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Jonathan's Jungle News
Last updated on Tuesday 20th July 2010
News and important events in the lives of the
animals of Jonathan's
Jungle Roadshow are reported and updated here
from time to time - feel free to check back in the
future to
see what is happening in Jonathan's animal
collection! For more information about any of
the animals featured here, click the
blue
highlighted words in the relevant text.
**
N.B. Some news stories (and their page links)
may refer to animals which I no longer have in my
collection so please check the
Meet the Animals
page for correct & up-to-date information about the
animals in my current collection!
20th
July 2010
It has been another excellent couple of weeks for
new babies! As well as the Peruvian horsehead
grasshopper babies reported below dated 7th July, I
have now had some more fabulous babies hatch!
The first of these belong to
Margaret, my giant
Asian praying mantis:
These very cute little guys
hatched from an egg sac (correctly called an
ootheca) which is a spongy structure which praying
mantises make to lay their eggs inside. In the
pictures below you can clearly see the barrel-like
ootheca along with the many, many babies (nymphs)
which have just emerged from it!
Once they have emerged, the
nymphs hang from silken threads just below the
ootheca to dry out and moult their exoskeleton.
In the picture below you can see lots of empty
moulted 'skins' (exuvia) just towards the bottom of
the picture - once moulted they start charging about
very quickly indeed!
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I have also had more
crested gecko
babies hatch in recent weeks, and as ever
they are absolutely beautiful! I have now
hatched nearly 100 babies of this species since I
started keeping them a few years ago, and they
remain my favourite gecko species I have kept to
date. When you see them as babies like these
newly-hatched ones below it is not hard to see
why!!!
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Finally, as if that wasn't
enough new baby news for one day, I have also had
lots more jungle
nymphs hatch in recent days (which is brilliant)
AND my first nymphs for some time of a species known
only by its scientific name of Haaniella dehaani!!
This species doesn't have
its own page at present (hence the lack of link to
their page within the text above) as I don't
currently have any adults of this species. As
these grow they will feature on a page themselves
but for the moment they are very small!
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7th July
2010 I
have had a very happy hatch of new babies in recent
days as my first ever baby
Peruvian
horsehead grasshoppers have hatched!! The
babies are tiny and extremely cute as you can see,
but boy can they jump! They are very difficult
to photograph as they don't stay still long enough!
You can see how tiny they
are from this picture of one of them on my fingertip
above! For pictures of the amazing adult
animals please click
here!
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23rd
June 2o10
I have today acquired some incredible new animals!
These amazing looking beetles are commonly known as
frog beetles
and they originate in south-east Asian countries
including Thailand.
Frog beetles are
exquisitely beautiful insects as these pictures
show. For this reason sadly they are very
popular as art exhibits, which involves them being
killed, dried and framed before being sold.
The individuals I have acquired would themselves
have been intended for the art market, but I am now
planning to use them to educate people about why
their beauty should be appreciated LIVE not dead!!
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2nd June
2010 I
have acquired many new animals in the last two weeks
and I am delighted with all of them! Firstly I
bought my first new snake of 2010, a rather gorgeous
captive-bred juvenile
Taiwanese
beauty snake:
This species of snake is
also sometimes referred to as the stripe-tailed rat
snake, for obvious reasons as seen below, but I much
prefer the common name of Taiwanese beauty snake
because I think they are so beautiful! This
individual is only about eight months old but it
won't be long before he is much larger, as they are
one of the fastest growing rat snakes in the world!
For more information and
pictures of this lovely snake please click on the
blue highlighted words above the top picture.
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I attended the British
Tarantula Society's (BTS) annual show at the end of
May and whilst I didn't purchase any new spiders I
did buy many other fabulous invertebrates, my
favourites of which have to be a new pair of
tailless whip
scorpions:
Despite their fearsome
appearance whip scorpions really are lovely and not
at all dangerous, being non-venomous unlike true
scorpions.
Whip scorpions are truly
amazing creatures for LOTS of reasons and one of my
favourite types of animals in the world! For
lots more information and pictures of these
remarkable animals please click
here. You
won't regret it!!
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I also acquired a beautiful
new giant Asian
praying mantis, which I took some rather lovely
pictures of in my garden on my return home from the
midlands where the BTS show took place:
This beautiful new animal
is now my new 'Margaret', as any of you who know me
will already know that I always name my giant Asian
praying mantids Margaret to save confusion for
younger children! She is absolutely stunning
and even better in real life!
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My final new purchase from
the BTS show was the largest individual stick insect
I have ever kept in my collection! She is an
adult female of an Australian species known as
Acrophylla
wuelfingi,
sometimes known as the giant walking
stick or Titan stick insect due to their huge size!
She is exceptionally beautiful as you can see below:
She measures 23 cm from the
front of her head to the end of her abdomen, and
when her front legs are outstretched she measures a
massive 34 cm! She really must be seen to be
believed...
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19th May
2010 All
of the baby imperial
scorpions which were born on March 13th 2010
have now moulted for the second time and are looking
fantastic as you can see below!
At this small size the
scorplings are perfectly safe to handle as their
small sting cannot even break the skin. The
venom of imperial scorpions is not dangerous to
humans anyway, even when they are adults, but having
experienced the pain of a sting from a large adult
female a few years ago I don't handle my adults any
more!
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Back on February 22nd 2010
I bought some tiny nymphs of a stick insect species
known only by its scientific name of
Phobaeticus
magnus. This is a species which originates
in north-eastern Thailand and Laos, the females of
which can grow to 30cm in length!! When I
bought them they were only about 3 - 4 cm in length
and looked like this:
The next pictures are of
some of these same nymphs and were taken today, as
you can see they have grown quite a bit!!
Even though they have grown
so much the largest of the female nymphs (in the
first two pictures) is still 'only' about 15 - 16 cm
long, so they still have plenty more growing left to
do! Watch this space for how they are getting
on in the months to come...
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5th May
2010 More
excellent news to report today!
Angelina my
metallic pink toed tarantula has moulted this
week, for the first time since I bought her in
February 2010, and is now looking absolutely
beautiful! The picture below shows her having
just moulted, although it is difficult to make out
what is going on in the picture as she and her
moulted exoskeleton (or exuvium) are both
right inside the thick web retreat that she has
created in her tall vivarium!
Basically Angelina is
mostly to the left of the picture above (with her
head hidden) and her exuvium is partly hidden as she
is on top of it. The parts you can see clearly
are the exuvium's fangs (the sharp black needle-like
things in amongst the red hairs at the bottom of the
picture) and some of the foot pads (the brown
coloured areas towards the top right of the
picture)! It is much easier to see her when
she is nearly out of her web retreat or on my hand
as below, now looking stunningly bluish in colour!
Her exuvium is considerably
duller in colouration compared to her fresh new
colouration as you can see in the picture below.
This means that she has not
been looking at her best at all since I bought her,
as the colour of the exuvium above represents how
she looked when I bought her and I thought that she
was beautiful then! Now that she has a fresh
new exoskeleton I am amazed at just how attractive
she is, and can see much more clearly why this
species is commonly known as the metallic
pink toed tarantula! I hope you like the way
she looks now as much as I do!!
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If you would like to check back on any 'old'
news please use the links below!
News
March - April 2010
News January - February 2010
News from 2009
News from 2008
News from 2007
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