I’ve been checking for the last couple of weeks for evidence of baby super worms in the Morio Beetle enclosure, with the intention of moving the beetles to a fresh enclosure to allow the worms to grow up in relative peace. This weekend marked the siting of the first tiny super worm, so the move was made. A jar of grits was raided as the enclosure’s substrate and I made a note to stock back up on corn meal and rolled oats for future needs for these critters and the mealworms. One instruction I’ve seen for breeding supers is to move the adult beetles to a new enclosure every 2 weeks, which gives them plenty of time to lay eggs while moving them to other substrates before the being to hatch out, but as I don’t think my needs will be urgent enough to require fresh tubs of Super worms every other week, I’m hoping that I can be more lax with this. As Morio beetles can live to up to 1 year, such a move every other week would require ~25 more tupperwares to hold the generations of maturing worms every year.
The baby worms look unsurprisingly like baby mealworms– to this day I can’t tell the two apart visually other than by the differences in their size, and perhaps behavior. Every experience I’ve had with mealworms, they have been sluggish to the point of wondering if they were alive or not. Much of this is from my ignorant “straight from the fridge” childhood experiences of feeding pet anoles and house geckos as a kid. My current mealworms came similarly from a fridge in the pet store, and never seemed to get terribly “active,” even after weeks of lounging at room temperatures and being fed choice bits of fruits and vegetables. The earliest beetles were likewise very slow moving and sluggish, but now all beetles are more active and seemingly vigorous. Maybe they’ve perked up during this past 6 weeks or so of care, I’m curious to see if the next generation of mealworms are noticably more active. Superworms always seem to be much more active than mealworms, thrashing violently and trying to pinch anything that picks them up, charging across the surface of an egg crate, and otherwise obviously full of life and vigor. Currently the new mealworms are about 3mm long, while I can find 5-6mm long super worms already, so the Super worms seem to already outpace the mealworms in size even this early on.