My extreme paranoia...

[Zephyr]

My absolute greatest fear with my roaches is species cross-breeding. I've been doing excellently on preventing escapes lately; Not even my pycnoscelus surinamensis have escaped. However, I'm absolutely paranoid (especially with the addition of several new species) that something's going to get out and hybridize.

Does anyone know if the following species can produce hybrids?

Blaberus boliviensis x Blaberus discoidalis x Blaberus parabolicus x Blaberus atropos (are the ones in the hobby pure B. atropos to begin with?)

Elliptorhina chopardi x Elliptorhina javanica

Aeluropoda insignis x Gromphadorhina portentosa

 

[Pharma]

Hi

Now that I have both Elliptorhina sp. I wanted to ask exactly the same question!

There could be a real problem with 'dwarf hissers' because they seem to have low/no genitalia differences and identical body size could suffice....

I guess the diverse hisser genera inter se shouldn't be a problem because inter-genus breeding is quite unlikely even though Gromphadorhina sp. can be crossed with Princisia sp. but Princisia is probably no valid genus. Gromphadorhina and Elliptorhina look quite different but... good that you ask!

There is at least one thread about the Blaberus sp. hybridization problem:

Citation by Pharma (too lazy to retype, original thread):

According to the male genitalia [LM Roth, 1969, Psyche 76,3] (and User Lucihormetica if I remember that correctly) it could/should be only possible within the same group. The Giganteus-group contains only B. giganteus and B. craniifer and there the size of the two species is too different to make a crossing likely. That means that B. craniifer hybrids are only hybrids of different local forms of B. craniifer and not species hybrids. Besides: I can't find a hybride on the link...This furthermore means that B. atropos syn. B. fusca could only possibly breed with species of the Atropos-group and for example B. colosseus only within the Brasilianus-group. Because several of the possible combinations shouldn't/couldn't work because of size and morphology differences (within the same group) or never occurred because at least one of the possible species is not in culture, any sort of species-hybrid in culture is wery unlikely. In addition: Several species have overlaping habitats and therefore it seems obvious that nature took precautions to omit hybridisation (well, there are several known animal and plant species showing fertil hybrids in such cases).

Then: Are you sure to have B. atropos and not B. craniifer syn. B. atropos (you in the US seem to often use B. craniifer only for the 'Black Wings'/'Florida Keys' variety and for all other 'Death Head' varieties B. atropos)?

Besides: In Germany they tried to interbreed several Blaberus species for that purpose: nothing resulted from it.

The real problem with this genus seems to be interbreeding of local varieties and unclear origin.

Personally I wouldn't co-culture them and escapees (luckily unable to climb back into a box) win a free trip to Lizards Island .

 

[Zephyr]

Actually, the B atropos I have are very discoid-like. They don't have the body structure or appearance even close to that of the larger Blaberus species (fusca, craniifer, giganteus.)

My greatest fear at this point is or boliviensis x parabolicus, seeing as parabolicus are rare enough as it is.

I guess to hybridize a member of the other species would have to sneak in and remain totally undistinguishable from the others, add to that, grow to adulthood and still not be noticed, and finally successfully reproduce.

Also, I think Orin might know on the javanica x chopardi issue. Hopefully he'll chime in soon. lol

 

[Pharma]

Well, as B. atropos, B. parabolicus, B. discoidalis, B. boliviensis, and B. anisitis belong to the Atropos-group they look often quite similar and only a dissection of the male genitalia would be good enough to determine them.

I wonder why you have a paranoia concerning the Blaberus sp.; they don't climb glass and are quite big and as long as you are not so ***** like me and use nice to glue and nice to look at rodent-resistant fiberglass fly screens which can more or less easily be bitten through by most roach species (when in addition there is no vaseline rim) you shouldn't have any problems with escapees (and those you could feed/kill/whatever).

 

[Zephyr]

Well, as B. atropos, B. parabolicus, B. discoidalis, B. boliviensis, and B. anisitis belong to the Atropos-group they look often quite similar and only a dissection of the male genitalia would be good enough to determine them.I wonder why you have a paranoia concerning the Blaberus sp.; they don't climb glass and are quite big and as long as you are not so ***** like me and use nice to glue and nice to look at rodent-resistant fiberglass fly screens which can more or less easily be bitten through by most roach species (when in addition there is no vaseline rim) you shouldn't have any problems with escapees (and those you could feed/kill/whatever).

I think it's more like a "if this one got out, it would fall down to this level of the rack and get in with this one" etc. lol

A good night's sleep took out a little of the paranoia; However, I'm still leery of the hissers...