Man, those sure look cool hatching out like that! One of us really has to get the s. californica and start keeping that one. As i have only found one (on mexican sage) and i read in Insects of Los Angeles Basin that they prefer 'coastal sage' i expect this is probably the best place to look for these. If anyone finds some of these let me know
Watching them hatch never gets old for me...I guess I'm just a big kid. If I can find any californica, you can bet I'll try to keep them!
Kamakiri, if you have a chance perhaps you could put together a post discussing your findings about keeping s. limbata oothecae in the fridge - i have never done this and am keen on trying this. Did you spray them? What was the hatch rate? stuff like that
It was pretty simple the way I did it. First, I gotta say I believe that these and many other ooths do not generally need to be sprayed while incubating. Only for the period that they are expected to hatch. Since I was only planning to keep it in the fridge for a month, I decided that it shouldn't need spraying.
I use containers that are paper ventilated cups (from Smart-n-Final right across the aisle from the deli tubs at the store near me). I noticed that they are the same as some ooth vendors use for commercial sale.
I put enough excelsior to loosely fill the bottom third of the container. I sprayed the excelsior once with distilled water to make it surface damp, but not soggy. I didn't want the ooth rolling around like the ones I've seen in the garden stores, so I made a basket or cradle out of vinyl window screen to hold it in the center, so it wouldn't touch the sides or the damp excelsior. Put the ooth in put it in the fridge, in the door on the upper shelf, where it never freezes. Took the ooth out a month later and glued it back to the top of the kritter keeper where it came from one day later. Just used two low-temp glue dots on the ends.
I haven't done a head count yet, but the hatching seems better than the last. So far it has been less than 24 hours and it looks like it has hatched more than Mandy's first ooth in two days. Which might mean that the diapause just let them group together more/tighter...I'll know more when hatching is complete.
That's about it. I'll send you one of the cups if you want.
One interesting thing about Mandy's nymphs is that I can see that some are yellow-based morphs and others are green based. While I am excited to have found so many new (to me) morphs...I really want to cross the Mandy pink ones with the (very few) others from Sandra and Cherisse. It seems the selective breeding is making a difference even at the F1 generation.
