Jerusalem Cricket Eggs!!!

Last Sunday, I checked on one of my two mated female JCs, Sam, and found a egg on the surface! It seemed rather freshly laid, and I searched the whole enclosure for more, however there were no other eggs, so I assume the female will be laying more soon.

Finding an egg in Sam's enclosure made me check my other mated female's enclosure (Ripper), as well, and boy am I glad I did! Deep down near the bottom of the enclosure, I found 12 eggs close together in the substrate. She probably laid them in a chamber rather than loosely in the substrate, however, since I dumped the substrate from her enclosure into another container while looking for the eggs, I was unable to observe how the eggs were originally laid.

So now I have 13 eggs total, one from Sam and twelve from Ripper, and Sam should lay more soon. I talked with David Weissman, the leading expert on all things Stenopelmatidae, about the eggs, and he mentioned that females likely lay more than one clutch of eggs in their lifetime, so Ripper may lay another clutch of eggs before she dies, which would be great! He also said that since these individuals were collected from Southern California, the eggs should hatch within a month, and the resulting nymphs should take two years to reach maturity.

I have separated all the eggs and put them in their own little containers, they are all buried in moist coconut fiber, hopefully they will hatch and hopefully I can rear the resulting nymphs!

Here are some pictures of Ripper's eggs before I separated them all:

I am very excited about this recent development, and I really hope the eggs end up hatching! Not many people have gotten eggs from Jerusalem crickets, just Smokehound714 on Arachnoboards, David Weissman and myself I'm pretty sure!

Anyways, that's it for this post, I hope you guys enjoyed, and I'll see you all soon! :)