Most of the giant millipedes available are still wild caught I believe. Does anyone here keep and breed successfully any of the large species?
Millipedes
- Thread starter Zoovolunteer
- Start date
-
- Tags
- invertebrates millipede
I've been working with Archispirostreptus gigas for several years, and we've had one clutch of young (7-8) so far. Most moved away, but at least one is still alive and well. Breeding is not the main difficulty, but rearing the young definately is.
Most of them are still wild-caught, but captive-bred tropical millipedes are not impossible to obtain. Unfortunately, it considers only a handfull of species, like the aformented A. gigas, which is by far the most commonly bred species. For almost any other species (Centrobolus, Epibolus, Spirostreptus and your occasional Sechelleptus and Anadenobolus) you need to know where to look, have a little luck and be willing to spend a good amount of money.
Most of them are still wild-caught, but captive-bred tropical millipedes are not impossible to obtain. Unfortunately, it considers only a handfull of species, like the aformented A. gigas, which is by far the most commonly bred species. For almost any other species (Centrobolus, Epibolus, Spirostreptus and your occasional Sechelleptus and Anadenobolus) you need to know where to look, have a little luck and be willing to spend a good amount of money.
I've bred a number of species of millipedes over the last 15 or so years and the one thing I've found all of them to have in common is that they seem to do much better the less disturbance you put them through; I used to keep a few species in under-bed storage boxes (~3ft x 2ft x 1ft) and I just filled it with rotting leaf litter and white wood and let them get on with it, with some additional foodstuff. Six months after they went in there was usually a good slack handful of young which developed well, although only if I left them well alone!
The majority, as Mr. Zootycoon states, are still WC but I think that this isn't simply down to the difficulty of rearing them (with some species it is however), but more that it's much easier and cheaper to import animals that can be sold/displayed almost straight away, rather than investing a lot of time and effort into rearing a population; I'd rather do the latter personally.. Maybe I'm just jaded about the pet trade though...
The majority, as Mr. Zootycoon states, are still WC but I think that this isn't simply down to the difficulty of rearing them (with some species it is however), but more that it's much easier and cheaper to import animals that can be sold/displayed almost straight away, rather than investing a lot of time and effort into rearing a population; I'd rather do the latter personally.. Maybe I'm just jaded about the pet trade though...
I recently added a number Anadenobolus monilicornis to my own collection (half of which I have on breeding loan). I must say we found it quite difficult to find captive bred ones (we particularly wanted captive bred millipedes). We ended up bringing them in from the UK.
The observation about disturbance doesn't surprise me. I've seen it with a whole range of species, from mongooses to owls. It is one of the primary reasons for many zoos to have animals behind the scenes.
I love that species, so stunning. I found with them they really appreciate a lot of rotten oak wood; when I bred them several years ago I didn't even put supplemental food in, just left them with wood and leaf litter and I had several clutches of offspring