Still Waiting on Bantua Babies...

As the title suggests, I'm still waiting on more Bantua sp. "Namibia" babies, pretty sure the females all started gestating their broods from scratch when I added more ventilation, so by my calculations most of them SHOULD be due to give birth by Christmas, (what a wonderful Christmas that'd be right? 😁)... Patience is key with Perisphaerinae, hopefully mine will pay off, as it's quickly waning and giving way to worry... I did see some of my females using those cork hides I made them recently, so fingers crossed!🤞

In any case, the five nymphs I did get from my first brood are doing splendidly, all of them are very healthy and roughly half grown already! I wasn't really expecting them to be this fast growing, it's a pleasant surprise, and at least it would appear that my setup seems to be working quite well for them, I just screwed up their ventilation levels at first... 😅

Anyways, here are some pictures of the fast growing nymphs:

Such cuties, unfortunately it can be a little difficult to get pictures of them, as they are fast runners and my camera lense seems not to want to focus properly on their waxy exoskeletons... 🙃
I may rearrange their enclosure a tad in the coming months, they hardly seem to use the horizontal bark slabs in their enclosure, so I'm thinking of arranging them differently, maybe more vertically in an attempt to maximize the amount of spaces they'll actually use and hide in, but I haven't decided yet.

Anyways, I think that's gonna do it for this post, thanks for reading everyone, I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you all in the next post! 😉

Rosie Eats, & a Random Plant Update!

Well, I hardly ever take pictures of Rosie, my Grammostola porteri female I've had for about a decade now, but I fed her recently and decided to snap a few pictures of her in action! 😄

Her she is chowing down on an unfortunate cricket:

The most annoying thing about this species is that they often go through long fasts, so I never know when she'll eat or not... This feeding was the first time in a couple months that she had taken food, and the week afterwards I bought her another cricket, which she then refused to eat... 😐 Such is the way of a tarantula keeper I guess... 😅

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And now, for something  I rarely talk about on my blog... PLANTS! 😂 Specifically, my Sempervivum arachnoideum. I've had a pot of these for over 6 years now, but over time the pot has gotten quite crowded, the soil has slowly turned into a mass of roots, and this year the plants started dying off slowly, as they weren't getting enough water...

Well last month I removed the last remaining plants from the clay pot they were in, and moved them to a new, plastic pot with a mix of Miracle Grow Houseplant Soil and Miracle Grow Succulent, Palm & Cacti Soil. Usually I just use the latter for my succulents, but this species seems to prefer more moisture than my other cacti and succulents, so I figured this mix plus the plastic pot would work nicely for them, (besides, I needed their clay pot empty for a new addition I'll be getting soon...).

It's been a month now, and most of the plants have taken VERY nicely to the mixture, despite the fact their roots had started to rot and needed to be cut back a bit, all but one of them look good as new and are growing nicely! 😁

Here's the ONE individual that still looks sickly, like they all did a short while ago:

And here are the rest of them!

So all but one appear to be healthy again, I'll take those odds any day! 😁 Hopefully that last one recovers, I'll do what I can for it, if not though I do have a cutting of this species growing in one of my other succulent pots, which I may move to this one to fill in that spot, (though eventually these plants will produce offshoots of their own, so the pot will fill up eventually anyways, one way or another...).
Anyways, just a little repotting/rescue story I felt like sharing, since I have a shortage of actual invertebrate related content to release right now... Besides, this species is actually called the "Cobweb Hen and Chicks", so I thought it fit along nicely with pics of Rosie eating... 😅

Anyhow, I think that's gonna do it for this post, I hope you all enjoyed, thanks for reading, I'll see you all next time! 😉

Paranauphoeta discoidalis = Paranauphoeta rufipes... Really!

Apparently now this blog is just a PSA site for taxonomy changes and such in Blatticulture... I'm OK with this. 😅

So apparently, Paranauphoeta discoidalis has been a synonym of Paranauphoeta rufipes for at least 30 years now... As you can see on the Cockroach Species File, discoidalis is listed as a synonym for rufipes, and a quick search shows that "P.discoidalis" hasn't been in literature for quite some time... Indeed, our hobby "P.discoidalis" match Paranauphoeta rufipes perfectly, and were collected within their natural range, (our stock came from the Tamrau Mountains, Indonesia, to be exact), so that would appear to be the correct ID, but how they were labeled with the name that's been a synonym for rufipes for 30 years is a mystery to me...

In any case, anyone still keeping "Paranauphoeta discoidalis" should now change their labels to Paranauphoeta rufipes, as that is the current name for this species! 😄

Unfortunately, as a side note, it would appear that the species has all but died out in the US hobby, with only a couple small colonies still remaining in the EU and Russia... Hopefully they'll be re-introduced to the US hobby one day, as they are quite a beautiful species, and I'd love to keep them again one day! (Note to self, NEVER use unsterilized leaf litter again, as that's what ended up dooming my old colony, damn protein hungry Trichoderma...).