My Yuukianura aphoruroides are doing swimmingly, despite the culture being contaminated with predatory mites and Poduromorpha sp. "Tiny Blue". The predatory mites seem not to be interested in the Yuukianaria, at least not enough to make a dent in their population. And the Poduromorpha also seem not to bother the Yuukianura, instead eating the more rotten foods that the Yuukianura already tend to ignore. So, the culture is thriving, and I've already set up another cup as a backup colony. 😃
Here are a couple crappy pics of a group swarming some food, along with lots of the sp. "Tiny Blue":
Such cute and vibrantly colored springtails, I'd like to get the Thailand Reds as well one day soon.
The Liposcelis sp. "TDE" I've isolated are breeding well, seems a very easy species to culture.
Finally got some pictures of them... though you can barely see the dang things. These are the best quality photos I could get of them, they're so fast and so tiny:
Definitely some neat little inverts, with good cleaner crew potential for drier setups.
Now for some rapidfire bad news... Unfortunately I killed all my Goliathus goliatus, they all made pupal cells, and one even made it to adulthood, but I kept them just a tad too humid during this stage, and that resulted in all of them dying as prepupal larvae, pupae, and even killed my one teneral adult. 😠Apparently they don't tolerate excess humidity well at all, but I found it difficult to get their substrate to a properly compactable level without keeping it as humid as I did, semi-humid is a very difficult humidity level for me to maintain personally here in the high desert environment I live in. So, that's quite a bummer. I did snap some pics of my teneral adult through the hole I poked it's pupal cell, before it passed away, which I'll share here:
Now for news that's perhaps even more frustrating, I accidentally killed my Titanophilus sp. "Colombia" by smashing part of her under the one piece of bark in her enclosure. 😟 This is particularly upsetting, since besides myself, literally only one other person keeps this species, AND she was doing fantastic for me up until this point (granted, she definitely wasn't mated, so I still needed to get a male from my buddy who's still got a small culture going before I had any hope of breeding this species). I'm quite angry at myself about this blunder, and in the future, should I ever acquire this species again, I will never use bark as a hide for them.
Unfortunately I've lost my cultures of Plectoptera poeyi, Margattea cf. bisignata, and Chorisoneura parishi. Thankfully, Kyle at Roachcrossing has a healthy colony of the former two, and should be able to send some back to me later this Fall. However, I don't know of anyone who has a good culture of the Chorisoneura... so those may be lost from culture now. 😞
I just did a trade with my friend Junkai Wang, and now finally have TRUE Hemiblabera tenebricosa "Monroe County, FL". 😃 In case any of you aren't up to speed, the old hobby "tenebricosa" stock isn't actually tenebricosa, but is more likely H.roseni. The difference between those and these true H.tenebricosa are pretty obvious, and are outlined in my post about the issue here.
Care for these is pretty simple, I've got mine in a moderately ventilated setup with a couple inches of coco coir substrate topped with leaf litter, which I'm keeping humid.
Here are some pictures of the nymphs:
They're pretty colorful for Hemiblabera nymphs, really looking forward to seeing some adults!
I also got some Chalcolepidius smaragdinus from Kai, which were actually the main point of the trade. However, while he did mention they were damaged from being housed communally (this genus is quite territorial and adults will bite each other's legs off if kept communally, or at least particularly crowded), I was not prepared for just how bad they messed each other up. Simply moving from one end of the enclosure to another is a struggle for the 6 adults he sent me (1 male, 5 females), and most of their legs have been reduced to little stumps.
I wasn't sure I'd be able to get any eggs out of them whatsoever in their current state, it's a challenge even with perfectly mobile adults, as they seem rather picky about their oviposition spots. However, I just found two eggs in one of their setups the other day. Two eggs out of 5 females is pretty abysmal, but it's much better than nothing, which is honestly what I expected. So if I can get a total of 8-10 eggs somehow, then I'd honestly be stoked, as that would give me a breedable group to work with, and then i can try and do better with the next generation of CB adults. 🤞
Even as damaged as their limbs are, they're still quite photogenic, so here are some pictures of the adults:
Such a beautiful species, would be amazing to get some larvae from them, so I've got my fingers crossed! 🤞
Also, big thanks to Ty from Ty Dye Exotics, he just sent me some Bantua robusta and Arenivaga sp. "Mt Ord", both of which I needed to restart my cultures of.
Anways, that does it for this post, thanks for reading, hope everyone enjoyed, and I'll see you all next time! 😉
