Who let the Centipede out the bag
Hi Guys Mike here,
We have had a great week here at BugWorld we had the privilege of holding a 3 day conference called TIWG, this stands for Terrestrial Invertebrate Working Group. We are very lucky to have held this especially with in our first 6 months of opening. We discussed all matters to do with Bugs with invertebrate keepers from around the country.
Some of our colleagues from another Zoo brought up some scorpions for us to identify. These turned out to be a slender bark scorpion another little male to add to our growing collection of this species we now have three boys, all imported beasties. The second scorpion turned out to be a female yellow tailed scorpion. We are over the moon with this little girl as those of you who have been to visit us will know we display this species.
The most common way of sexing scorpions is to compare the pectines these are comb like structures on the underside of the scorpion’s body and the scorpions use them as a sensory organ, in the male scorpion they are normally longer and thinner. Also males will normally have thinner bodies. Always exceptions to the rule though guys.
Jeff and Jenny had an exciting job of trying to take photographs of the underside of our Giant centipede, not the friendliest of our insects. The reason for this was for us to sex it. We have had to send the pictures to a centipede expert as centipedes are notoriously difficult to sex. We will let you know the outcome. 
Our little mantises are not so little now we have 2 of the 13 now mature into boys. So we are on the lookout for a non related girl so we can try and breed them. Although not Bug related we did get a phone call about a gecko which had been imported from Thailand which we went to collect lucky for us we had a room full of zoo keepers who could take it to more suitable surroundings and where it couldn’t eye up any of our bugs.
That’s all for this week guys.
Take care
Mike