Gone with the Wind

Hello everyone. 🙂

     This post will be rather outlying compared to the normal content that you see here as it deals with death and the past rather than life and the future, but it is in honor of a very special invert, so it gets a pass. 😉 With that said, let's jump right in.

     Rewind all the way back to July 23rd, 2015. I had just discovered the wonderful invert keeping/culturing hobby a little over a year earlier and after getting my feet wet with mantids and experiencing a number of failures, I decided to explore the other niches of the hobby. On this Summer day I would acquire a large male Gromphadorhina oblongonota (Wide Horn Hisser) nymph, which I would "name" Tropical Tank, but would never really refer to it by that title at all. Upon unboxing him from his particularly cramped shipping container, he bolted out and into the shipping box faster than I anticipated such a large roach to be able to move, proving to be really one of the only times I was ever genuinely startled by one of my cockroaches. I would set him up in a 16 or so qt. container that my mom had sitting around in the house and set up the inside with a coconut fiber substrate, a couple pieces of cork bark, and a neat, little food bowl and water bowl. I was hesitant to handle him and such at first, but quickly got used to it and would eagerly check up on him whenever possible. As mentioned earlier, he was already a large nymph when he arrived and so after only one, maybe two molts, he was a towering adult. 😀

     After a while, my mom got him an enclosuremate in the form of a male Gromphadorhina portentosa (I'm not sure if it was a hybrid or not, but that's not the point of the story 😛) based on my request. By the time the male G.portentosa molted to adulthood, I had amassed a small handful of invert species and so I thought I'd start up a blog to document any developments in my collection. The first blog post I ever published of course had to feature my two beloved hissers and after that they would both appear one more time in one of my "Photos" series posts. I'm not sure if housing the two hissers together was a good idea as it ended up leaving the G.oblongonota probably more beat up-looking than he should have at that age, but I don't think it had much affect on his long term health. For some reason or another, the G.portentosa male perished shortly after rehousing him with some Elliptorhina laevigata nymphs that I had recently acquired, but the oblongonota continued on.

     He became known as "Old Man" in his later life, a much more fitting name than "Tropical Tank" would have ever been. He fully embodied the moniker often being known to slowly trudge around the enclosure as well as his body allowed him to and take long sips from his water bowl whenever it was filled up. As long as he had been in my care and as old as he was, he still always managed to work up a good hiss for me whenever I'd pick him up. Indeed there was never much of an indication that he was reaching the finish line until one day I picked him up and he didn't hiss. Soon after in early April of this year, at an estimated total of 3 years in age, he was gone.

     The pet that had been with me from the time that I was 13 to just before my 16th birthday, that was here before my blog was a thing, that was here before I was in high school, that was here long before I moved, and that was here before any other cockroach, was no longer here. It brung a sadness that was partially because of the loss of the roach himself, and partially because of how much life has changed since his arrival. I was no longer keeping whatever few species I could fit on the top of a little dresser, but rather keeping and breeding nearly 100 different arthropods of all shapes, sizes, colors, and origins from a ton of awesome friends I'd met along the way, and that's just to name one thing. I don't think the death of any other arthropod I'll ever keep will bring an emotional reaction like this and perhaps that's a good thing. Death is such an everyday part of this hobby whether it be by old age, health problems, or being fed off, that I couldn't go on if I paid mind to every single event where something perished. Granted, barely anything I keep is strictly a pet anymore, so who knows, maybe I'll get even more attached to something in the future.

     I definitely hope to get his body preserved properly in some way soon; getting it cast is resin would be the coolest, although I'm not sure how I'd get that done. Maybe I'll have to look into things more.

     All in all, I don't think I could have asked for much of a better individual to light the flame for my now raging fire for keeping and breeding the most astounding animals on earth also known as arthropods. I'm confident that he helped change the way that the many family members I showed him to look at "bugs" in the world around them, so hopefully some buggy friends' lives were spared thanks to him as well. He will be missed.