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If you only have one male, you should introduce the male to the female's back manually rather than risk the chance that he's seen as a prey item when he jumps towards her back. Allowing things to happen on their own time can result in the loss of the male. The male should readily jump on if you...

I don't have the room to heat all of my enclosures in one place with a heat lamp, so heat pads are less expensive for me to use. If I did have an entire wall of a room I could devote to my critters, I'd probably install a rack and use a single heat lamp. Heat pads come in various sizes and the...

I prefer heat pads because they're more energy efficient and I can place several in different areas without the utilities bill skyrocketting.

7th instar 36 days after unpacking. It's the freshly molted individual with small amounts of pink on the right. Also in the picture is a 6th instar with yellow coloration on the left and a plain white one on the bottom for comparison.

I lost the previous batch of offspring, but my female and her cohabiting male were quick to produce another group of babies. Invasive Argentine Ants are quite a menace during the summer months when they move in to search for moisture and food. My pair of adults were somehow left unmolested by...

Fine mesh will work, so would mesh-like fabric such as cheesecloth

Larger cultures will last longer as long as you remove most of the flies every time they eclose. Smaller cultures will run out of food much faster and it will be much easier to have the cultures crash and lose them all. When you say poly fiber, I can only think of the cheap, fluffy material at...

Fruit flies are capable of climbing glass. The only thing you need to think about is that a shallow container will make feeding time extremely difficult with all the flies escaping everywhere and too narrow a container will mean there's not enough surface area for the maggots to spread out in...

I have not had issues with illness and death from feeding roaches, but I had encountered problems in the past when feeding them bees and wasps--most likely due to trace amounts of pesticides that they've picked up and able to tolerate. It was most definitely not the sting that did them in, as I...

Those are definitely springtails. There are many different species and they come in a few shapes and a variety of sizes. There are some interesting globular springtails where I work that look like orange balls with a head and antennae. Fleas have antennae, but they're hidden away in grooves and...

I occasionally do that when I run out of flying insects, but it's pretty tedious since they'll go into defensive mode and perceive the prey item as a threat most of the time. If you can manage to get them to nibble on it and then grab it, you can feed them that way. They'll usually refuse to...

You'll have a very difficult time getting them to capture crawling insects and their raptorial claws are not quite strong enough to pull something with a good grip off grippable surfaces. They tend to prefer anything that flutters and buzzes around to something that crawls towards them. You...

Dragonflies tend to have very little in terms of food stores in their body. They're voracious predators that have to keep capturing prey in order to sustain their flight. They're mostly exoskeleton aside from the flight muscles.

You can use a pin to poke a very large number of holes on the sides or you could cut a section out of the side near the bottom and hotglue some mesh or fabric.

Cross ventilation is a good idea. The benefit of good ventilation is that you prevent bacteria and mold from growing and sickening your mantis. The problem is that you'll have to find a way to keep up humidity and spray more frequently for species that like moisture. Ventilation is necessary...

I definitely don't remember the ones I kept previously growing this quickly, but they were fed on hydei fruit flies until their fifth instar. I'm willing to guess that fruit flies aren't the most nutritious since I remember quite a lot more poop being expelled for my previous orchids while these...

My second attempt at keeping Hymenopus coronatus. The previous attempt didn't go too well when most of mine died in the care of my friend while I had to go out of town for a month. 2nd Instar after unpacking Molted to 3rd instar 4 days later. Molted to 4th instar 9 days after unpacking...

Paradoxa can live in a 32 oz deli cup as adults, but you can also house them communally in a larger enclosure. You can make dividers for kritter keeper type cages using pieces of cardboard or plastic cut exactly to size to fit and prevent mantises from getting through.

She is most likely in pain or in some discomfort at having some of the sensitive inner part of the body protruding out where it's exposed to stimuli. In most insects the anus and gonopore, the opening through which eggs are laid, are separate. If we're looking at a prolapsed anus, she may still...

Yeah, it can be a bit strange to think of us and most other organisms as something that could be slipped inside out if it weren't for skeletons, hardened exoskeletons, and specialized muscles.