Dying Roaches

[AbraxasComplex]

So my Dubia colony recently recieved a wonderful Phorid Fly infestation. I have searched all the topics. I cleaned the enclosure and made sure to wipe out all the Phorid Fly adults and larvae using manual methods and traps. So far I'm on my way to getting rid of them.


But I am having major die offs of adults and nymphs. Before cleaning it was 20+ a day. Today I only found 12, so a slight decrease. This has been going on for a week or so.


I have a heating pad keeping it warm (started with 200 roaches, now I have 800+ so it's not heat), I removed the cricket gel, but am using cork bark instead of egg crate in order to keep them alive, still getting persipitation on the sides.

I have had no die offs of roaches in the scorpions/centipedes tanks when I have fed (I tend to over feed due to all my communal settups which are crawling with predatory mites), only casualties in the breeding container.

The other night I found a nearly dead adult with tiny (1 mm) long white larvae on it. Could these just be newly hatched Phorid larvae, or something else? I placed it in a container with predatory mites and it was cleaned off within a day. I'm keeping an eye out for more in order to take a picture, but why am I loosing so many? Are the Phorid flies spreading something, or is it possible the Phorid flies lay their eggs on the roaches?



On another note, my latteralis colony also recieved the phorid fly infestation. Only deaths are by old adults, or by bad molts. No other problems.

 

[SlaytanicArachnid]

hows your ventilation

 

[AbraxasComplex]

I have a 8''x4'' opening cut in the lid for both colonies. It is over the cool side. This is the only side with a lot of percipitation as the heat pad side is always dry.


The majority of dead roaches are found on the cool/humid side with the opening. Out of the 12 I found tonight only 2 were on the dry side and those two were completely rock solid (dehydrated). I noticed the pattern for whenever I found dead roaches a while back, 90% on humid/cool side.

My house is always around 68-70'F and about 35-40% humidity.


I never had problems before with the lid being on. With the increase in roaches, are they depleting the fresh oxygen?

 

[AbraxasComplex]

One thing which may or may not be a problem is my roach dry food mix. It contains a lot of fish food, repcal tortoise food, cricket feed (grain) and solid gold katz-und-flocken cat food.

I used to feed my dubias the mix before hand on a constant basis and never had problems (though they tended to smell). Then I stopped considering I had a large supply of veggies, fruit, and other table discards (the smell stopped). When I first had a few die offs I thought it was due to lack of food as the colony grew, so I started feeding the mix once again to suppliment between major meals. I don't think this would be a cause of the die offs (never happened before), but could the sudden increase of high protein be killing some as well?

Die offs haven't increased or decreased, extra food or not. The only decrease in deaths was a day or two after the hefty cleaning.