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PhilinYuma

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Yuma AZ, where else?
This thread is as much for me as anything, though anyone who has a dozen of the cutest mantises in the world, all with cute names, and wants to expand their holdings to a hundred or so (ten times the fun, right?), might want to read this It is a one week diary of my work on my own collection.

OK I currently have 8 cubes in use for one reason or another, though I shall ultimately use them exclusively for L1-2 nymphs and breeding. My Idolos, which so far refuse to mismolt (I have a theory!) and my empusa, about to go into diapause when i can set up a routine/technique, are in two of them. There are four HF cubes and about fifteen mel and hydei jars. The numphs from sub Texans to tiny whatevers are in 32oz and 4oz pots.

Today, 101711:

Got up really late today to celebrate the fact that I have no mantids to mail, and paid the price.

I took Tucker to our bee hunting ground to collect 28 bees, but found that it was late and hot enough for the fairy duster flowers to have stopped feeding for the day. They can't close, but they turn a darker red and the bees leave them alone. So off we treck to the pink-flower-vines (name?) which are alwasys swarming with bees until late next month, went home and fed 'em. You have to feed yr bees as soon as you get them home, here, or they become anoxic. Fed all the usual suspects and tried a few on my L4/5 thistles. They can take BBs but not Bs yet, so HFs for them.

Today should be FF mix day, but i'm all behind so will wait until tomorrow. I'm feeding about 150 L1s right now.

Checked out four fresh pots of HF food. maggots are at 2nd instar, but i'm OK for pupae. I'm feeding 10+Gms a week. Not a lot, and I supplement mine with Chuck's service.

I bought 24 100ml vials with "child proof" lids last week, and tried to cut a dremel hole in one lid for a mesh cover. What a mess! The lid comes in three layers. I don't want to use a hole cutter, so I'll try something else tomorrow. these things take up a lot of time. I have a hundred of Rebecca's pots to have ventillation holes cut in them. They'll have to wait a while longer!

Tried to restart my largest humidifier that i haven't used for over a month. It was sulking and the light refused to turn from red to green, so I soaked the inside of the base with bleach (I normally use vinegar, but this called for Stronger Measures) and scrubbed it with an electric toothbrush that i keep for that purpose until the light turned green. I wanted it to keep my two L1 cubes moist and to trickle down on top ofhe HF cages, but i forgot how powerful it is. I cranked it up like the penguin that I use for the ooth hatcher, and when i checked later, the Caliber III was registering 99%RH. This is dangerous for the hygrometer that can just stop working and then needs a lot of fiddly love and attention to get it working again. If at all.

Time for Mantis Mail. Not much today. Made a deal with a Mantis Friend for some ooths in a swap for cubes. This will give me a chance for a Great Nymph Experiment!

Ordered some great small roaches, B. lateralis, an excellent feeder, so I shall have to set up a large plastic box with eggcrate and a ventillated top. Perhaps I can get Tucker to do that, but probably not.

Read forum mail four-five times, a few posts, and that's it for the night!

 
what empusas do you keep? could you explain how you will diapause them? i would realy like to keep this species. (will you be breeding them)

 
I hope you keep this going Phil, or start a blog. :) I'd gladly read the daily adventures and details of a veteran mantis keeper such as yourself!

 
The Life and Times of Phil Yuma, I like it! Wait a minute it's not going to include the kinky parts is it? :unsure: :lol: Please tell your Amigo's Mr. Rayner and Jus I said Hi.

 
This will run for a week when the whole routine of chores should start again. The main idea is to show that though this is a splendid hobby, when you go from a few to a lot of mantids, you have to have a schedule of chores that often don't involve playing with yr mantids.

I'll do a thread on the Empusa fasciata di[pause when i start. It will be the first time I have done it! And yes, of course, I shall mate them. There is a curete way to sex these guys, but more later.

I brought your post up, Nick, when i was visiting sunny and we agreed that what happens in Yuma, stays in Yuma, usually because no one else is very interested! :D

Went bee hunting earlier today than yesterday, but it looks as though they are giving up on the fairy dusters. I took a black bee a little smaller than a honey bee today; the smallest black bees, about the size of a BB are almost too fast to catch and rarely settle. The Jacaranda trees are in blossom here, and you can usually capture fat, slow moving carpenter bees without any trouble, but they are too large for anything i have right now. For the purpose of this thread, I discovered that collecting --door to door -- takes about 75 mins and feeding about 15 minutes. That includes capturing one or two that escape in the exitement and inevitably try and get through the closed window.

My biggest job today was cleaning out 20 12" cubes. A number of these had been sent to me by a good friend who is no longer in the hobby. I spray them with full strength bleach, rinse them off and then let them dry in the sun. But these had strange stuff stuck on them that had to be scrubbed and scraped at without teaRING THE MESH.i AM GOING TO SEND SOME OF THESE TO A mANTIS fRIEND, BUT I REPAIRED A FEW MYSELF. i FIX MINE WITH mODGE pODGE A THICK WHITE GLUE FROM -- YOU GUESSED IT -- MICHAELS, BUT MY FRIEND HAD ALSO CUT UP A CUBE AND USED THE FABRIC FOR REPAIRS. nO NEED TO THROW THESE GUYS AWAY and the caps were a mistake, but I type too slowly and badly to go back. Sorry!

Here's something interesting for those of you who keep Idolos in mesh cubes. She bought lengs of dense grey foam in 3/4" thick solid tubes and stuck the ends to the sides of the cube with stick pins -- i removed about 150! -- and it seems to me that they could be pinned so that a bunch of them could run parallel with each other the length of the top of the cube., so that they covered it. Someone might want to try it.

I made a belated batch of FF food - i use the same (excellent) mix for mels and hydei and both love it. 51/2 cups of potato flakes, 1 cup of brewer's yeast, a half cup each of sugar and dry yeast ( I buy it in 2lb bags -- much cheaper) and 1TBS of Paraben; a 1lb bag lasts for months. I mix it dry in a KitchenAid stand mixer. According to Consumer Reports, it takes abput 15 minutes for a thorough mix! I then start adding 6 cups of water while it is stirring and let it stand to absorb the water. When it is at the consistency I like, almost runny, I take the bowl off and quickly cover it to keep the almost wild (ferile?) FFs at bay. Despite the lack of gluten in potato, the mix will rise and I shall mix it again, briefly, tomorrow to let the residual CO2 out, though i have never seen the flies affected by it.

If you use this method, be sure to clean off the dough hook or what ever you use for mixing. When it dries, it is like cement!

And I'm happy to say that two of my favorite GDs took up most of my evening. I talked with Amanda for about an hour on the phone, chatting about fun stuff, mostly the fact that Hubris had a significantly different meaning for the Greeks of Sophocles's time, when it was a serious crime, than its watered down version today, and we did a complete plot run down on the three plays of the Oedipus cycle (I only had to fill her in on the second play) finding out who was guilty of hubris and when. We completely exonerated Antigone, and determined that most HS teachers know nothing about Greek tragedy.

I visired my Sunny to give her one of my silver earings for her sensitive ear (never get yr ears pieced with a gun!) only to find that she had bought some today, but we made mozzarella and prosciuto omeletes and discussed Ellen Scultz's new book after she showed me the clip from last night's Daily Show. we also laughed about the fact that both the Britsh and US news gave endless details of the Jewish boy just released by Hamas, but nothing about the 1,000 Palestinians that were released. We had both gone to the one news service in English that wre know oft that would cover the Arab side, and it did! :D

I mention this to point out that i don't spend all my time cleaning up after and waiting on mantids and to demonstrate that there are a lot of American teenagers who know a lot but can't discuss it with parents who aren't interested. Yay!

 
Nice. Great recap!

If the stuff you scraped off the cube is the same as mine (and not the more common vomit), it's waste product that I've seen my Idolos spray out their back-sides (looks like a cat scenting it's territory). Violins did it, too. Stands to reason the other Emphua might, as well.

 
Wow. That wasn't quite a week, was it? I found this when I searched for my Empusa post to answer a question by Gripen. so here you go, mate.

Diapause is a temporary slowing down of an insect's metabolism/growth in reponse to life threatening, regularly (usually anually) occuring environmental conditions. The European strain of the European mantis, Mantis religiosa, (but not the African or the Asian(as was first discussed on this forum a few years ago) undergoes a period of diapause in the ooth in order to prevent premature hatching in the fall due to a warm spell that would end in death from freezing. The diapause is initiated by chemicals secreted by the female in response to the shortening photoperiod in the fall before the ooth is laid..The embryos go into a form of stasis and the diapause is broken by the first sub zero weather and the zygotes star developing again. Let me repeat; a freezing spell does not induce diapause, it breaks it. This has to be the most commonly misunderstood concept in mantis husbandry.

Diapause can also occur when food becomes apredictably scarce. Some grasshopper nymphs in the desert SW go into diapause and almost stop eating in the early summer as their grass becomes seer and do not start to grow again until the monsoon brings more moisture.

Now here's the fascinating thing. In Macedonia and other areas (the Slovenian Karst Plateau, is a good spot if you have friends there) Mantis religiosa and Empusa fasciata coexist and have completely opposite strategies for coping with the winter's cold. M. religiosa hatches in the spring and the ooths are laid in the fall, just like those of American species, where they undergo diapause which is broken by the cold so that the nymphs can emerge in the spring. E. fasciata nymphs hatch in mid summer and still have a way to go when winter, marked by 10C (50F) weather for a month or so, arrives. During this period, the nymphs move around less and eat very little. Once the spring comes with warmer weather, their metabolism retirns to normal and they eclose to adulthood, mate and lay their ooths.

In captivity, it is possible to induce diapause by gradually reducing the photperiod, drastically limiting food, and reducing the temp to about 50F for a month or so when the nymphs reach about L4/5. The big problem with this for meany of us is reducing the temp to that level. I was lucky in that I mijudged the instar of my four E. fasciata and after I had reduced the photoperiod, the flargest one molted to adult. I have three survivors of the original four and today a female eclosed, so I now have a pair.

I have read and been told that if M. religiosa ooths are not chilled for several months, the nymphs that hatch are few and weak. I think, though I don't know, that the problem here is not the lack of diapause time but the lack of quiescence that is induced by the cold winter and causes the embryos to develope slowly, over a longer period. This is true of some US Stagmonmantis species that do not undergo diapause but need a resting period during the cold months in which the the embryos have ample time to develop. I guess that I should add that captive bred M. religiosa females that are not exposed to a diminishing photoperiod soon after they become adult will NOT lay ooths that go into diapause.

I also know that diapausing grasshopper nymphs will start to grow again as soon as they have adequate food, so I am hoping that the lack of a diapause will not have an adverse effect on the E. fasciata. I shall keep everyone informed. Wish me luck!

 
Just got to this, great stuff btw, how r u culturing houseflies? Do u culture bottleflies? Last time I tried culturing house and bottle flies it stunk up the whole house! Also, what do u feed your bees u catch? I sometimes catch a bee or two for a mantis and I didn't know u had to feed the bees! :)

 
Phil, thanks for the information on diapause. It seems easier with my moths as I just place the diapausing cocoons in my bug refrigerator.

When I'm in a hurry I just spray my net enclosures with really hot water. They come out fairly clean but it doesn't get rid of what is left behind from the ooths I have removed. When I'm doing a thorough cleaning, I soak mine in water/bleach overnight, and they come out like new.

agent A said:
Just got to this, great stuff btw, how r u culturing houseflies?
Click to expand...
Agent A, I have used Carey's media and method for culturing houseflies and after a few minor adaptations, I was successful. At the moment I have too many mantids, and I wouldn't be able to raise enough houseflies to feed them all. So, I've mostly been buying blue bottle pupae and larvae from a couple of sources. But you'll want Phil's advice since he can tell what instar a maggot is.

Phil, I'd love to know how you are doing with your Texas Unicorns.

 

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