Thursday, August 15, 2019

Caught in a Pink Romance

Rah rah ah-ah-ah!
Ro mah ro-mah-mah
Gaga ooh-la-la!
Want your pink romance! 😜

Seriously though, love is in the air in my pink roach enclosure, and the rest of this post explains why!

See, I knew my old adult male Gyna capucina was still alive, as we discussed in my last post about this species, I even snapped a couple pictures of him, as well as the newly mature female I found then. I was a bit worried about his fertility, and wondered if he might already be sterile due to old age, in which case I thought my female would die without mating, as I didn't think any other males were even close to maturing. That would obviously be a big waste of a female, especially since under optimal conditions they have quite large litters...

Luckily though, I was wrong, as when I was doing enclosure maintenance a couple of weeks ago, I found at least TWO recently matured, perfectly virile adult males! 😁 There might even be a third, but I only caught a glance before it buried itself rapidly, so it may have been the older male... In any case though, my female will DEFINITELY be fertilized soon, (if she hasn't been already), and should give birth to a bunch of nymphs if all goes well! 😊

Anyways, here are some photos of one of the the new studs! This time I tried a variety of backgrounds when photographing, to try and get the most authentic coloration I could, and while the ones with the white background may be a bit tough to look at, the true pink color of the males showed up best in those ones:











Fingers crossed I can breed this species successfully, they are so, so pretty, definitely more so in person than in photos! 😍

Also, I've been meaning to feed both these and my Bantua some artificial pollen, as apparently Gyna love it, and seeing as Bantua are semi-aboreal, it seems reasonable enough to me that they'd come across pollen in the wild. Thankfully my buddy Brandon Maines at Magnificent Beasts just hooked me up with some, so I'll definitely be offering it to these two species regularly! 😄
It's quite a good supplement to the diet of a variety of roach genera, and palynivores like Pseudoglomeris magnifica or Hemithyrsocera vittata/palliata breed and develop far better when it's included in their diet. Brandon should have some more artificial pollen in stock right now for a good price, so if you'd like to add it to your roaches' diets, I'd hit him up at Magnificent Beasts. 😉

Well, that's gonna do it for this post, hope everyone enjoyed, thanks for reading, I'll see you all next time! 🙂

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