10/4/2021: A belated happy birthday to my Blaberus giganteus

Sometimes I think about perceptions of the bug hobby, especially the ones beginners have. A while ago (when I was still using the abomination known as Facebook) I came across a comment about how insect breeders had many problems with inbreeding and it was standard procedure to… go out in the wild to collect more to add to their colonies every few years.

I have since found the pervasive fear of inbreeding in captive culture to be very overblown and the ends to which people go to “prevent” it are perpetually amusing. I will admit, I was once hyper-aware of inbreeding, but the concern began to decay when life veteran insect and reptile keeper Kim Wismann challenged my beliefs. When I had brought up inbreeding as a potential source of collapse in my Princisia vanwaerebeki colony, Kim skeptically commented that I should re-assess my husbandry. This model of skepticism has become a pillar of my insect rearing toolkit, and instead of being overly concerned about the effects on inbreeding I have shifted my focus to minor seasonal changes that occur in my bug keeping rooms that have large ripple effects through cultures (such as humidity, air flow, temperature fluctuations, etc.). For examples, the large die-offs in my Elliptorhina davidi colony, which I once attributed to some bizarre inbreeding fault, were due to the change in temperature between summer (cool and AC-fed with stagnant air) and winter (warm with constant furnace heat moving the air). Bin conditions can change chronologically too, with waste accruing and once-suitable hiding places becoming weathered, worn, or insufficient, and these can be easy to miss when working under the assumption that nothing has changed in a set-up. I do not doubt that inbreeding can play a role in the decline of some species in the wild or in captivity (and some insects, such as Hymenopus coronatus, seem to have built in developmental mechanisms such as drastically staggered maturity to prevent doomed crosses between siblings), but when good, proper husbandry is the foremost lens used to examine extended propagation, the “inbreeding as the root of all evils” theory crumbles in my experience.

With this, I’d like to wish a happy 15th birthday to my Blaberus giganteus colony. Acquired off of Roachforum.com in my earliest roach keeping days, the line was a university colony whose origins I cannot 100% recall (though if pressured I would say they came from a university in Pennsylvania, and that they were for-sure from wild caught stock unrelated to other hobby lines at the time). The sale ad may still remain in the archaic logs of the classifieds section, though most of the information regarding the stock lies in long-since deleted private messages. I have cherished the line through the years as a bastion of my roach keeping beginnings and a testament to an appropriate level of apathy to inbreeding in captive insects. It has taken years but I have hammered out the husbandry to what has been a tricky species for some; air flow, proper hiding places for adults and subadults, and a proper humidity gradient in the substrate have been fruitful for me and cut deaths of fresh adults to levels a younger me could only have dreamed of.

Time will continue to pass, and my beloved Blaberus giganteus will continue to live on, unaware that by some accounts their disappearance from the mortal plane is long overdue.

-Kyle