Word of the day: blatticulturist
For the Love of Cockroaches: Husbandry, Biology, and History of Pet and Feeder Blattodea
Hardcover – 18 Sep 2017
by Orin McMonigle (Author), Jonathan Lai (Foreword), Louis M. Roth (Contributor)
£44.95
The amazing diversity of color and form in cockroaches around the world has rarely been displayed to the average animal enthusiast. Several well known species have been bred for decades as feeder insects for reptiles and other exotic pets, but there has only been a handful of dedicated blatticulturists keeping and breeding a wider range of species for sheer enjoyment. As exotic cockroaches receive more attention, more and more people are trying their hand at them, but with very little attention given to these creatures in the popular literature. That changes now, as Orin McMonigle shares his enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge in this new book, For the Love of Cockroaches. Orin provides experienced instruction for proper housing, feeding, and breeding cockroach species, followed by details on the many species available to enthusiasts (illustrated in full color). At 350 pages, this is the definitive cockroach manual for anyone branching out into these fascinating insects.
Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon.com
Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars 1 reviews
Beautiful book and everything you need to know to keep cockroaches successfully
14 August 2016 – Published on Amazon.com
In my opinion, this is Orin McMonigles best book yet! It is enjoyable to read and look through and covers the basics of cockroach biology and their history with humankind. Most important, this book contains extensive information on keeping cockroaches as pets or as feeders for other pets — although if you start off keeping them only as feeders, I’ll bet these wonderful creatures will win you over into keeping them for their own sake as well. 😉 I have found the extensive species-specific information very interesting and helpful and am grateful that the author took the time to include photos of each species, as well as the many other beautiful photos throughout the book.
Highly recommended!
11 people found this helpful.
I was only looking for an automatic chicken feeder.
January 8, 2019 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 18
Wounded warrior
No, we’re not starting 2019 off with an injury. Jack got hurt before Christmas and is very much on the mend now, thenkyewverymuch.
Something clamped down on his back leg a couple of days before Christmas. I won’t describe the wound; it was gross. The vet thought a cat or dog, but it seems an awfully big hole for a cat and there are no strange dogs in our neighborhood.
Anyway, they wanted to perform surgery on him on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t allow it. If something were to go wrong, there would be no-one to turn to for two days. Last time they put him under, he woke up trippin’.(I was going to say trippin’ balls, but that seems kind of a mean way to describe a neutering).
We took him in as soon as the office was back open, and they conceded that he was healing nicely and probably wouldn’t need the surgery after all. At any rate, I’ve spent an otherwise delightful Christmas poking antibiotics down the cat.
Happy new year, y’all. If you didn’t see London’s fireworks, they were particularly good this time. Despite attempts to politicize them by making the London Eye look like the EU flag.
Oh, you want your moment of schadenfreude? Before the fireworks, the announcer called it the “Coca Cola London Eye.”
Yup.
January 1, 2019 — 9:05 pm
Comments: 21
Shiiiiny…
This came across my Facebook this evening from a photomicrography group I belong to. Mixed diatoms from the Gulf of Thailand at 20x magnification.
Diatoms, if high school biology seems a long, long time ago, are microalgae that live mostly in water. Actually, these are dead diatom skeletons, which are made of silicon. Diatoms make 20% of the world’s oxygen and comprise almost half the organic stuff in the ocean. Also, they’re purty.
I have now done everything I intend to do in aid of that Christmas thing — which mostly involved tidying the kitchen this evening. Tomorrow, I have an hour’s work, an hour’s coffee with my colleagues and then I’m off until January 3.
But I’ll be here if you’re looking for me.
December 20, 2018 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 10
Fixed.
He probably didn’t think he needed fixing.
It was a little scary for a while. This morning, they said to expect to hear from them at 1:30. We didn’t. When we called, they said he was fine…and we could come at 5:30, and then they kept us waiting.
I suspect he didn’t come out of the anesthesia as fast as expected. When we finally saw the vet, she said something like, “the important thing is that he’s awake now.”
After Jack had his op, he was out of his head for twelve hours. Climbing the walls, crying to get out. It was awful. If they were waiting for Booboo to sober up a little, I’m all for it.
Anyway, he was wobbly for an hour, but he’s fine now. Except his pupils are the size of dinner plates and he stinks of disinfectant. Oh, and…no balls.
December 4, 2018 — 9:29 pm
Comments: 12
Lossy
In the prior thread, Wolfus asked if “lossy” was a Britishism. It ain’t. And because I’m desperate for stuff to post about at the moment, I shall explain what it is.
“Generation loss” is a thing in graphic arts. It means that every time you make a copy of something — every time it goes down a generation — it loses quality. If you have an illustration, and you photograph it, and then you do a color separation, and then you print it in a magazine…every stage of that process involves a degradation of the original.
Then if you make a photocopy of the magazine article and digitize it to put in your slide presentation…don’t laugh. I often deal with images that are many generations removed from the original.
That’s generation loss; the term “lossy” is used specifically for digital file formats.
The Targa tiff file — which you may never have run across — was a common early digital file format that purported to be lossless. In theory, you could make a tif file of a tif file and every one was as good as the original. Downside: they were huge.
Lots of file formats have used all sorts of clever algorithms to try to squeeze file size without losing quality.
The jpg file came to rule them all because it’s very, very good at the trade off…it can look very good, or it can compress very small, or it can be a compromise, depending on what you ask it to do. That’s what it’s asking when a graphics program gives you a jpg quality slider.
The image at right is a jpg compressed at a quality of about 70% (100% means very little loss, very little compression) and it’s about 36K on the disk. The inset is compressed at around 10% (lots of loss, lots of compression) and is about 7K.
Notice the characteristic big square blocks that are the hallmark of jpg compression. I bet you’ve seen that before! Different lossy formats are ugly in different ways and when I get my Photoshop back, I can show you.
That’s not my big white rooster, by the way. That’s my old lavender hen Violence (may she rest in peace). I’ve had three lavender chickens, and they’ve all hated me.
November 28, 2018 — 9:32 pm
Comments: 7
Don’t rub it in
Somebody sent me this. It comes from our popular classical station, Classic FM, via a Tumblr called Music Theory. I think I have all that right. I like to attribute where I can.
Those are Polands. I have whined before about how much I want one. I got some ‘fertile’ eggs that weren’t this Spring, supposedly including at least one Poland.
Note, at right, they have a knob on their skulls that those stupid feathers sprout out of. So even when they’re tiny fluffy chicks, they have ridiculous hairdos.
The roosters grow up to look like potted ferns and the hens have fluffy afros. I know owners who have to trim around their eyes or tie their headfeathers into hipster buns so the poor birds can see to walk around.
Oops! I hit premature PUBLISH. Well, that’s all there is to say about that, I guess.
November 8, 2018 — 4:53 pm
Comments: 8
Weasel TV
I hate to admit how much time I’ve spent watching this image. I mean, not this image, the live version. The surveillance cam in the chicken house.
It was originally trained on a hen sitting on fertile eggs nest box. Two months, night after night, I watched that image hoping to see a newly hatched chick poke its head out.
As it happens, the first batch of eggs were all total duds. The second batch was half duds. That’s why I spent two months watching a broody hen when the gestation period is around twenty days.
Anyway, newly hatched chicks don’t poke their heads out. They don’t come out from under mama for days and days, so I discovered any hatchlings by lifting her up and peering into the nest, long before I saw a chick on cam.
I have hours and hours and hours and hours of recorded chicken cam. I actually bought a backup hard drive to store it all. Wanna see?
November 7, 2018 — 10:14 pm
Comments: 5
Gonna give my boys a complex
Uncle B took this on his cellphone. Bigass male pheasant stalking around eating the bits messy chickens leave behind. (Sure and you want to see this pretty boy in color). I wasn’t home so my flock was in the cage, looking stunned.
He’s about three times the size of one of my chooks.
Uncle B asked if we had pheasants in the States and I honestly didn’t know. Wikipedia says they’re everywhere, but they’re only native to Asia.
Any pheasants where you are?
November 1, 2018 — 8:57 pm
Comments: 24
My other boys
Roosters. I swore I’d never have one. I promised the neighbors.
But this year I got it in my head to put some fertile eggs under a broody, knowing roosters were a possible outcome. And how.
The final result: twelve ‘fertile’ eggs resulting in three live chicks. Two of whom are cockerels.
The first six were duds. Then I got four more in a close-to-hatching state, of which only two hatched. I may have damaged the other two somehow getting them home, for which I feel rotten. So I got two more newly hatched from the lady I’d bought the eggs from, from the same clutch of eggs.
What I’m going to do with these two handsome boys, I do not know. It all depends on how they act when the testosterone takes hold.
We’ve started to hear faint and feeble cock-a-doodle-doos of a morning.
September 26, 2018 — 8:31 pm
Comments: 11
Brothers from a different mother
Can I get a d’awwwww? I took this picture a couple of minutes ago, and it’s a first.
We coaxed Jack into the same room as the baby, finally, about a month ago.
This was all made easier because Jack is an absolute pig and kitten food is fatty and delicious. We’ve tried to keep him off the food bowl, but he’s a crafty boy. And visibly fatter.
Then came the playfighting. Poor Jack. Kitten ran him ragged. But, hey — kitten food.
This started as a playfight and turned into a mutual nap. It’s adorbs.
Charlotte is at the other end of the house.
September 24, 2018 — 9:12 pm
Comments: 13