ONH

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    1 - Nisquallia olympica egg case laid in terrarium. Some individual eggs are visible, the orange ovoids.

    10/13/2009.

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    2 - Three Nisquallia olympica egg cases laid in terrarium..

    10/15/2009

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    3 - Nisquallia olympica egg case laid against the glass wall of a terrarium.

    10/15/2009

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    4 - Three Nisquallia olympica egg cases laid in a terrarium. Individual eggs indicated by arrows.

    10/15/2009

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    5 - Nisquallia olympica egg in a case laid in a terrarium. The length of a single egg is indicated by the scale.

    10/16/2009

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    6 - The end of an egg case laid in a terrarium.

    10/13/2009

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    7 - Nisquallia olympica egg case. The ends of three individual eggs are visible.

    06/25/2014 Upper Wolf Creek Trail, Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington

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    8 - Nisquallia olympica egg case, with several hatched eggs visible.

    06/25/2014 Upper Wolf Creek Trail, Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington

During October 2009, we kept two female and two male Nisquallia olympica in a small terrarium. We arranged sand and rock chips from a location along the Obstruction Point road in the bottom, and supplied them with water in a small dish, and food.

Within hours, I observed one female ovipositing and both females mating with both males. Mating appeared to last more than an hour, not counting mate guarding (see Mating in the Nisquallia menu). We observed both males and females eating salad leaves, and nibbling on catfood kibbles and bits of fresh apple.

After about a week we emptied all the sand and rock chips from the terrarium to look for eggs.

We found several egg cases. It’s possible that we could have scooped egg cases up with the sand in the field, and therefore obtained egg cases of a different species. But all three cases looked similar and individual eggs looked identical.

Slides 7 and 8 show egg cases found in the field in 2014. These egg cases were associated with our observation of hatching grasshoppers. (See Emergence in menu.)