Tiger Beetles!

Salmonsaladsandwich

Salmonsaladsandwich

Eleventh Instar
Tiger beetles are great.

(I'm pretty sure i've seen the C. Sexguttata and C. Duodecimguttata ovipositing!)

 
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Beautiful! :) Hope they do well for you! Very nice camera quality BTW!

P.S: The beetle on the first video at 0:23 seems to be an Amara sp.

 
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No, they don't. Although at one point in the video it looks like one is trying to eat the other, they're actually fighting over a piece of food. In the wild you can sometimes see large numbers of tiger beetles in close proximity. Even solitary species that don't swarm can be seen together in the best egg laying sites or in sun flecks.

 
Scratch that. I didn't feed them yesterday and there was a bit of a bloodthirsty riot going on this morning until I gave them food. But I've had them for a week and this is the first incident, so I guess ya' just have to keep them fed at all times.

 
The adults are starting to die off, but at the same time I'm starting to see little round larval burrows in the sand! They're much bigger than I expected for hatchlings, but then again they do need to reach full size in only 2 molts.

 
Yeah. For a second I panicked and thought "oh my god where am I going to get all this tiny live food?!?" And then I realized that they can eat ants. All I have to do is leave an apple core on the ground (sorry, roaches! I swear you'll get the next one!) and shake it over the cage. Heck, all I have to do is leave an apple core in their cage and it would attract all the ants they could ever eat...

 
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Hmm... I guess the larvae don't really like pavement ants, probably because they're shells are tough and they don't die easily. Sometimes they flick the ants away, other times they drag them down only to throw them out a few seconds later. I can't tell whether they eat them at all, in any case tetramorium is clearly a bad food. Other ant species just run up the glass and out of the terrarium immediately so there isn't much opportunity for them to get eaten. I tried dead mosquitoes but half the time they mistake them for debri and flick them away. I'm not sure what to feed them...

 
Try wingless fruit flies or the "giant" springtails. I'm sure they would eat the springtails, but the fruit flies might climb out of their reach...

 
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Yeah, fruit flies wouldn't be any better than the ants that climb glass. I tried feeding them those yellow Lasius spp. That you find under stones in the woods and they worked great, (can't climb, soft and palatable) but they're not as numerous or as easy to collect as pavement and 'climbing' ants.

 
Well, springtails would be my best answer, they are usually sold in the hundreds for low prices and you can set some aside for starting your own colony. You could always just find a rock in a semi-moist area and shake it against a jar and you should have a bunch in there, though some species may be too small to feed your larva. Also maybe those dwarf isopods, Thrichorhina tomentosa would work, they are pretty productive, or tiny baby roaches?

 
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