Homalosilpha sp. Colony Report

August 30, 2025

Hello everyone. Welcome to another post, its been quite a while.

So about more than a month ago on 3/7/2025, I got a package containing a small colony of an unidentified Homalosilpha species.

Upon opening the package, it was this little bottle with some stuff inside and of course, the roaches themselves.

I refer to them as Homalosilpha sp. "South Sumatra", as it is their collection origin based on the seller.

This genus is generally known as Asian Flat Roaches, based on their native range in the continent of Asia and being particularly flatter compared to other roaches.

In my opinion this is pretty unique and interesting

Here they are, very nice looking species and definitely one of my favorite genus of roaches.

I received probably about 5 nymphs and 5 adults.

In the past, around October 2024 I had gotten a few specimens of Homalosilpha ustulata, but I had failed keeping them.

I think my main mistake was keeping them too warm and way too humid. They do enjoy humidity but I think I gave too much and at the same time the enclosure was too big for them making it hard to find food.

Humidity is still important though, as the ones I have originate from the deep forests of Southeast Asia which is generally known for being pretty humid and have dense foliage.

So learning from my mistakes I put their enclosure in a colder spot, considering the enclosure size I kept them in a decently sized enclosure, about 30x15cm tub.

Definitely lowering the moisture and humidity amount, but proving enough for them to be able to live aswell.

Homalosilpha sp. enclosure

This is when the enclosure was first made, I have made a few changes to the layout and more stacked bark.

Man are they stunning!

So over time I have been feeding them what I usually feed all my roaches. Fruits and fish pellets for protein.

They really do make use of the protein that they consume for sure, because a couple of weeks after I had got them, look what I spotted.

They have been laying a pretty good number of oothecae.

After flipping the bark, I noticed that by each week the number of oothecae plastered onto it seems to increase.

It took quite a bit more than I initially expected to get them to hatch. I was a little confused but I left them be. And it was definitely worth it

After more and more oothecae have been laid, I waited for the nymphs. It took about a month to get them to hatch.

On 1/8/2025, on the first of the new month, the first batch had been born :D

They are just the general looking Blattidae nymph, but that doesn't mean it's not exciting!

Very happy to have these here, my first time successfully getting this genus to breed

Fast forward to the second ootheca that hatched, I caught them in the middle of exiting the ootheca

Very interesting to see, never witnessed something like this before, absolutely insane

Fast forward to this week, there is a fairly good amount of nymphs and some from the earlier batches have been entering their second instar, which is starting to get that white color that stays to a zebra type pattern as nymphs.

And that's all until the time of this post, definitely will be adding more updates in the future on their progress and growth, and here I will just end the post by attaching a few of their pictures.