Moulting

Caught this one moulting today. I tried to video it, but the phone-cam stubbornly wouldn't focus on the bug; it was more content to focus on the curtain behind or the surrounding leaves. This photo turned out pretty well though.

Hard to believe it fitted in that tiny exoskeleton a few minutes ago.

In sadder news, we had our first death. Not sure what happened, there was just a tiny, curled-up body on the bottom of the enclosure one morning. There was one that had hatched a few days earlier that looked a bit droopy, but no way to tell if it was that one for sure.

We haven't had a proper count for near two weeks now. The leaves still looked pretty good last weekend, so rather than change everything over, we just put some fresh ones in there on top. We should have 26 babies left.

Growing up

Major excitement today. For a while, we've been peering in at the babies and thinking that maybe this one or that one looks a little bigger, but it's hard to tell. When spiny leaf insects moult, they usually eat their skin, so the only evidence it's happened is that they look a bit bigger. We caught one today with its skin, still intact, on the other side of the leaf. Ms Jaz snapped this photo.

It's legs are a lot different to the babies, with those obvious leaf structures rather than the thin ant-like legs. So now we know what to look for it'll be a lot easier to spot.

Multiplication

At last count we have 21 or 22 babies. Details and notes can be seen at the spreadsheet I'm using to keep track of them.

This is the cage we put them in to make sure there are none in the leaves we're throwing out. There's definitely 21 bugs counted during the leaf changeover today. There might still be 22 (which is what there was supposed to be) because we might have missed counting one that was sitting near the door. So, apart from one we lost early on, all the hatchlings have survived so far.

A few of them look slightly larger than the others, so they might have moulted. There's not a huge difference, so it's hard to tell. They're growing quite slowly because the cool weather slows their metabolism. We think this is probably why Spinelar has lasted so long. We've had her for 19 months now, so she must be at least 21 months old!

Organisation

Another hatched today. That makes 10. We want to be able to keep track of how many there are, at the least to make it a little easier to know when we have them all out during leaf changeovers. So, we've started a log here. Just the date, what happened - whether it be a new hatching or a count while changing leaves - and how many in total.

A couple of them look slightly larger than the others. We're not sure if they've moulted, or if they're just larger. As spiny leaf insects moult, they eat the skin, so it can be difficult to tell. In the picture below you can see the one on the left looks quite different to the other three (see better quality pic here).

Being mid-winter, it's a bit cool. They've been quite still for babies. When we turned the heater on and the room warmed up, they were a lot more active and they mostly gathered in the corner of the enclosure nearest the heater - even though the heater is several metres away. This house has much better insulation, so the temperatures don't get nearly as extreme as at the last place. Most of the deaths of babies in the past seemed to be related to heat. It'll be interesting to see how this lot go through the winter.

Baby bonanza

The pitter patter of tiny feet can't really be heard, but they're there. So far nine eggs have hatched and we've only lost one baby. When I say 'lost' I mean exactly that. One just disappeared. We don't know if it escaped or if there's a tiny body buried under the coco-peat somewhere.

Four babies visible here, although one is hard to make out because it's out of focus.

It's a constant worry because of the poor run we've had with babies in the past. The best one we had was Houdini who, after a couple of months of getting on fine, sat up on the top of the enclosure one day and just stayed there till we gave it a poke a couple of days later. It was, by then, an ex-Houdini.

Changing over the leaves is getting more difficult, because we're carefully fishing each insect out and putting them in a holding cage and then having to swap them all back again.

The first few had names: Gumnut, Speedy. But now there's so many and they all look alike, so Ms Jaz has given up on the names for now.

New Sticks

In the past couple of months, we've moved house, let the grasshoppers go and welcomed some new additions to the family.

With the grasshoppers reaching the end of their season, we released the remaining ones and had a look through the dirt and grass at the bottom of the cage to see if there were any eggs. We weren't completely sure what we were looking for, and we didn't find anything obvious.

Spinelar, the tough old girl, is still going. We bought her as a juvenile, at least a couple of months old, in December 2012, so she's at least 20 months old now. We were a bit worried about the first batch of eggs because at the old house, it got really *really* hot in the summer. Eggs that have been fertilised can start hatching after a few months. When we had no hatchlings by February or so, we were worried that the eggs had been cooked by the extreme heat we had over summer. We kept an eye on them and kept watering them anyway.

Then last Tuesday, 27 May, there was a little smudge sitting on the side of the container. I nearly missed it because I wasn't looking for it or expecting it. It was our first hatchling from the eggs laid by Spinelar.

Mother and child

 A second one hatched this morning. Over the last eight months or so, Spinelar has laid hundreds of eggs. This could get interesting. It's possible that there are cooked eggs in there, and the ones hatching now are ones that were laid later on. Hopefully, some of the fertilised eggs have survived. We'll have to wait to know for sure. If we see some of the nymphs mature into males, then we know that the earlier eggs, the fertilised ones, survived. If it's all females, it would seem likely that the earlier eggs didn't survive because spiny leaf insect eggs don't need to be fertilised by a male, but unfertilised eggs will only produce females.

Explorers

We went out on the weekend for an exploration ride. We looked at the Google maps of the area, picked some green spots close-by that we'd never been to before and cycled there. These were mostly small parks nestled in the middle of a block, on the way to nowhere.  So we found a couple of new little playgrounds, some rope and a plank up a huge peppercorn tree and a large reserve that appeared to have been flooded recently. This last had some bushy areas, some swampy areas and mostly looked pretty unkempt - which is no bad thing when you're a bug-hunter.

We already have enough grasshoppers at home, so when Ms Dragon found this very attractive specimen, I was able to talk her into leaving it at the park.

Ms Dragon looked everywhere in the hopes of finding a praying mantis, but it turned out that we needn't have left our own yard.  When we got back home, we found this fellow waiting for us on a window.