Pet Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches

BARBARO 

This male hisser is the most outgoing chap on my roach ranch.You can tell he is a male by the two big horns he has on his pronotum, which is a sort of shield that covers his thorax (upper body). His head (a pair of feelers or antennae are attached to it) is tucked under the pronotum. Barbaro probably exhibits normal male hisser traits such as head-butting, but I have yet to catch any of my male hissers head-butting each other. In the pic to the right, Barbaro is intently examining something very interesting on my finger.

BIG MAMA ROACH  

Formerly known as Missy Roach, Big Mama is now a proud mommy of about 20 baby hissers. Unlike Barbaro, Big Mama doesn't have two big bumps on her pronotum. Big Mama doesn't engage in head-butting and other such violent pastimes.

ROACH RANCHING 

Madagascar hissing roaches, back in their homeland, live on the forest floor in warm, humid hisser paradise - plenty of rotting logs to hide out it, and lots of fallen fruit to snack on. My hissers are managing okay in their 10 gallon tank although they probably miss paradise. They hang out under the cardboard egg cartons placed in the warmest part of the tank. It's warm because the heating pad is situated beneath. I've snuck out at night and caught them roaming around the tank, eating and drinking. I don't put any bedding, peat moss or soil or leaf litter in there though. It makes the weekly clean up much easier, and doesn't seem to get in the way of them breeding like mad (see pic to the right). It doesn't take long for a colony to get big. A female hisser is ready to reproduce at 6 months, and gives birth to 20-60 live young every so often. Hissers live several years.

ROACH SUSTENANCE 
I feed my hissers cat food and fish flakes, and throw in apple slices, banana peels, cucumbers and assorted salads every week. There's a bottle capful of fresh water that I stuck a piece of sponge in so the baby hissers have a personal flotation device if they accidentally take a swim. I change that out every two to three days. Also every time I clean out the bottom of the tank, wiping with paper towels, I leave a little bit of roach poop in there. Baby roaches (nymphs) need to nibble on the grown ups' droppings to get roach-friendly bacteria in their own digestive systems. Think of how we eat Lactobacillus-laden yogurt to boost our friendly gut bacteria population.

If you have any questions, or have suggestions on what you would like to see added here, I welcome you to email me!

Giant Millipedes as Bug Pets

Here you will learn about giant millipedes, sexing male and females, and how to care for these gentle veggie-loving giants. To know them is to love them.

My pedes Archie and Millie are sweetly affectionate and a bit shy with strangers but will warm up given time.

ARCHIE 

Allow me to introduce you to Archie. The pic above shows a very inquisitive Archie the male millipede. If you look closely at his legs, counting to where the 7th pair of legs should be, there is instead a pair of short knobby gonopods (gonopods are what make male millipedes male millipedes). Archie is an extrovert as far as millipedes go. He loves munching on cucumber slices and the occasional banana peel. He gets quite a lot of exercise moseying around his 10 gallon apartment. He's a little smaller than Millie whom we are getting to next.

MILLIE 

Miss Millie (pic right) is quite a bit larger than Archie. She is also more timid and spends a lot of her day curled up under the leafy litter in the 10 gallon apartment she shares with Archie. If you look closely at her legs, counting down to where the 7th pair of legs should be, there is in fact a 7th pair of legs and no gonopods. Except in Millie's case, her left 7th leg is a little stump from an old injury. Fortunately she has plenty of other legs she can use to get around with! Female millipedes have their reproductive parts tucked away neatly inside their bodies.

Sexing Male and Female Millipedes 
As you would have guessed from reading about Archie and Millie above, it isn't all that complicated telling a male from a female millipede, especially if you're looking at a Giant Millipede! Males have a pair of knobby gonopods instead of legs on their 7th segment, while females have legs. It takes a little patience to wait for your millipede to get into just the right position for you to take a peek at his/her underside. Perhaps you could put your millipede into a glass fish bowl and examine it while it is crawling about inside (this stretches out its underside a bit better).

Millipede Home Sweet Home 
Millipedes love dark, damp and warm digs in leaf litter. Their home needs to be twice as long as their body length so they have plenty of space to explore and exercise. Mine seem happy in their 10 gallon glass aquarium. I placed a heating pad under one half of the tank and also covered that half of the tank with black plastic to keep it dark. They love hiding out there! I mist the tank daily with a spray bottle filled with water, and I cover the top of the tank with a piece of saran/cling wrap to keep humidity high inside the tank. High humidity helps the leaf litter to rot, which is great for my 'pedes as you will see next.

Feed Your 'Pedes 
Millipedes are detritivores, and munch on rotting leaves and well-rotted wood of most trees (except cedar). Get plenty of oak leaves and bark/wood the next time you take a walk in the park. Place these in a ziploc bag, freeze for a day to kill any other bugs, thaw out, then let your 'pedes have at it. The freeze step is important because the leaves and bark/wood may also harbor millipede enemies such as centipedes (which snack on millipedes). My 'pedes also love eating cucumber slices. They have surprisingly weak jaws and need soft food.

Breed Your 'Pedes! 
Obviously you will need a male and female millipede for this. They also need to be the exact same species of 'pede. It helps if you order your pair from the same supplier. I got mine from Wards Natural Science. You will need to give your 'pedes some privacy, and comfy conditions (see Millipede Home Sweet Home above). I can't help but sneak peeks every so often. They are so affectionate! In the photo below, Archie is whispering sweet nothings to Millie as they cuddle.

If you have any questions, or have suggestions on what you would like to see added here, I welcome you to email me!

Bugs as Pets

Bugs make such fun pets! In my blog you will find information on some bugs that make great pets for kids (and grown ups too!). These are Madagascar Hissing Roaches, millipedes and crickets. They are harmless, extremely easy to care for, and will provide hours of interesting observations for the owner.

Pet bugs take up very little space, are cheap to feed, and can be pretty affectionate little buggers. Giant millipedes are gentle, slow-moving vegetarians. Hissing roaches are actually fastidious groomers and neat-freaks. Crickets make sweet pets that chirp you to sleep at night (for me at least!), and are a key ingredient in many edible Bug Recipes.

Get ready to embark on an exciting and rewarding adventure as a proud bug owner!

Choc Chirpie Chip Cookies Recipe: Cricket Flour Cookies

A tasty twist to the beloved old-fashioned chocolate chip cookie, these tastebud-tickling treats will bring out your inner chirpie! The cricket flour adds lot of protein and minerals, and an extra dimension in flavor.

Ingredients: 
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup cricket flour*
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 pkg 12 oz choc chips

*To make cricket flour, you will need about 50 adult crickets. Follow steps 1-3 & 5 as for the choc chirpie recipe above. Then whizz the dry-roasted crickets in the blender for cricket flour. 


Preparation: 

1. Mix flour, cricket flour, baking soda and salt 
2. Cream butter and sugar (10 minutes) then mix in egg and vanilla essence till just blended 
3. Stir in dry ingredients to form stiff cookie dough. 
4. Stir in choc chips 
5. Drop rounded measuring teaspoonfuls onto baking sheet 
6. Bake at 350 deg F for 15 minutes 

 Enjoy!

Choco Chirpies Recipe: Chocolate Covered Crickets

These chocolate covered crickets are scrumptious! The sweet chocolate 'cocoon' encases a surprisingly crisp, nutty and flavorsome filling.You will need 20 live adult crickets, toothpicks and dipping chocolate.

1. Feed the crickets some fresh apple slices for a day or two. This helps clear out their gut and imparts an awesome apple flavor to your choco chirpies. 
2. Put the crickets to 'sleep' in freezer for 10 minutes. 
3. Rinse and drain. 
4. Bake 200 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour. Skewer with toothpick through bottom towards head. Legs should break off easily at this point. 
5. Bake a further 1 hr at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Test for doneness by squishing one - it should be crisp and kinda crumble when crushed. 
6. Dip crickets into melted chocolate. The pic to the right shows milk-choc, dark-choc and straight (hardcore!) crickets. 
7. Lay on wax paper to harden. 

Enjoy!

Bug recipes

Insects are a great source of protein and most of the ones I have enjoyed had a sweet, nutty flavor. I have stir-fried cicadas in the Borneo jungle, savored sago grubs at a bustling market in Sarawak, and sampled some truly tasty chestnut weevils in Virginia, USA.

Here you will find links to my favorite edible insect recipes, and links to my bug-eating adventures. For now I have listed two of the most popular with kids and grown-ups alike: 'Choco Chirpies' and 'Choc Chirpie Chip Cookies''.

What do Cockroaches Taste Like? : BLECH

One of the questions I ask myself is, would I ever dare to eat a cockroach? After all, I've dined on crickets and chowed down on sago grubs and chestnut weevils with relish. Perhaps a roach, stir fried with extra virgin olive oil and dressed with a sprinkling of sea salt and black peppercorns, would go down easy? Nuh-uh. I remember watching a movie  - Papillon - where a starving prisoner eats a cockroach that wanders into his cell. I think about that particular scene quite a bit. If I were starving, would I eat a roach? ...

Actually, wait... YES I have accidentally eaten a cockroach before. In fact, I have also eaten cockroach poop (droppings / frass) before too.

How - you may wonder - the heck did I know it was roach and poop? Well, it's the taste. While the texture or 'bite' as you crunch down on a roach is not much different from that of a cricket (both have leathery tegmina or wings), a roach tastes AWFUL. Just AWFUL. Crickets taste like whatever they ate last. I know this because when making choc covered crickets, I would feed them organic apple a few days before 'processing', to clean out their guts. With their guts full of apple, they tasted sweet. Flavorful.

Not so for roaches. A roach tastes AWFUL. (I know I just said that.)

By the way, I absolutely must clarify here that those 'fried cockroaches' people brag about chomping down on in Thailand are NOT cockroaches. They are the Giant Water Bugs (Belostomatidae) and although they look similiar, do not taste half bad. Trust me, a taste of cockroach is one that is not ever forgotten. Why is this? It is because cockroaches have glands on their abdomen that ooze the super stinkiest pheromone ever known to mankind. These pheromones are powerful attractants to other cockroaches. Combine this with the fecal pellets, which are in themselves malodorous, and folks, you have a 'Winner'.

NOT a cockroach! These are Giant Water Bugs, a popular street-food snack in Thailand and neighboring countries

"Cockroaches taste the way they smell. That's the first time I ever came close to losing it" (Entomology professor Lynn Kimsey, UCLA Davis). Lynn, my sentiments exactly.

The American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) wins hands down for worst smelling cockroach species. The Madagascar hissing cockroaches smell musty, and I imagine that's how they would taste. According to Entomophagy on Youtube, they taste musty. Cockroach species have varying degrees of stinkiness.

Sigh! I think I have just about creeped out myself for the day. I will have to tell y'all about my accidental cockroach ingestion another time.

Would you dare to eat a cockroach?

Fear of Cockroaches: What Worsened Mine

Okay, I have recovered sufficiently from my previous post Worst Nightmare Cockroach Stories and will today, for my dear readers, relive one more traumatizing cockroach encounter.

Again, if you have a roach phobia, do not read this. Instead, read How to Overcome Fear of Cockroaches.

Cockroaches like dank, dark and dirty places. The home I lived in growing up had plumbing that went from the sink or any drain hole, into the big drain behind the house. Typical of Malaysian homes. Somewhere in the deep dark depths of that plumbing, lived a huge colony of American Cockroaches, Periplaneta americana. How huge? I'll tell you how huge in a future post on this Nightmare series.

The toilet / bathroom on the ground floor had one such drain hole. Malaysian bathrooms are wet bathrooms - taking a shower gets the entire (tiled) floor wet, and the bath water goes down a drain hole.   The drain hole leads to the cockroach colony. At night, which is when cockroaches are active, the critters would creep up the drain pipe, and through the drain hole, and into the toilet / bathroom.

Cockroaches come out from these at night.

I was afraid to use the toilet at night. When I absolutely had to, I used these semi-effective avoidance strategies. First I would turn the light on, without even opening the bathroom door. I would let be a few minutes. Since cockroaches are light-averse, they usually scatter when the light comes on. I would open the door a crack, making sure to look behind the door first, quickly step in, do my business, and get out, hopefully not having encountered any roaches face-to-face. A quick in, do business, out, was all I would hope for. I was usually successful.

Except this one time. I did the usual. Then when I went to sit down on the loo, I felt scratchy legs scurrying up my bare hip. With a wordless scream, not even looking to confirm that it was indeed a cockroach, I pushed it off me with flailing arms. It was a cockroach. It landed smack on the floor, then it made a bee line for the drain hole where it promptly vanished using the 'pendulum maneuver' (reported by the same roach researcher who uncovered the astonishing fact that at high speed, cockroaches run on two legs). Shudder.

Why can I not pee in peace? Tell me Why? At my most vulnerable, with my pants down, this dastardly creature would prey on me. Darn you Cockroach!

After that, I always, always, lifted the toilet seat to check under it, before sitting down. Did I find anymore roaches hiding out under there after that? Yes, occasionally. I am not sure why, but they also like hiding under the rim of the toilet seat. So I check there too. And also all around the bowl. And on the floor too. And the walls (roaches are good wall climbers).

I am so glad I live in PA now. It is cold. The roaches don't overwinter. I haven't seen one (the American cockroach) ever.

Ok, I need a break. I'll be back.

Cockcroach Phobia: Katsaridaphobia? How did I get it?

Roach phobia also known as Katsaridaphobia / Blattodeaphobia.

Phobias Really Cramp Da Style
As in all phobias, roach phobia is irrational. It doesn't make sense. It is crippling.

People with this phobia do anything they can to avoid roaches. Unfortunately, avoidance is a tactic that would not really work when it comes to roaches, because these six-legged terrors are EVERYWHERE. And they are here to stay.

I was once a very successful roach breeder. Meet Big
Mama and some of her babies.

Ease That Phobia
I remember my earliest memory of roaches stalking me as a child (recounted HERE). I continued to have horrifying experiences with cockroaches into adulthood. Thing is, I dissected cockroaches in high school and also as a Entomology graduate student at Virginia Tech. And 'The Ultimate' - had a stint as Cockroach Rancher boasting 500 hissing cockroaches.

All this roach-handling should have blown away my phobia.

Well all that helped. A lot. But I'm still afraid of them!

(Read Fear of Cockroaches to help deal with the phobia).

How Do Phobias Start?
I delved into what creates a phobia, in the book Hypnotism: A Hypnosis Training and Techniques Manual and found that phobias can be learned, created by a traumatic event, or a way of coping with generalized fear i.e. by placing all that unformed fear into (for example) a fear of spiders. I don't think I have a 'second hand fear' - getting the fear from my parents - because neither my Ma or Pa are scared of cockroaches. My Pa, growing up, slept on the wood floor in the family grocery shop and had cockroaches running all over him all night. Roaches don't bother him at all.

My phobia most likely originated at childhood (which I talk about in my previous post).

Masochistic Me
Strangely, although I was terrified of roaches, I had a morbid curiosity about them. I remember picking up The Nest from the used book store, and tortured myself reading it from beginning to the end. It's about cockroaches that develop a taste for human flesh. I might actually even watch the movie The Nest.

By the way, while cockroaches won't bite a chunk out of your thigh, they do eat the skin and other particles that fall off humans.

Hmm, now that I'm thinking about this - could my hands-on approach to tackling my cockroach phobia have led to me study entomology? After all, I did take up scuba diving to face head on my fear of drowning. (I now love scuba diving, but am resigned to aquaphobia for life).

Do you have a fear of cockroaches? How do you cope? Or not? Would love to hear from you!

xo Gracie

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Worst Nightmare Cockroach Stories: Oh the HORROR

I am afraid of cockroaches. Cockroaches are the stuff of my worst nightmares and my run-ins with them have scarred me for life. It kinda helps that I am an entomologist - knowing the facts about these ugly bugs has helped me (somewhat) overcome my fear of cockroaches. And I can lay claim to having been a roach rancher in the past. But I still get cockroach nightmares every once in a while, and I still scream if one takes me by surprise.

(Note: do NOT read any further if you have a roach phobia. Do read how to overcome your fear of cockroaches)

What caused Gracie's phobia?

Cockroaches seem to have a vendetta against me. They have terrorized me since I was a kid. Into my teens, these horrible creatures upped their game and their targeted attacks grew worse, culminating in a terrifying epic showdown in my early adulthood where I emerged (somewhat) victorious. 

I'll start with my earliest memory of roach terrorization. I was a wee girl. The scene: in the kitchen, watching Ma make dinner while munching on an apple. The Terror: I glanced at my apple right before taking another bite, and saw a huge cockroach perched on the apple. Its antennae jerked back and forth. It was looking right at me. I was too horrified to scream. I don't remember what happened after that. I think I was too traumatized...

I had waist-length hair as a teenager. We lived with my Popo and Kung Kung - us three kids (more now) situated in a room next to the kitchen. So I was sleeping in a mattress on the floor, my hair spread out over the pillow. In my sleep (I am a light sleeper), I felt something rustle in my hair. Immediately guessing (to my horror) what it was, I started grabbing at my hair. I felt something leathery, a little squishy, and large, and I knew it was a cockroach. I grabbed it, ripping out some of my hair with it, and flung it blindly across the corner of the room, while simultaneously leaping up and flipping the light switch. I lost sight of the roach! I spent the rest of the night lying in terror on my mattress thinking of it crawling around the room awaiting its revenge...

I'll post my next two worse experiences next time. This is all I can handle for now hehe. Have you been terrorized by a cockroach? What's your worst cockroach nightmare? I'd love to hear your story!

xo Gracie

p.s. It would be AWESOME if you could click on any ad here - my sponsors give me a few cents per click. Thanks for supporting my blog!