owen_mitch
Arachnopeon
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2005
- Messages
- 8
hi all-
after nine months of waiting (they might as well be humans), my hissers finally gave birth; three females in one week, in fact! i'm thrilled, but also had a few questions. here they are, in order of importance:
- how the hell do i clean their enclosure now? it was no big deal to remove a few dozen big adults by hand, then sweep and scrub out the container... but hundreds of delicate, tiny babies kind of complicates the proposition.
just to be extra-difficult, the little buggers (pardon the bad pun) refuse to cling to the eggcrate like their parents, or the adults and juveniles of the giant cave and lobster roaches they share living space with... which would make it easy to remove all (or at least most) of them. instead, they seem to prefer hanging out on the plastic "floor" itself, necessitating very careful, one-at-a-time removal. if anyone has learned any handy tricks for dealing with this, i'd love to hear about it.
- one of the mother roaches died in childbirth. she pushed out all the babies (who seem healthy) in what appeared to be the normal fashion, but then continued to push out... a lot of other stuff. it wasn't the remains of an ootheca, and insects obviously don't have placentae... to my admittedly untrained eye, it looked like actual tissue and organs and blood, and there was a great deal of it. she died within a day. can anyone explain this, or how to prevent it in the future?
-finally, i seem to have one "peter pan" roach. i got the whole colony as nymphs more than a year ago, and all of them matured in the standard six months... except for this little guy (or girl). it's well over a year old now, but is stuck at what looks like the third or fourth instar (about the size of an adult lobster roach). it seems perfectly happy, but just isn't growing up. and i'm sure it isn't just growing very slowly: it kept pace with the others for the first few moults, but then just stopped completely at the third; it hasn't shed for around ten months. is neotony (or paedomorphia... i can never keep the two straight) very common in hissers?
thanks-
-J
after nine months of waiting (they might as well be humans), my hissers finally gave birth; three females in one week, in fact! i'm thrilled, but also had a few questions. here they are, in order of importance:
- how the hell do i clean their enclosure now? it was no big deal to remove a few dozen big adults by hand, then sweep and scrub out the container... but hundreds of delicate, tiny babies kind of complicates the proposition.
just to be extra-difficult, the little buggers (pardon the bad pun) refuse to cling to the eggcrate like their parents, or the adults and juveniles of the giant cave and lobster roaches they share living space with... which would make it easy to remove all (or at least most) of them. instead, they seem to prefer hanging out on the plastic "floor" itself, necessitating very careful, one-at-a-time removal. if anyone has learned any handy tricks for dealing with this, i'd love to hear about it.
- one of the mother roaches died in childbirth. she pushed out all the babies (who seem healthy) in what appeared to be the normal fashion, but then continued to push out... a lot of other stuff. it wasn't the remains of an ootheca, and insects obviously don't have placentae... to my admittedly untrained eye, it looked like actual tissue and organs and blood, and there was a great deal of it. she died within a day. can anyone explain this, or how to prevent it in the future?
-finally, i seem to have one "peter pan" roach. i got the whole colony as nymphs more than a year ago, and all of them matured in the standard six months... except for this little guy (or girl). it's well over a year old now, but is stuck at what looks like the third or fourth instar (about the size of an adult lobster roach). it seems perfectly happy, but just isn't growing up. and i'm sure it isn't just growing very slowly: it kept pace with the others for the first few moults, but then just stopped completely at the third; it hasn't shed for around ten months. is neotony (or paedomorphia... i can never keep the two straight) very common in hissers?
thanks-
-J
