Sorry for the lack of updates, I've been busy.
Insect-a-Palooza was a great success. There were tons of people there. I hope I inspired some of the children who visited the insect zoo. Call me sentimental, but I was overjoyed when a little girl who held one of the stick insects exclaimed, "This is so cool!"
This is the only planet we have, so it's good to know the next generation will have some love for it.
Anyway, without further ado, I have more pictures!
This is one of our Chilean rose-hair tarantulas. A co-worker and I cleaned out all the tarantula tanks yesterday and gave them new "furniture", including petri dishes of water. This little one was so thirsty she dunked her entire body into the dish! If she could speak, I'm sure she would have gone: "Aaaah...~"
Remember that sort of tannish colored praying mantis in the last post that I explained was a male? Well...
He laid eggs. (my fingers make a cameo appearence here)
The sort of brain-shaped thing attached to the top of the tank is what's called an egg case, or oothica. Inside that are many, many eggs. I'm talking about 400 total.
We were so sure he was a boy mantis too... It's funny. The girl who brought the mantis in called it "Penelope". I told her it was a boy and it was renamed "Penn". And now it's a girl again. Can't the mantis make up its mind? ...oh well.
On top of it all, those 400 babies are going to have cousins.
Different container, same thing. Another oothica, laid by another mantis.
The proud momma. She actually laid TWO egg cases, so there could potentially be 1200 babies hatching. Oh man...that's gonna be a lot of mouths to feed.
Finally, one of the death's head cockroaches is doing something odd. Compared to its friends (of which there are two, one to the left and one sort of underneath), it is very light-colored. It's almost ghostly in appearence, and certainly startled me when I noticed the change. Do the bugs somehow know Halloween is coming?
Anyway, I think it's changed this color because it's getting ready to molt. We'll keep an eye on it and make sure it's okay.
As always, I'll answer any questions to the best of my ability.
Oh. Unrelated to insects, but this was on a poster for the Computer Science Club's LAN Party, and since it's a cute drawing and I love TF2, I'll post it here for your enjoyment as well.