I become a teneb hospital

 
I acquired a new Nyctoporis carinata specimen last Saturday! I was hiking around in the forest and finding zero tenebrionids, even in the damper areas near the river. While I was walking home I saw it flailing upside-down on the roadside, with spiderweb in its legs. Evidently it had fallen and couldn't get up, and was dying from heat exhaustion as a result.

Normally I would have disentangled it and put it right side up elsewhere in the forest, but I got too excited and decided to take it home. Normally taking things home tends to be a bad idea, since I have a track record of accidentally performing unethics on captive specimens (I still regret the coccinellid starvation incidents), but this time it wasn't a problem. When I got home I saw that it was twitching its legs and jaws in a very uncoordinated fashion and would have surely died if I left it in the forest. It stopped spasming after the first few hours and feebly chewed a cooked rice grain, which was good. For some reason dying insects seem less likely to survive if they are unwilling to eat. Unfortunately it still could not walk.

It remained unable to walk for the next day or two, and kept awkwardly dragging itself away backwards from its food after feeding sessions of mere minutes or seconds, although its appetite did slowly improve. However, today I opened its jar and was pleased to see it had fully recovered! Some of its legs are permanently broken but it can now walk, and it has eaten a considerable quantity of rice and assorted fruits. It certainly is a joy to work with compared to those awful green scarabs; it shows little fear at being hand-fed and picked up, can detect its food from long distances via antennae (the scarabs only detect food and feed in captivity if they walk into fruit face first, and their facial aim is terrible), doesn't have monomaniacal urges to constantly fly (seeing a flightless Cotinis specimen spend hours a day attempting to go airborne is just painful to watch), and doesn't even play dead or flinch when handled, even though death feigning is one of its main defenses (it lacks defensive scent glands).

I still plan to send it alive to an acquaintance once COVID lockdown ends though; I've read that nyctos tend to be lethargic and kind of boring to watch, and don't think keeping it would be much fun.