Hemithyrsocera sp.

 Hi everyone. Welcome back to another post, after quite a while of not posting.

I recently got a shipment of a few species of roaches. One of them was Blattella asahinai, and I got about 15 individuals.

I spotted a few odd nymphs and this black adult, which was much larger and has a different morphology compared to asahinai.

I initially thought this was Scalida latiusvittata, which is a species I've kept before due to the patterning and color. But then I checked out some of my latiusvittata pictures which revealed my specimen was much larger than latiusvittata.

A few days ago, I was checking out iNaturalist to identify my nymphs, they looked like they would be Hemithyrsocera, so I checked out the Hemithyrsocera genus on iNat.

I immediately saw some images of a roach that looked almost basically identical to mine, and the image was labeled as "Hemithyrsocera simulans". 

After seeing that, I tried to find a paper online about simulans, but the recorded range for this species is only in China and neighboring countries, so not from West Java, Indonesia where they were originally collected by the seller.

I got a paper for simulans, and I read through it and the descriptions were quite literally identical to mine. In the bottom, it did mention that simulans are identical in morphology and other characteristics when compared to another species called Hemithyrsocera irregularitervittata.

H. irregularitervittata barely has any information and I couldn't find any papers online for this species, other than that they're an Indonesian species. All I got is that there is a defying characteristic between simulans and irregularitervittata.

H. irregularitervittata has two robust setae present in the 7th abdominal tergum. So I proceeded to capture the adult specimen and put it in a small spiderling cup. I saw the two setae that were being mentioned which are those little moustache-like hairs on the abdomen, just below the cerci. So this could be irregularitervittata!

H. irregularitervittata setae 

I also saw that there were no styli, indicating she was a female! And before feeding her I did see that her abdomen was kind of inflated, so I'm really hoping that she's gravid. Fingers crossed.

But then, I found a specimen of true irregularitervittata and it was actually more of a tan-colored Blattella look alike. So this was not irregularitervittata.

I haven't managed to find any visual matches, but I hope I can soon.

I'm also guessing these nymphs in are nymphs of the irregularitervittata, but that's not certain, but I think this because they look like some generic Hemithyrsocera nymph.


Welp, that's pretty much it. Hope I can keep these guys as a thriving colony one day, and spread them more in the hobby.

Thanks for reading, goodbye and have a great day 👋 


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