5/9/2022: The Amado Arenivaga assortment

Riding on the coat tails of Arenivaga apacha “Cave Creek Canyon”‘s success, sp. “Amado” are ready for an upgrade. However, this locality poses a unique problem: it is a mixture of two species!

Arenivaga seem semi-selective of their wild habitats, as each location and microhabitat tends to have a single species. From a hobbyist perspective, the only time a mixture of Arenivaga species has been found “in the wild” was under a board near San Antonio, Texas. This situation generated a bit of a buzz on the Allpet Roaches Forum back in the day, as one hobbyist pondered why he saw both small, presumably “immature” females carrying oothecae alongside much larger “adult” females. It turns out this stock was a mixture of Arenivaga tonkawa (the origins of my stock is in that line) and Arenivaga bolliana. “Amado” makes for a second recorded instance, although Arenivaga enthusiasts present on the Arizona trips have known this locality was a mix since its first collection in 2016. Shared between both instances is human influence, as the “Amado” species were found under concrete rubble in a well-trafficked area.

The males are very different, as can be seen in picture at the bottom of this post. Females may be as well, with one species having redder females and the other being darker, but captive Arenivaga trend more red than wild counterparts for unknown reasons so this may not be reliable.

My plan of action will likely be to pull copulating couples OR cross my fingers and hope the color differences in the females are telling. Either way, it seems the species with the lighter males is likely different from all other species I had collected, which will give the species tally a delightful bump.

It may take some time for me to make this stock available considering I would like to offer each species unmixed, but perhaps I will make an exception due to the intimate interweaving of the two in the wild.

-Kyle