Indian Walking Stick Eggs Have Begun to Hatch

Today, we were pleased to see that our Indian Walking Stick (Carausius morosus) eggs collected from our only adult had begun hatching today after about 6 weeks after they were laid. 

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For the past few weeks, we have been checking our Indian Walking Sticks eggs everyday for hatchlings. These eggs were from the brown morph adult we found back in April who is now gone and the green morph adult we reared from first instar found in March who is still currently laying eggs. We had collected the eggs from the two females in two separate plastic cups so we could better estimate when they would begin hatching since the brown morph adult laid eggs much earlier and than the green morph one that started laying just around when the brown one went missing. Thus, we were expecting the brown morph walking stick's eggs to hatch first, but were extremely surprised to see two hatchlings from the green morph's batch of eggs when we checked today! 

The mother of the eggs began laying around the start of June, so it's been about 6 weeks since these hatchlings' eggs were laid, which sounds just about the right amount of time. However, eggs from the brown morph adult were laid as early as April and are thus over three months old. They can't possibly be alive unless they're diapausing which is extremely unlikely; how they died, we have no idea since we subjected them to the same conditions we always have for 4 years already and we have never had eggs die before. Anyways, we still have over 100 eggs and counting for our hatching batch. 

Shown below are a few pictures of one of the newborns as well as one of their still alive and healthy mother. The hatchlings squeeze out of their shell from the knob shaped "lid" or capitulum. The newborns look more or less the same as older nymphs and adults except that their abdomen is curled up and there are no secondary sex characteristics (though we know they are all female since this is a parthenogenically reproducing species). All newborns are this shade of brown but may change shade or turn green as they molt. Very frustratingly, however, the newborn photographed here went missing somehow (sigh, we know this is sort of embarrassing and careless on our part), so we have only one now, though it's not a big deal since there will be more than enough to rear as more hatch (the eggs will keep hatching and be laid so long as our adult is still alive!). 

For the rearing method, we basically copied the set-up for our adult but with a much smaller container. It's just a small plastic tub positioned vertically with a branch placed in a water vase, shown below. We find brambles (Rubus) and roses (Rosa) to be the best and most convenient hosts for this species, so we stuck in a raspberry cutting which should stay fresh for at least two weeks. The little newborn already started nibbling on the leaf when we put it in. As more walking sticks hatch, we will just keep putting them in here, but if it gets too overcrowded we'll just get a bigger tub.

​Anyway, let's start a count so we can keep track of our stock.
​Count: L7: 1 (F0); L1: 1; eggs: 128 (2 hatched)

- Alan