CrawlinChaos
Arachnosquire
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2014
- Messages
- 100
Hello again guys! First off, I hope every one is having a happy Halloween. Second, I am pleased to report that pumpkin guts and pumpkin rind is huge hit with my millipedes this year! Third, I have two quick questions I wanted to pose to the hive mind (ha!).
1) In a few of my enclosures, there seems to be some sort of mite living in the substrate. They are a distinctive rusty red/almost brown color, about the size of a tip of a pencil and relatively slow moving. I've seen them mostly moving around on the top layer of substrate and very rarely on the millipedes themselves. I've read several places that the vast majority of mites are harmless and I don't think these are parasitic, as they don't seem to be clustering on the millipedes and I often find them feeding en mass on added food, along with the springtails. However, it would make me more comfortable if I could ID them.
2) I remember reading a couple of times that people have had mass die off of baby pedes. Back in the beginning of the year, I had tons and tons of N. gordanus babies crawling all over the surface of the substrate of their enclosure. Now, I very rarely see any at all. The adults seem happy as pigs in mud and I haven't made any major changes besides adding springtails to the enclosure. In my mind, it almost seems like the more springtails I saw on the surface of the substrate, the fewer baby pedes I saw. Could the pressence of the springtails encourage pedelings to retreat below the surface? Or am I experiencing one of these infamous mass die off? Or did the all just go to molt at the same time, lol? I'm tempted to dig through the substrate to see what I can find, but the prospect make me nervous.
I appreciate whatever info you guys can share with me! Thanks again.
1) In a few of my enclosures, there seems to be some sort of mite living in the substrate. They are a distinctive rusty red/almost brown color, about the size of a tip of a pencil and relatively slow moving. I've seen them mostly moving around on the top layer of substrate and very rarely on the millipedes themselves. I've read several places that the vast majority of mites are harmless and I don't think these are parasitic, as they don't seem to be clustering on the millipedes and I often find them feeding en mass on added food, along with the springtails. However, it would make me more comfortable if I could ID them.
2) I remember reading a couple of times that people have had mass die off of baby pedes. Back in the beginning of the year, I had tons and tons of N. gordanus babies crawling all over the surface of the substrate of their enclosure. Now, I very rarely see any at all. The adults seem happy as pigs in mud and I haven't made any major changes besides adding springtails to the enclosure. In my mind, it almost seems like the more springtails I saw on the surface of the substrate, the fewer baby pedes I saw. Could the pressence of the springtails encourage pedelings to retreat below the surface? Or am I experiencing one of these infamous mass die off? Or did the all just go to molt at the same time, lol? I'm tempted to dig through the substrate to see what I can find, but the prospect make me nervous.
I appreciate whatever info you guys can share with me! Thanks again.
