"Masoala" portentosa Babies, Ammopelmatus Update, & Random Pictures!

Well I forgot to mention this in an earlier post, but two weeks ago, one of my Gromphadorhina portentosa "Masoala" gave birth! 😁 Oddly though I think it was a brood from my one sickly female, as I found her dead the same day. I'm pretty sure she actually aborted most of her ooth a few weeks prior and was acting a bit off from there on out. Thankfully she apparently still had brood in her, gave birth to about 15 of them, and then died. But the rest of my females are all healthy, and most are SUPER plump, so I'm expecting a lot more big broods soon (without the random post-birth mortality... 😅). And the offspring that were born are all healthy, and most have molted once or twice already.

Here are some pictures of the nymphs, plus one of the other adult females (showing off more "normal" coloration for this strain, compared to the "cherry red" female I showed off in my last post about this species:

Small nymphs

Adult female

So glad these have bred for me already, and hopefully there's a LOT more nymphs where these came from! 🤞

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Next up, some unfortunate Ammopelmatus sp. "Boise, ID" news. It would seem that heating my females to get them to catch up to my males in growth was a very bad idea, apparently heat, even coupled with high ventilation, causes a lot of issues with them, and all but one of my females died before maturing, with the last female not looking so good either. I've moved her back to a cooler location alongside my adult males, but I'm skeptical that she will make it. Poor decision on my part, but if I had just left them at room temperature they wouldn't have caught up to my males anyways... So seems like I may have been doomed to fail with the ratio of nymphs I found.

This is all particularly unfortunate, considering that now that all my males have matured, I now know that adult males of this species look pretty dang cool! They have long gangly legs, and VERY long spines on their hind tibiae that I've not noticed on other Ammopelmatus spp. males I've kept.

Here are some pictures of one of the mature males:

Hopefully my last female pulls through and matures in time to mate with one of my males, but I'm not holding my breath. At least I got to see adult males in person.

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My Alphitobius diaperinus are doing great, and I just added them to my For Sale list, but realized that despite having kept them previously years ago, I've never gotten decent pictures of them... So, for the completionist in me, and for my FS list, finally got around to getting some pictures of a group of adults. 😂

Here are the pics:

About time haha, still no pictures of the larvae, but meh, good enough. 😅

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Lastly, my Trachelipus rathkii "Ada County, ID" are also doing great, but again I've never gotten pictures of just normal grey rathkii... and I just added these to my FS list. So once again, for the sake of getting pictures of all the stuff I keep, and for my FS list, I took some pictures of then. 😆

Here they are, in all their glory:

I like the variation this species displays, they're a simple but interesting isopod IMO. Very intolerant of drying out though, and I only find them in very moist areas in the wild.

Well, that does it for this post, thanks for reading, hope everyone enjoyed, stay safe, and I'll see you all next time! 😉