Dubias

[Sublime]

Thanks Jeff and Andrew for the support, appreciate it!

[JeffreH]

The adults look like fairly normal dead adults, if that makes sense lol. This would convince me it might just be doom from old age. If you start seeing younger nymphs die off as well then we will be in for some troubleshooting.

Also good news - the living adults appear to be meaty and of healthy size. The weaker individuals I've encountered are very gimpy, not fill-out, and don't nearly have the same length to width ratio. You females look nice and plump, and I LOVE love love love love the colors on them. I've been culling a lot of mine lately due to excessive darker females, I want to see more of those bright oranges in the females that reach adulthood like you have there. Perhaps 5 years of inbreeding from a single colony of 250 has allowed more of the darker phenotype to come out and less of the nice rich oranges. I've actually contemplated buying up some fresh stock from good colorful bloodlines to mix into my current colony...

Also: some constructive critism. I wouldn't let the hottest point of the bin get any hotter than about 105 degrees F, 113 is a little intense in my opinion. See, just like our reptiles and amphibians, an insect's metabolism is directly proportional to the temperature and each species has its own preferred range. I think B. dubia fare best at a temperature in the long term when they are exposed to overall temperatures in the 85-95 degree range. Roaches will actually thermoregulate to maintain ideal core body temperature, but if things are too hot you may literally be causing them to age slightly faster. Not saying this is responsible for dei-offs, but it might be partially contributing. They may grow faster when kept extremely warm, but this also results in faster death and temperature spikes may even cause infertility or death of the embryo. I think your 95-105 range on the bottom was more ideal to begin with, although keep that heat tape handy in case things chill out some in the winter or you need to add another bin down the road = )

Honestly, I think you just have some old roaches - a 10% die off rate after 3 weeks isn't too bad, you still have in excess of 150 adults and assuming a 50/50 split of males to females, if each female can produce even one litter you should be able to produce another 1500+ nymphs at minimum. I think you'll be okay, there is just no way to tell an adult's age prior to shipping and some old roaches surely got mixed in. Odds are you'll have some old timers and some freshly molted adults, and those freshly molted adults will keep producing and thriving for you for months.

It sounds like you are taking fantastic care of them. The only concern I had about adding supplementation is I sometimes noted excessive calcium in the diet occasionally leads to bad molts in some inverts. Not sure why, I have a couple of hypotheses, but since you are feeding a perfectly good diet its not necessary to get into it.

Continue to do what you are doing and give them more time to settle in and start producing babies for ya. Keep us posted on them, I'm sure they'll continue to come around for you! Don't get discouraged!

And I agree with Mark in that a single bad molt isn't a major deal, you'll get that from time to time. Usually the fellow roaches in the colony consume this roach or it just falls down dead to the bottom of the bin.

Mark - I'll send you a PM regarding my availability = )

[Sublime]

Yeah I know what you mean; their body structure and color is starting to show their age... I'll look out for young ones dying, none of them have died yet from what I've seen.

Might be worth it to get a fresh batch in to mix it up and those oranges do make them look 5x better than just the standard 'black' roach. This isn't a big concern to me because I'm just trying to get a colony started lol. For you though, I could see you wanting to do that. Plus, it's just good business - a lot more appealing.

Thanks for that advice on the heating, the infrared thermometer gun I use I think is off by 4 degrees (elevated). I'll work on adjusting the rheostat down to your preferred range. I just thought I was having a heating issue problem when I wasn't seeing results, so I turned it up even higher. Yeah that's the good thing about stacking egg flats vertical in their as opposed to horizontal. The frass falling down for the babies to eat, easier to clean, and thermoregulating where the heat dissipates or moving closer to the heat source. That does make sense about them aging at a much higher pace due to the intense heat. Alright sounds good, I'll taper down the heat little by little to get back to the optimum range so that it doesn't cause drastic changes in temperature for them.

Yeah I'm hoping the death rate slows down and I got some younger adults in the mix...

Thanks, I try to take care of them to the best I can do... The reasoning for why I never add supplements into the diet of my feeder insects anyways is the crickets die off quicker in their life cycle if they excessively are taking in calcium into their diets. Those commercial cricket gutloads are a great example of too much calcium. They need higher protein in their diet, not calcium. That's all done by dusting . This diet is for my crickets and roaches, everything has worked out fine with it. I might down the road add like powdered skim milk and tropical fish flakes, but there's already enough in the blend as it is.

They should settle in fine now that I'm on a better routine for them that seems to be working smoothly. I'll keep you guys posted, sure. Thanks.

Replied to your pm .

[MonsterPyxie]

Mark,

Only issues I see is the lack of frass, babies nom on that stuff, and the high temps. Like jeff said, I would try and get them down to a 105 peak. (make sure your taking temperature readings of the entire bin for hot spots)'

Also get some scissors and snip a V or square out of the lip of your food/water crystal dish's so the babies nymphs can crawl right into the dish. they might not be able to climb over even that tiny lip of the lid.

I turned my temps down to 93 peak, and around 88 at the lowest, with me sitting at 90 on average, and my peeps seem to be doing great.



I'm trying some new stuff that I got info from a reliable breeder.... see how it goes.