Another breeding issue :( - ootheca hanging out

I know this one is a couple months old, but I'm curious as to how your hissers are fairing? By now there should have been a brood or two if things are going well. These guys are generally very hardy and don't usually die off easily, and it sounds like you are doing all the right things.

I've not had a problem due to low humidity; where I live is very dry and for nearly a year my hissers went with very low humidity and they thrived. Sounds to me that your taking very good care of them so my knee jerk assumption to the what is causing all this is bad genetics in the female.

I'f your looking for an alternative food for protein you could look into fish flakes; they are usually packed with protein and easy for nymphs to eat due to their thinness. 

 
HI Marrader21, there has been (mostly) good news since this last post - two of my three new females gave birth without issue, one to a pretty large litter, and the other to 7 or 8 or so, and overall I now have about 30 nymphs at varying stages of development, with the oldest/most developed I think being fourth instar. They seem so far to be doing well with only one death (a nymph which didn't seem to make it past first instar at all) and I am much more hopeful that most of these will reach adulthood. 

Unfortunately it hasn't all been good news as one of my new females from a different colony also prolapsed whilst giving birth and died shortly after  :(  - I think there were a few live nymphs from the litter and there are certainly some which are smaller (second instar) which I think are probably hers as she gave birth a couple of weeks later than the other two. The most recent birth was not that successful either - the female was OK and there was no prolapse, but I think there were only one or two live nymphs, and the rest were stillborn (developed enough to look a bit like nymphs rather than eggs but not developed enough to survive, sadly).

So I must still not have everything exactly as they need as I don't think it can be down purely to bad genetics if there has been another death and a premature birth from the females from both colonies. I did recently move the colony to a larger enclosure and although I have tried to keep the conditions as close as I could to the previous one it is a little dryer (lower humidity) and there is a steeper temperature gradient simply because the heat mat I am using can't heat the whole enclosure as well as the smaller one, so maybe the stress of that is causing problems at the moment and I am hoping that once they get used to their new enclosure the births will start being more successful again. Food wise I'm pretty much doing the same as before, a mix of "dry" protein from cat food and oats, "wet" protein from haricot beans and sweetcorn, and a mix of leafy greens and fruit. Interestingly the nymphs seem to prefer the green leafy veg and the adults prefer the fruit, but both like the cat food, beans and oats!

On the plus side if most of the nymphs I now have survive to adulthood then there is a good chance of the colony growing and thriving, as long as I don't let it get too overcrowded either  :o

 
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