Get undressed, for success: Spiny Leaf Insect shedding her skin
I’ve been waiting for this moment but no-one told me how stressful it was going to be!
Look, I want to preface this by saying we’re still in lockdown so don’t judge our boring Monday night but I’d be lying if I suggested our other Mondays were any different 🤣 So we were sitting trying to decide what our entertainment for the night was going to be: Battlestar Galactica or The Terror. It’s a hard decision. Anyway. Now we don’t do things by halves, so we have this huge glass and mesh enclosure for the girls, our two Spiny Leaf Insects, right smack in the middle of the room, on our coffee table. Subtle decor and all that.
So to see each other you kind of have to look through the enclosure, around the various leaves that are in there to provide Fleur and Petal with food and shelter. I had planned to talk AT matt about why one show is better than the other but instead something caught my eye and I kind of pointed frantically and repeatedly at the roof of their house, screaming, “It’s happening!” And happening it was: the white ghost of Fleur’s old exoskeleton hung from the mesh roof and by the time I spotted her, she was hanging upside down, her new skin, a deep orangey brown, most of her body undressed, her body arched and she was slowly freeing her legs.
I’ve watched loads of Cicadas shedding and I’m always awe struck at the sight but seeing an animal that you’ve grown to love performing a task that is both completely natural but also fraught with potential issues is so damn stressful. And as this was our first Spiny Leaf Insect moult (the females moult 6 times and the males 5 to get to maturity) we spent a fair bit of time googling and asking for advice online, trying to work out if things were progressing normally. The first thing I read said the entire process can be over in 10 minutes! Yeah, nah.
I had noticed her quite far through the moulting process at 8:20PM and by 8:40PM all of her legs were out with the end of her abdomen still in her old skin. This was clearly going to take much longer than 10 minutes. At this point I was pretty much losing my mind. Part of the issue with moulting is that these insects need a decent amount of humidity to assist the process. If the humidity is too low, they can start to harden before they have fully gotten out of their shed. This can be bad news.
I noticed that she had also lost part of her front left leg during this time – this is fairly common and can again be caused by lower humidity and will regrow if your insect has a few more moults before reaching adulthood. It wasn’t until 9PM that the her entire abdomen was freed and she swung herself up and onto her old exoskeleton. It really blows my mind that the old, empty skin, hooked onto the roof (or a branch) can support the entire body weight of this now much bigger animal!!! Incredible! At this point I felt much more relieved but the process was far from over and we watched half in awe and half in disgust as she began to eat that old skin and not only the old skin but the first piece she honed in was the portion of front leg that had not made it out of the moult in time 😳 Gross, Fleur!
We went to bed at 11PM to leave her munching in peace. I’m a perpetual door checker at the best of times, circling back, my hand twisting the handle one, two, three times, just in case and I can now add in that I’m also a perpetual moulting Spiny Leaf Insect checker too! I must have gone back into the lounge room five or so times, flicking on the light and leaning down, face so close to the glass that it fogged up, breathing nervously at Fleur as she just hung there, eating her old self.
I was told it could take up to 48 hours to fully harden and to just leave her do her thang. I’m a control freak. This part I found the most difficult, just watching her hanging in the same spot over days, not eating or drinking. I ended up adding some freshly washed wattle next to her in case she was hungry or thirsty. I did, during that process, accidentally whack her super hard with those leaves, so yeah, consider me now the type of gal who will leave the spinies to do what they need to do, when they need to do it!
It was about 36 hours later, around 2ish on the Wednesday that she started to begin swaying. She made her way across the roof of the enclosure, managing with her new set of legs, stretching them out and finally moving down the glass wall and onto the leaves where she proceeded to eat and eat and eat. Finally!
All in all it was a bloody amazing thing to watch but those 36 hours were HARD – for me that is, Fleur handled it like the champ that she is. I don’t think my heart rate dropped until she started eating something other than herself 🤣. Sure it was like a scene out of Alien and as they say you’ll always remember your first but let me tell you, I’m over here excitedly waiting for Petal to start undressing. I’ll be an old hand at this in no time! 🙌
Moulting Spiny Leaf Insect – Northern Illawarra
