A few days after removing all the males from the main enclosure, when I was sure she was OK, I put my smallest male back in with her. About a week later, I noticed she was actually gravid, so I quickly took the male out of her enclosure. Everything was looking fine, but for reasons too complicated to get into here, (let's just say it had something to do with my mite eradication process), I ended up placing her enclosure under two others, previously I had it on top of a stack of cages.
A couple days later I found her up against the enclosure wall, sluggish, half of her legs had stopped working, and her eggs never developed enough for her to give birth to any offspring. A few hours later, she was dead. I think placing her cage under two others covered the ventilation on the lid, so even though she had cross ventilation, she must have suffocated. At least, that's the only reason she would die that I can think of, it's the only thing that changed in the past few days leading up to her death, and she seemed perfectly healthy until that point.
So, I've managed to kill ALL of my P.bolivari females due to stupid mistakes, I'm pretty furious at myself. 😡 At least my males are still alive, I'm going to try and acquire a few more females this Spring, and will try again to breed this beautiful species. This time I won't be making the same mistakes I did before, that's for sure!
My Arenivaga tonkawa culture seems to have hit a little snag, my adult males are all dead, but my females still haven't laid any ooths at all. Additionally, I found a subadult male dead, and full of fungus. I think this is from a lack of adequate ventilation, as Arenivaga seem to be highly susceptible to fungal infections when ventilation is low. So, I moved my females to a new enclosure with lots more ventilation, and hopefully that will fix things.
I also added a little more substrate and ventilation to my Arenivaga floridensis "White" enclosure, as my female doesn't seem to have produced any oothecae yet. None of them have succumbed to fungal infections, but I feel like adding more ventilation may help matters, we'll see. I'm also going to try keeping them more moist, since they seem to hang out in the moist half of the enclosure the most.
Lastly, while I was at it, I added some more ventilation to my Arenivaga sp. "Algodones Dunes" enclosure, as they really didn't have a lot of ventilation. While doing so, I snapped a couple pictures of one of the females, here they are:
Well, that's it for this post, thanks for reading everyone, will see you all next time! 😉
Very sorry to hear about your last female P.bolivari dying, that must suck to the moon and back. :( I'm growing rather nervous with my own Spanish isopod situation now considering that one of my P.haasi "Super Giant" died randomly and I suspect that one of my P.expansus "Orange" passed away due to me slightly altering the ventilation. :(
ReplyDeleteMan, I can't get over how awesome those Arenivaga sp. "Algodones Dunes" are! Really hope you're able to get a hold of a male before they pass away! :)
Yeah, I'm super bummed about it. :( Now I'm not even sure a lack of ventilation was why she died though, because as a test, I put one of my males' enclosures right where hers was, (it has the same amount of cross ventilation and everything), and he's doing fine... So who knows what killed my last female.
DeleteYikes, that's no good, sorry to hear it. :( If you think they've reached sexual maturity, try removing all but one male from their enclosure, might stop the females from dying. If both sexes are dying off, I'd increase the ventilation more.
The Algodones Arenivaga are so pretty, I highly doubt I'll be able to track down more though, at least, not in their lifetime... :(