Sunday, February 12, 2017

Strange Morphs

Hello again guys,
Here we are at the overall third post out of my four consecutive overdue update posts. I'll share the bulk of my remaining updates in this post and then will finish off with a smaller post. This one will be on the various color morphs I've came across recently(I'll also be trying to isolate these morphs with the isopods). I'll start with the one roach species that has displayed a striking color morph for me.
So a few weeks ago I decided to check up on my peppered roaches only to find an almost B.craniifer-looking adult male! I was astonished by its stunning, nearly solid black wings! After seeing him, I immediately asked some of the expert enthusiasts about this morph and ended up finding out that it wasn't an isolatable phenotype, but was rather one that shows up when individuals are kept at cooler temperatures. My next two adults (one male, one female) also displayed almost solid black wings, but obviously I wasn't as excited when I noticed them since I already found out that the morph was non-isolatable. Besides this, I still figured that I'd share some pics of them just because they're so beautiful!
Here they are!





Black-winged A.tessellata adult males



Black-winged adult female A.tessellata
Now let's get to the isopods.
The species I've, without a doubt, seen the most variation in is Porcellio laevis and they've proven to be very variable yet again. Recently I noticed two very interesting new phenotypes in my colony, brown bordered and orange bordered individuals! I've found about five specimens with partial or full brown bordering and around four with partial or full orange bordering. Very unfortunately, in the process of me transferring the orange bordered individuals into a new enclosure, half of them died due to desiccation. :( The ones that died happened to be the two individuals with full orange bordering, leaving me with two partially orange bordereds. I currently have the bordered specimens isolated from the others, but will likely be passing over the project to another enthusiast.
Anyway, here's some pictures!



Brown bordered P.laevis


Orange bordered P.laevis
I'll end with some not-so-strange morph news.
Firstly, I wanted to share that I'm currently attempting to isolate the relatively common gray, Porcellio scaber-esque morph of Trachelipus rathkii.
Here are some pics of them.

T.rathkii "Gray"
Secondly, I've recently learned that the calico form of T.rathkii may be a sex-linked trait and might only exist in females. I'm not sure about the validity of this info yet as I haven't really checked every single individual in my two "Calico" colonies yet, but the ones that I have checked do seem to all be female. But anyway, I still figured I'd share that my colonies have been doing very well and are producing tons of mancae!
Here's a photo of the little cuties!
T.rathkii "Calico" mancae
Hope you guys found these morph updates fascinating and I'll see you guys at my last overdue update post, goodbye! :)

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