Another (mis)molting question :(

[rensallar]

I had 3 of my L1 Chinese nymphs molt last night. The problem is 2 out of the 3 had minor mis-molts.. the old skin was still stuck to one of the back legs.

2 of them were in containers like this. 1 did fine, the other had a back leg stuck to the old skin. This was a picture of the one that did OK. His skin was actually stuck to the top and dividing cloth in the container. The other one was hanging on the lid with the old skin still stuck to it.

1 in a 32-oz deli container, also had a leg stuck to the old skin.

As you can see, the back right leg, he's just holding it up in the air.. I helped peel the old skin off his leg this morning when I saw he was just dragging it around when he was walking.

I'm not sure what went wrong.. the surface of the lids are either fine mesh, or cheese cloth. They don't have any problem walking around on it when they are not molting. Do they need some kind of vertical wall or stick to grasp onto when they are coming out of the skin to get the leg out completely? The one that left the skin on the vertical wall did great.

Do I need to change the material I use on the surface of the container?

I think the humidity is fine.. I mist it everyday or every other day. There is some foam at the bottom to help retain moisture. Temp has been in the 70's.

I have lots more mantises to learn from.. just trying to prevent this from happening again.

 

[Rick]

Get rid of that foam. You have way too much of it in there too. Use a THIN layer of paper towels or spaghnum moss and keep it slightly moist. Only mist again when it starts drying out. Those little nymphs are pretty fragile and the problem of the skin sticking to the leg is fairly common. You can try to remove it or just snip the leg. It will grow back.

 

[rensallar]

Get rid of that foam. You have way too much of it in there too. Use a THIN layer of paper towels or spaghnum moss and keep it slightly moist. Only mist again when it starts drying out. Those little nymphs are pretty fragile and the problem of the skin sticking to the leg is fairly common. You can try to remove it or just snip the leg. It will grow back.

I was just using that thick of a foam for now, because the 32 oz containers seemed a bit large for the L1 nymphs.. the fruit flies won't have as much room to stay away from the mantises. So it essentially turned the 32 oz container into a 24 oz container or so. Seems like they have enough height? The height is still like 5-6x the length of the mantis. The foam isn't soaked or even really damp. Just the 1 layer of paper towel on top of the foam is moist.

 

[Rick]

I was just using that thick of a foam for now, because the 32 oz containers seemed a bit large for the L1 nymphs.. the fruit flies won't have as much room to stay away from the mantises. So it essentially turned the 32 oz container into a 24 oz container or so. Seems like they have enough height? The height is still like 5-6x the length of the mantis. The foam isn't soaked or even really damp. Just the 1 layer of paper towel on top of the foam is moist.

I see. I thought you were using it for humidity. Well I normally keep all those little nymphs all together after hatching until I get a several left. Just too much trouble trying to care for a bunch of individual nymphs. Nothing you can really do. When that happens to me I try to pull the skin off or just snip it off at the leg.

 

[whamslam3]

mine just molted and has some of the old skin stuck to one of the back legs. do i have to snip it or can i just leave it there until next molt?, cuz i dont know how i will be able to catch it in order to snip it or peel it off. what should i do?

 

[rensallar]

mine just molted and has some of the old skin stuck to one of the back legs. do i have to snip it or can i just leave it there until next molt?, cuz i dont know how i will be able to catch it in order to snip it or peel it off. what should i do?

That's pretty much what happened to mine too. I left it for the rest of the day.. sometimes it just fell off by itself. On a couple, I took a pair of forceps or chopsticks and grabbed the old skin. It's really easy to catch them when they're dragging that around. Then took a pair of small scissors and just snipped off the old stuff. I felt bad that I had to snip off part of the leg on 1 of them, but it has actually been doing much better after I did that. Before that, the leg would just dangle and the mantis wouldn't use it to walk with or anything. It is able to use the stump after I snipped it.

I was told that the rest of the leg will grow back after it molts again.

 

[hibiscusmile]

Yea, I was a disbeliever once, but now I BELIEVE!