I've never kept this species and was curious if there was anything unique about their husbandry. Also, looking for a few good pics.
Anybody keeping bumpy hissers?
- Thread starter Allpet Roaches
- Start date
http://www.roachcrossing.com/for-sale/roach/all/bumpy-hisser/
Besides Kyle's page I can't find anything about their care. Seems they are unstable, possibly because of inbreeding...
Besides Kyle's page I can't find anything about their care. Seems they are unstable, possibly because of inbreeding...
If inbreeding were the cause we wouldn't have any hissers alive today.
Anybody even keep this species presently?
Anybody even keep this species presently?
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I agree, inbreeding seems to have little affect on most invertebrates, and it seems to be what people blame when a species doesn't do well. It's probably just that the species doesn't do great in captivity and experience weird die offs, just like the Giant cave roaches.
This species is similar to chopardi but a little bigger and care is seemingly the same but maybe once a year or so I will have a huge die-off in the colony despite no changes in husbandry or diet. I think what may happen is that the fruits/vegetables I feed them are seasonally treated with bacteria that cause infections in insects and at those times due to the lack of genetic diversity in the colony many of the individuals from the baby boom are killed off leaving the healthiest/those with resistance and the cycle begins again.
Kai Schuette of the University of Hamberg started the colony from a single adult female collected under a palmetto frond and I believe he said only a pair of her nymphs survived to found all of the stock currently in collections. While I don't think inbreeding typically afflicts insects, considering this is an island species with a presumably limited distribution and that the founding stock originates from a sibling pairing, it's not surprising that they'd be susceptible to pathogens or slight changes in diet/husbandry conditions.
Kai Schuette of the University of Hamberg started the colony from a single adult female collected under a palmetto frond and I believe he said only a pair of her nymphs survived to found all of the stock currently in collections. While I don't think inbreeding typically afflicts insects, considering this is an island species with a presumably limited distribution and that the founding stock originates from a sibling pairing, it's not surprising that they'd be susceptible to pathogens or slight changes in diet/husbandry conditions.
Very weird, if the most healthiest/resistant were the only ones to survive, wouldn't the offspring of those individuals be more hardy, and then the offspring of their offspring even more so, until they eventually stop dying? Maybe next time that happens, you could isolate the most healthy looking ones and try to start a new colony with them, just an idea.
Here's where we can make some theoretical assumptions.
In a system where resistance to pathogen "X" is a simple recessive characteristic, whatever individuals survive would be resistant and the entire colony from that point on would be as well.
But what may be the case (making the assumption that my theorizing is what is happening) is resistance may be relayed via heterozygosity or homozygosity of the dominant gene. If this is the case, we would expect that homo. recessives may be weak to the pathogen and that either het. individuals or homo. dominant individuals convey resistance, in which case this die-off would be expected as with the larger population the proportion of the homo. recessives that were produced during a period without the pathogen present dying off would be huge whereas the same scenario playing out in a smaller/reduced colony would appear to be one or two individuals dying off for no apparent reason.
This is all assuming a lot of things and doesn't take into account the high possibility that resistance to the stressor is conferred by multiple genes or that I could be completely wrong about the cause of such fatalities (though the symptoms immediately preceding death are congruent with those reported from bacterial infections and/or pesticide poisoning in insects).
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lovebugfarm
Eleventh Instar
I know this is an older post but I was wondering why not try to grow your own veggis for this off period they expiernce. A small indoor aquaponics system would produce the most pure produce and you could use a simple fish tank.