Originally Posted by furryscaly

Yeah, ok, so this actually happened almost a month ago, but I haven't had time to edit the photos, plus I'm lazy.

Cheesestain, my female Madagascar hissing cockroach, Gromphadorhina portentosa, gave birth on March 8th! And I just happened to be up late enough to catch it, and just happened to get to a convenient point in my Dane Cook video that I had already seen recently, and just happened to need some more water from my room, and I just happened to glance at the cockroach habitat when I went in there, where I just happened to catch her in the beginning stages of giving birth. The father's name is SpiceyDoritos

MHCs hatch their ootheca (an egg case laid by mantids and roaches) internally, and then release the nymphs afterward. They spill out kind of rice-shaped and then swell to their normal size and shape. You won't eat rice for a month. What I found very interesting is you can actually sex them right from birth. The females are the "tube-shaped" ones, and the males are the wider flat ones. I also found it interesting how they came in waves of lots of females, then lots of males, and so on.

I walk in, see this, and run back for my camera:


They're so cute! That one on top is a female:


They're bigger than you'd think. That's my thumb:


It's cool how they use mom as shelter. This isn't all of them though:

Originally Posted by MRHickey

If I walked into my room and saw that I would run out to get something too.... a phone to call an exterminator. After years of "palmetto bugs" I can't imagine having anything like that as a pet intentionally.

How often do they reproduce out of curiosity?

Originally Posted by nicole

I am traumatized now, lol.