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.

Mystery moth

We were at a park down by the river a couple of nights ago. Ms Dragon made friends with this rather photogenic moth.

I haven't been able to find out what sort of moth it is. A Google image search did turn up one single photo that is the spitting image of this, but there was no discussion about what type it may be.

Another use for a grasshopper enclosure.

Cat TV

The cat spends hours with her nose up against the wire. Sometimes she even takes a nap that way.

JazDragon's insect quote of the day.

Empirical observation with empathy:

"It must be awful being a male grasshopper. When they're mating, their abdomens get stuck together and he has to put up with being dragged all over the place by the female."

Moulting Mishaps

The grasshoppers are still going strong. It turns out they're pretty easy to keep.

We keep them next to a large window that gets a fair chunk of morning sun. Every day, before she heads off to school, Ms JazDragon puts in a handful of fresh-picked grass. The grass dries out through the day and we haven't taken any out (explanation of why later), so there's a rather large mound of dried grass accumulated on the bottom. When Ms Jaz gets home from school, they get another handful of grass. We don't have any water in there, but we give it all a good spray twice a day and that seems to be enough to keep them happy and hoppy.

For some reason we were under the impression that grasshoppers attach their eggs to the grass. That is why the dried grass was never removed; Ms Jaz was worried that we would be throwing the babies out with the bathwater grass. More recently, we read that grasshoppers lay eggs in soil, so Ms Jaz put some dirt in a tray, sprayed it and tucked it under some of the dried grass. There have been some definite sightings of 'adult' activity, so chances are that there are eggs in there somewhere.

The males appear to be smaller than the females. That is just from the observation that when the above-mentioned 'adult' activity is going on, it always seems to be a smaller hopper on a larger one.

In the last round of moulting there seemed to be more mishaps than last time, a couple of deaths and a few legs gone missing. I don't know whether that's because of anything we're missing out on providing in their habitat, or whether it's just what happens when you're a grasshopper. We do come across plenty of hoppers in the wild, missing a big leg or two.

This is one of the fatal mishaps:

Out to the right of the photo is the abdomen, that zig-zaggy thing on top of the abdomen is a misshapen wing. The large hind legs seem to have come off with the skin. The old skin is still covering the head. The hopper was still alive at this stage. The freakiest thing about it though, was this:

The leg with the arrow pointing to it seems completely detached from the body, but it kept moving!

Spot the hopper solution

There was a bit of controversy over the solution.  JazDragon and I spent a bit of time scanning the shot and arguing over what might be more hoppers.  In the end, we've only circled the ones we both agree on.

Click for a closer look.

Spot the hopper

This is a game we find ourselves playing quite a lot.  How many grasshoppers can you see in this picture?

I'll post an answer at some stage later.

They're still growing. Here's one just moulted.

Eerie grasshoppers and dicey days

This is how we found the grasshoppers yesterday morning.

Are they trying to communicate?

All lined up in a row, with the boss hopper on top?  Or an almost symmetrical arrangement: three on the left, three on the right, and three in a triangle in the centre - the far right one sulking at the side instead of getting between the two brown ones on that side because it wanted to be in the triangle.

It's amazing how well they blend in with the grass.  I'll have to see if I can get a good enough photo with the not-brilliant-quality phone camera that I use and put up a game of spot the grasshopper.

We had quite a scare with Spinelar the other day too.

Spinelar says, 'nothing to see here.'

Her enclosure catches the morning sun, which is usually nice, but we've had some extremely hot weather. On very hot days that whole corner heats up enormously, so we take her (vase, branches and all) out of the enclosure and sit her somewhere cooler.  It's not like she ever moves any further than the next leaf to munch on, so we've left her sitting on the coffee table for a couple of days before.  Just have to clean up the poop-pellets and eggs.

When we first got spiny leaf insects, we figured that they wouldn't mind heat too much because they're from Queensland. Last year during a heatwave, Leafy and Spinelar did OK, but all of the babies alive at that time died. Generally, I try not to use home air conditioners - I'd rather go to the beach, the pool, the shopping centre, the library. This year I've been forced to use it to save the bug.

One hot day a couple of weeks ago, Spinelar on the coffee table wasn't looking too flash. She was flopping over sideways and looking limp. I turned the air conditioner on for the first time since we moved in here. Having seen stories of reviving sick stick insects with sugar water, we tried her with some of that and eventually she started looking better and then went back to her usual self.

Although she doesn't move around a lot, she has her way of doing things that we've become accustomed to. Her abdomen pulses almost as if she's breathing (more probably the constant squeezing eggs out, I'm guessing), when we spray water around she'll start swaying as if she's been caught in a breeze and when she's disturbed she'll often grab the nearest leaf and start munching as if her life depended on it.

Last Sunday, we had another hot one.  I turned the air conditioner on.  It went 'whiirrrr... pshhhhh' and silence. Something in the fuse box, something that couldn't be fixed without an electrician, had burnt out. We removed her to the coffee table.  We thought it might not be so bad because there was a cool change setting in early, so we opened the doors and windows and let in the howling, but ever so slightly cooler than inside, wind.

She didn't like it. She went floppy again. Very floppy. At one stage I thought she was gone, but just the slightest movement of a leg told me that the end had not yet come. I offered her sugar water. She ignored it. We went to bed that night fully expecting that she wouldn't make it. Surprisingly, in the morning she was still with us. She accepted a little sugar water. Suddenly, she really seemed to like the sugar water, her mouth parts were flicking all over the cotton-tip. I could have fed her more but was scared of giving her whatever is the equivalent of insect diabetes.

She's eating leaves again and looking stronger, but I think this last incident has affected her. She hardly moves at all now when we spray, her abdomen seems still.  She's moved herself around and seemed ok a couple of times, but something about her has changed.  Not to mention she's getting on in age. We've had her for fourteen or fifteen months, she was probably at least a couple of months old when we got her, so she's getting close to the average lifespan.  We'll have to see how she fares, but I worry the heat may have hastened that somewhat.

Grasshopper kingdom

This week's craze is grasshoppers. They are suddenly everywhere in the yard so Ms Jaz made a grasshopper city.  She used the enclosure she made at school.

Bright and airy enclosure

Grasshoppers basking in the sun.

Lots of grass down the bottom for food, though they seem to prefer sitting up in the sunlight. They're eating and growing and several have shed a skin.

Shed grasshopper skins

They're quieter than crickets, which were last summer's craze.

Some back-story

This is what Leafy looked like back in April 2013:

This is what Leafy looks like now:

We presume he died of old age because the Australian Museum website puts the male spiny leaf insect life span at 6-8 months.  We bought Leafy as a juvenile in December 2012, he moulted to adulthood in February 2013 and died around the beginning of November 2013.  On the scale of spiny leaf insects, he had a pretty good run.

A few weeks before Leafy died, Spinelar reached her adult stage.  Many times JazDragon's exclamation echoed through the house, "Oh my God! They're mating AGAIN!"  Leafy did his best to pass on his genes before he shuffled off and Spinelar did start laying eggs before he died, so we are confident that a bunch of the lots and lots of eggs are fertilised.

JazDragon was very sad at Leafy's passing, but she knew it was coming.  For several weeks, he'd been falling off branches and deciding that perhaps it was more comfortable having a bit of a rest on the floor of the enclosure.  His last days were a constant cycle of resting on the floor, then dragging himself back up for a rest on Spinelar.  Jaz decided to pin him up the way they do at the museum so she could always have him. The sign says "I miss you Leafy.  PS. I love you."  She even gave him a couple of playmates to keep him company.

Spinelar and the lots and lots of eggs.

This is Spinelar

She's been busy for the last few months laying lots of eggs.  Here's how many eggs she's laid since the beginning of October:

Wow, that's a lot of eggs.  She's still going!

This story is a continuation of the one started by Jaz Dragon.  Jaz is excited by bugs and likes to tell everyone about them, but being ten years old means that, even if she likes to talk about it, she often thinks that writing it all out is a bit... well... boring.  So, I'm going to take charge of that bit and we'll see how that goes.