I keep promising myself "no more pet bugs", but, well, the plight of the specimens tugged at my heartstrings and I couldn't resist taking them home. Also, before you ask, I could not ascertain the adaptive value of their puffiness. They never seemed to use their bulges for anything and were honestly quite boring to watch (pretty much all they did was eat and walk around).
Anyways, eleven successfully pupated and turned into adults (all of which I released). The other three died from assorted mysterious reasons in case you're wondering. No parasitoids emerged.
Here is an adult!
I wanted to get more adult pics to show off their extreme color polymorphism, but, well, they were very uncooperative. The pics I do have are either blurry or depict my fingers (for aesthetic reasons I dislike having visible body parts onscreen), so I'm not posting them here. Also I'm too lazy to retype my rearing tips so here you go.
Unrelated news:
- My Asterella californica specimen was killed in an accident several months ago. It wasn't caused by bad care, the accident was just an annoying random event.
- I just found another colony of Sphaerocarpos!
