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!