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New B lat housing

octanejunkie

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Decided to upsize out roach colony housing using a $7 sterilite container from Home Depot and some mesh screen following this video from Alex at Tarantula Haven. Because the roaches prefer darkness, I spray painted the sides with a $1 can of black spray paint. Total investment in this container is about $10

I am storing the container on a baker's style metro rack and have a standard home heating pad on low under the container, this raised the floor temp to around 85-90 degrees.

I'm using a few egg cartons cut in half making handling easy inside the container, though as the colony grows we will probably need to add more egg crate.

Food and water are simple, dried dog food and water bites in a small planting basket.

We just upgraded to this so I will update this thread if anything changes for better or worst to warrant an update.
Happy roaching!


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Tortoise Tom

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I've got mine in an 18 gallon tub. I use 12x12inch egg flats and cardboard dividers.

I also read that roaches like darker bins, so I did some side by side testing for a couple of years. I saw no difference between sterilite clear containers and blue, green, or gray opaque containers. I now prefer the clear bins because they are smoother inside, which makes it harder for the little buggers to find their way out, and because I like to be able to see what's going on in there.

You could have saved $1 on paint!!!
 

octanejunkie

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Lol I have a clear one for cleanup transfers

Hoping the humidity is high enough for the oothecas to hatch, so far none have

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 

octanejunkie

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Updated my process to segregate hatchlings to feed tiny slings.

I harvest some of the oothecas and put them in snack cups with substrate until the hatch. The ooths take about 3-4 weeks to hatch, but I don't harvest them the moment they drop so it's a crap shoot.

Once they hatch I corral the hatchlings into similar cups with substrate and raise then separately from the main colony. As they grow into nymphs, I put new hatchlings into new cups to keep them separated by size.
This way I have nymphs of all different sizes to feed to all my different size slings.

This seems like more work but it's easier than trying to gather the right size nymph from the main colony. Obviously I don't pull all the oothecas from the colony so there are hatchlings and nymphs if all different sizes growing in the colony to keep it going.

Ooth cups, no order, nothing to manage
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Batch cups
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Depending on how many hatch out in each batch determines how many cups I have here, separated by size. I feed out from these cups.
 

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