Pet Arthopods

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When I was around 10 I would keep praying mantises as pets.

I wouldn't mind having a pet beetle of sorts.

We are exceedingly fortunate to live near a trailhead so much of our arthropod encounters are catch & release. It's actually been a wonderful way to learn about our local ecosystem (of which arthropods play a *huge* part).

As pets though we have a few adult Peppered Roaches, a colony of perhaps 50-75 wood lice (ie roly-poly bugs) of two sub-species, a giant millipede or two (haven't seen one for a few months, they live in the bottom of the louse aquarium)...I think that's about it right now. Oh, and about 500 feeder crickets & a few feeder Dubia nymphs for the lizard.

We'll occasionally have temporary visitors that stay at Hotel Edenthiel long enough to get a few good meals before we release them again; mostly praying mantises, spiders, millipedes (including the amazing Bay Area bio-luminescent ones)... jumping bristletails (which are so cool b/c they were the among the earliest and haven't evolved since).

Some animals do pretty strange stuff. Or at least it looks strange to us, but to them it's normal. Like the other day I read about the Darwin frog, where the male swallows up the female's eggs and carries the live tadpoles around in his vocal sac. When they grow into baby frogs they jump out of his mouth one at a time, and live on their own. It's kind of gross, but that is one dedicated father.

Frogs are not arthropods (ie they don't have exoskeletons); they are amphibians.

That said (veering even further OT for a moment), you are so right about unusual, especially amphibs. There are also frogs (T. robustus) that have Wolverine-like bony claws that break bones & push through their skin, and others (Suriname toad) whose eggs incubate in their skin; when they are old enough they burst out (ugh, gross). Oh, and many fish will change sex as needed for the survival of the species, as do water fleas. Many Pacific gecko species are 100% female and reproduce via parthenogenesis. And so on...

But back to arthropods!

One that has a special place in our family's life is the Crane Fly. When they get in the house we are always sure to let them out & once inadvertently cared for a larvae until it hatched from the moss we had in a terrarium!

But my favorite arthropod pets would have to be the pair of trilobites I used to own.

They looked like a cute pair of overgrown wood lice four inches long. Cool as heck.

Part of what made them cool was knowing that they were between a quarter of billion, and half of a billion years old, and predated the oldest dinosaur!

Okay. They werent actually "pets". They were fossils made of yellowish sandstone I bought at a funky curiosity shop in Province Town on Cape Cod. I would display them on the living room coffee table, and kinda thought of them as pets.

Don't have them anymore unfortunately.

I ♡ Trilobites! They and dragonflies are my favored tokens/symbols. They're depicted in art in our house, fossils on the bookcase...I even used them to decorate my steampunk Halloween costume as a sort of crest or house symbol. My mother in law even brought a few tiny specimens back for us when she went hunting for them in Utah a few years back.



(Walking trilobite image from http://www.trilobites.info/guidestart.htm

My beautiful arthropod thread! What have you people done?! FROGS ARE NOT ARTHROPODS!

I'm just kidding. Nobody panic.
I don't have any trilobites, but my garden does have a healthy amount of isopods running around in it.

Ah, Crane Flies. There's this issue I have with them actually, it's simply that they're one of the three critters that all get referred to by the name "Daddy Long-legs" depending on where you are. Cellar Spiders and Harvestmen are the other two. You never really know which of the three is being spoken about when someone refers to that nickname.

I've never heard that name before - are 'Cellar Spiders' the same as Pholcidae?

Yep, those are the ones.

Sabreclaw, how difficult to keep are the stick / leaf insects that live in your house? Or the scorpions, for that matter - I assume those are the non-poisonous varieties?

Oh - two more my daughter cannot stop herself from holding and going all goo-goo over if she encounters them, the way some kids are with, I dunno, baby bunnies or something, are below. She's extremely sensory sensitive and somehow the grippier the arthropod, the better. Sort of like deep pressure vs light touch (which would be analogous to a clawless furry critter, I suppose).



and

I don't know quite how caring for spiny leaf insects goes as that's taken care of by others. From my understanding it's not difficult though - just the daily misting to keep humidity up and occasional replacing of eucalyptus leaves, plus a once in a blue moon cleaning out of the enclosure. They do fine in a tank, but a mesh is preferable since they really like to climb. They're also great to handle so long as you're gentle, since they're totally docile and very slow. If you've got something for them to hang off of you can even keep them out of the enclosure with you for quite a while without them wandering off.

As for the scorpions, it ultimately depends on what type. The ones I've had have all been simple to deal with, but there can be a few things to remember. One thing to keep in mind with arachnids in general is that they are often very, very fast. For this reason handling is not recommended for the inexperienced there's the risk of a scorpion bolting and injuring itself or escaping.

All scorpions are venomous. Every single one. The important thing is that most are not dangerous to the average human. However, there is always the chance that someone has an allergic reaction to a particular scorpion sting. Some of the stings can also be quite painful, so there's that to take into account.

My mother recently discovered, and has become quite fond of the Australian Leaf Insect. Can't say I disagree with her, those are pretty neat bugs. Phasmids, like stick insects and the spiny leaf insects we already own.

I'm sorry for mentioning frogs. It's just that this thread made me think of all creatures that aren't the typical furry-and-cuddly variety that most people like. I just really like frogs. And toads and newts and salamanders. Can't see myself ever owning a scorpion or a cockroach, to be honest.

Oh, amphibians have a special status in our house, too. Especially these, which can be found on the front patio in early spring. We have a colony of them living under a large Japanese Maple half-barrel; moving it is a half day job due to the salamander relocation / temporary housing / fattening up / return operation. We must have frogs & toads as we can hear them at night, but I've yet to see a single one.



I think this thread was intended only for things with exoskeletons, though. Wouldn't hurt to start a new one, "favorite non-fuzzy animals"!

My brother and I once had a pet lobster. One of those miniature freshwater lobsters or crayfish or whatever you might call them. We had her for a few years. It must have been a female because one time she had eggs, but they wouldn't hatch without a male to fertilize them, obviously. During her life she she molted several times, but we never saw her do it so it must have been very late at night, we'd just find her empty shell in the tank.