Roach Party!

I was going to edit the theme of this blog and clean it up a bit to encourage myself to be a little more active with updates, but according to tumblr, this blog no longer exists. Isn’t that interesting?

Sorry for being so absent. I’ve been focusing on other areas of my life lately. I still have the roaches, of course!

In the meantime, if anyone is interested, I have a trail camera blog that’s much more active.

Carving any pumpkins this Halloween?

Got roaches?

They will gladly eat your scrap pumpkin bits!

Gave the lobster roaches some honey tonight. They love that shit.

When they had finished eating it, I saw some interesting social behavior. A bunch of them had gathered up on the glass and started cleaning each other. Peacefully. Delicately. Even cleaning each other’s faces! It’s a sensitive area they typically don’t let other roaches touch, especially with their mouths.

More interesting is that it was only adult females and nymphs doing this. The adult males continued to run around being obnoxious, as they always are. It seems the guys just never calm down. Always on the move, always looking for something to get into or some female who is ready to breed again. They don’t have time for pleasantries. Run run run. Runrunrunrunrun always.

Been a while since I last updated. Life has been hectic. Today, I built the lobster roaches a new town.. city… utopia. Lobstopia.

Anonymous asked: Can cockroaches bite. And which ones are the worst.

Can they? Sure. Are they likely to bite you? Not at all. Roaches (at least a vast majority of roach species) don’t even bite in self defense. They’d rather use foul defensive odors, squeaks, hisses, or their speed alone to help them escape any threats.

I’ve been “bitten” by my own, but I’m not sure I could call it biting so much as… nibbling? If they’re hungry enough and you happen to smell like something they find appetizing, they will gnaw on you. None of them have ever hurt me by doing this. Their mouth parts aren’t really designed for taking chunks out of you. They’d have to chew away for a bit before they did any serious damage, and I don’t think they’d even go that far.

As for the worst? I couldn’t really answer that. If you’re dealing with an infestation, and I mean a huge infestation, some people claim they’ll chew on you while you sleep, but I don’t know if any of those stories are even credible. What they thought were roach bites could have been bedbug bites.

When it comes to biting, roaches really aren’t anything to worry about.

fossilporn:

Predatory Cockroach From The Age Of The Dinosaurs Discovered Trapped In Amber

A miner in Myanmar recently stumbled across a 100 million year old predatory cockroach trapped in amber. It is a perfectly preserved specimen of an exotic insect, an ancient relative of the praying mantis. The predatory cockroach, called Manipulator modificaputis, has been described by Peter Vršanský from the Geological Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Günter Bechly from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, in the journal Geologica Carpathica.   Read more at IFLScience…

britsnana2:

3/16/14

Parcoblatta (Wood Cockroaches) - Parcoblatta pennsylvanica (Pennsylvania Wood Cockroach  - Female with Oothecae ( egg casing)

Found under a rotten piece of wood in a field.

Oothecae are deposited by females in moist areas. Tiny nymphs hatch out of the oothecae, and go through multiple instars of development 

Adult males and females both have wings, but only males are capable of flight. In males, wings cover the abdomen; adult females typically have small wingpads (tegmina). Older nymphs may also have prominent wingbuds. Nymphs of different spp. are impossible to tell apart based on known characters; identification of adult females is difficult or not possible, depending on the species and geographic location.  Only the adult males have the characters that can definitively identify the species in this genus.  Unfortunately, the characters needed are covered by wings, and so identification of living males is not usually possible. Oothecae are deposited by females in moist areas
Adult males and females of P. pennsylvanica and P. divisa have a dark brown pronotum with a pale, whitish border:

Rest well !

I have acquired, as my friend put it, “a herd” of new lobster roaches. I traded her some of my hissers. Turns out a herd is quite a few. A small colony, but a colony none the less. We’re back in business.

When I introduced the remaining four from my original colony, the new guys all came out of hiding and went to check it out. It was very strange. I didn’t expect them to behave so excitedly upon discovering the survivors. I didn’t expect them to react much at all, really. But, it was a literal roach party.

They’ve always been a lot of fun to watch. Lobster roaches are pretty active.

The gold medal nymphs have a new favorite thing, and that is black tea with honey.

Bronze beauty by Jean and Fred

Polyzosteria fulgens