Cactus longhorn eggs!

arizonablue

arizonablue

Fresh Imago
My tiny group of cactus longhorns have been getting busy, and tonight I found three eggs in the substrate! Sorry for the awful photo but you can at least see the little things. They're like little green seed pods, with dents in them. I've been told they will puff up and hatch when watered, so I've tucked them in some moist sub and misted them. Cross your fingers for me, gonna see if I can raise these little suckers to big beetles!

cactus longhorn eggs.jpg

 
Congrats! Do you have a live prickly pear to rear the larvae in or are you going to try the clipped pad method?

 
Assuming the eggs hatch, I'm going to try the clipped pads. When they're teeny-tiny they probably will do just fine on a few bits of the chunk kind you can get in a bag. 

 
It is moist - the eggs are laid at the base of cactus, and hatch after the summer monsoons. Peter has raised these and he told me that the eggs always seemed to hatch after being watered. Not sure whether I'll have any luck but we'll see. :)

 
They generally hatch for me pretty quick after misting the sand a little. The larvae will go inside the cactus pieces and eat the cactus until the cactus rots and molds. The little bit of the tricky part is that when you change the cactus piece, even though it's really black and moldy, often times the little larvae is still inside of it, so be careful not to throw it out the larvae with the cactus pieces. 

 
@Garin I've read that they tend to die when transferred from piece to piece, especially if done more than a couple times. Is this not the case in your experience?

 
I have some pretty large grubs now and I think some have formed pupal cells, hard to see, but none have made it to adult yet. So until they are adults, I'm not really sure how well I'm doing with these things. So I think it's definitely possible that caring for them in the piece method may not be the best. I also did a really poor job of keeping track of the number of larvae that have died. A lot could have died in this process, not really sure. 

However, I definitely think that raising cactus long horns using pieces of cactus is not the best for them. It definitely would be better if you had a really big tank that had a nice potted cactus and they could just stay in there their entire life. 

 
The surviving larvae of mine is getting pretty big now (there were two originally, but for some reason one of them left the pad and died), I haven’t had any problems with transferring them, and I’ve done it... three times? Not sure, but whenever their cactus really starts rotting I take them and transfer them.

 
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