Eggs Blue Death Feigning Beetles

It has been my distinct pleasure to be a resource for classrooms across the USA, pet bug hobbyists, museums and zoos as well as scientists including Dr. Dean Rider who sequenced the genome of the species. Asbolus verrucosus is a true pleasure to observe and they make great pets because they are easy to care for, long-lived and very active in the tank. They are sometimes called ghost beetles by people in Yuma, AZ and thereabouts. Less commonly they are incorrectly called ironclads, but they are not in the family Zoopheridae despite being similarly hard-bodied. Just yesterday, somebody on instagram told me he personally witnessed one being run over by a care and it survived, intact! This is the first in a series I will be uploading about the species. In this video you see recently deposited eggs on the surface of the substrate. I mention my inspiration for making the video as Rus from the Aquarimax channel here on Instagram. His progress in documenting this species has motivated me to document the life cycle too. While I have had them for a decade, I have never made an attempt to reproduce them because it was long thought to be nearly impossible. But in 2018, the Cincinnati Zoo managed to reproduce them through the life cycle. This video reflects the tendency of the species to simply deposit eggs on the surface of the substrate. In my next video I will specifically document the actually breeding behaviors that precede deposition of the egg you see in this video. Perhaps, through the efforts of dedicated breeders and the sheer number of people keeping this species, the hobby can begin to offer captive-bred specimens of this nearly perfect "pet" bug in the future! Thanks to bug guy Andrew Barell from andrewbarell.com for his help with editing and animations! I appreciate your hitting the like button, and comments and questions!