeping his quite humid, and thinks my failure with hatching their ooths in the past has been due to me keeping them too dry. So this time I'm keeping these ooths super humid, but warm and well ventilated too. We'll see if I have any luck this time, if keeping the ooths too dry was my only mistake with this genus, that's gonna be funny and slightly depressing... 🙃😂
Lastly, but perhaps most excitingly, Brandon sent me a new morph project to try and isolate fully: Neostylopyga propinqua (African Bullet roach) "Bloody Bullet".
Brandon's African Bullet roach colony has been throwing out a lot of high red individuals lately, and so he picked out the reddest ones he could find and sent them to me, to try and isolate and further refine the high red coloration on them. The morph name "Bloody Bullet" is super cool IMO, and I hope to do that name justice by isolating out a very red line of this species! 😁
I've got them set up in a moderately ventilated container with a thin layer of coco fiber as the substrate. They've got bark hides, and I'm keeping them fairly humid, at around 75-80F°. I'm offering dog food and fruits as the main diet.
Here are some pictures of a couple nymphs, and a couple adults:
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| Nymphs |
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| Adults |
The nymphs are VERY high red, like, they have much more red coloration than I've ever seen in my old normal colony of this species. And while I used to have a few reddish adults pop up in my normal colony from time to time, these adults of Brandon's have a much redder base coloration, especially on the abdomen, with lighter red blushing extending from the thorax well into the abdomens as well.
Hopefully I'll be able to get a colony breeding true for this coloration, and perhaps intensify the red coloration on the adults in particular with selective breeding. 😁
Well, that's it for this post, thanks for reading, hope everyone enjoyed, stay safe, stay buggy, and I'll see you all next time! 😉
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