These fascinating creatures are giant HISSING COCKROACHES, from the island of Madagascar.  They live in warm tropical rainforests, where they do an important job by eating rotting fruit and other waste on the forest floor.  Some people do not like cockroaches which is a shame, as these ones are very nice animals which can be handled very easily as they do not bite.

Male hissing cockroaches have a pair of pyramid-shaped bumps on their heads which are their 'horns' and which are used to fight each other!  The picture below shows the horns quite clearly, as well as their eyes which are the two black circles just above the base of the antennae.  You can also see that their antennae are quite hairy, these are sensitive hairs which they rely on to 'feel' their way around their environment as, despite having eyes, their vision is not very good.

This picture shows a female hissing cockroach and as you can see there is no evidence of large horns here, only small raised bumps where a male's horns would usually be.

Hissing cockroaches, like many of my other animals, have an external skeleton (or exoskeleton) which they have to moult regularly (a bit like shedding their skin) in order to grow.  When a cockroach finishes moulting it is very soft and white in colour.  The pictures below show a cockroach coming out of its old exoskeleton and just how white it is soon after it has emerged from it.

After moulting, the exoskeleton gradually hardens and darkens until a number of hours later when it is back to its normal colour again.  During this process the exoskeleton of a hissing cockroach can look very beautiful, as shown in this picture below:

Hissing cockroaches are unusual amongst the insects in my collection as they give birth to live babies rather than laying eggs.  When females are pregnant, or gravid, they become quite heavily swollen due to the mass of babies growing inside their abdomens.  The one pictured below is not yet as swollen as they can become, but you can still clearly see the large size of the abdomen!

When they are first born the cockroach babies (known as nymphs) are very soft and white, just like they are when they moult, and they gradually harden up and become darker in colour.  A female can have between 20 and 35 babies at once! 

During my time keeping these fantastic animals I have had well over a thousand babies born and always maintain a large collection of them of all sizes, the pictures below representing just a very small selection of my group!