My resolution is to build a time machine.  Not so much for travel, just a machine that manufactures more hours each day. 

I shall fail, but isn’t that what new years resolutions are about?

@foggygoofball my resolution is getting my domesticated Arvicanthis niloticus into the scientific world. Their character if finnaly good enough to be petted (they are horrible monsters, biting very agressively! At least they where years ago…) 

Also fnnaly getting a sixpack… the last bit of fat is always the hardest….

And lastly promoting the shit out of phantasia! 

@genesis How long have you been breeding them?  I’m just curious, since I live on an entirely different continent, they are considered an invasive species here.  I’ve tried to import several species internationally and Customs here never once answered an email I sent, though they did send me a letter to my physical mailbox about a violation when I tried to import a breeding pair of Cherax tenuimanus.  

I was prepared to argue my case but the bastards had them destroyed.  It turns out that even though they don’t answer emails, they are present and doing their jobs. 

That was long ago and another life, though I’d like to try again some day.

@foggygoofball  i got them half way domesticated, around the end of the lockdowns but had breeding difficulties at the beginnong, because i like it colder than they do. Heat lamps solved it. A friend of mine got them as snake food and i convinced him to feed the biting assholes first (did need suprisingly little convincing…) and he gave me my starting breeding pair. 

And this is the second time i domesticated something. The first time where normal rats, had a extremly bad biting starting point where the babys would bite me 2 weeks old. Noatter how much i petted them. But unlike a normal response (getva better breeding animal) i opted for the hard way and selected for a good character with myinbreeding line. Needed 5 generations (50-200 babys per generation) for an normal character. Added a few geberations and i got some extremly cuddly babys, never saw a human and instandly loved them.

Also if you want to get sone exotic animals (specially those who breed fast) try talking with a zoo. If it won’t be for the second lockdown, i would have a special pig species instead of ducks. Already talked thebthe local zoo and made plans for the next piglets. My uncle bought aquarium fish multiple times from that zoo. 

Oh and the exotic ducks i purchase (AMD RELEASE THEMSELF INTO THE WILD!!! THEY SHOULD STAY… NOT FLY AWAY!!!) are from breeders all around germany, was on the road for 24h for my smew

And about your lobster relative, fry of them is small enough to live in a 100ml bottle or smaller? Why don’t you make hollydays somewhere nice…

As far as breeding goes I am focused on another species right now, Vespula pensylvanica.

I’m not nearly brave enough to try and smuggle animals internationally. Also, I can’t afford the flight and my anxiety would probably kill me being stuck in an aircraft with so many strangers for 18+ hours.

I did however find a breeder in the southern USA.  But I’m not going over that border for the foreseeable future, I’m not brown skinned, but the possibility of going and being detained is too much trouble.

@foggygoofball yeahif you are detected, you need to channel your inner caren, get scared of those animals withhisterya and actas if this is the fault of thatdirty hotel that had those nasty critters everywhere! Also during peak vacation time when everyone is overworked and stressed.

also does the breeding differ becaue of the h-ploid males? Recessive traits hiding most be very easy to detect.

The breeding is still fairly unknown at this point, is going to be a slow and difficult process.  Very little research has been done on captive breeding.  Mostly from what I have seen and read, there is both natural inbreeding within the hive and once a potential foundress leaves the hive she can be fertilized by multiple males, then throughout the creation of eggs, the Queen somehow is able to select whether or not to fertilize the eggs. 

So essentially at any point there could be up to five or six fathers of any of the particular wasps in the colony.  This makes the actual control of the breeding rather difficult, especially when you consider that they reproduce on a yearly cycle.

If I really want to control things then I need to clip their wings and find a safe way to tag them, checking regularly and removing any males that arise.  This year is mostly a proof of concept, and I’m going to develop some tools that I can 3d print for handling and anesthetizing them safely.

After the summer though, I’m going to need to figure out how to keep the dormant queens alive through the winter.  People have not had a lot of success from what I’ve read so far.

@foggygoofball  i would recomend massproducing queens for the proof of concept. 

Do they still breed if they are in captivity and not released?

Is a single male enough?

Do larvea react to bee gelee royale also with a queen metanorphosis?

Can hybrids with other species be made?

Is artifical insemination an option? (This needs the most queens…)

Actually, yes artificial insemination is being used in wasp farming in Asia.  So long as I can capture a few queens in the spring time, I should actually be able to experiment with some hybridization.  

Rather then royal jelly, the Queen makes a nest and signals with pheromones that she is in charge.  If she dies or is removed, then the other females will spontaneously start to mature, then they will lay unfertilized eggs which will all hatch into males, eventually the potential Queens will breed with the new males in the nest and then new Queens will be born in the Autumn from fertilized eggs so long as the colony survives.

The real challenge with this species is that they build a covered nest, so it is difficult to monitor what is happening within in terms of inbreeding.  

In the last few days I’ve read a bunch of interesting research papers out of China, they mostly focus on the Asian giant hornet but there are cases of vespula vulgaris being bred for medicinal uses as well. 

Most hobbyists on the English-speaking forms are just collecting paper wasps which live on an open comb and it makes it much easier to monitor behavior, but the Chinese are figuring out how to farm them industrially.  

@foggygoofball wait, the workers can lay eggs for the males? 

That’s amazing, that means you can screen the compleate hive for an interesting worker and use the worker for production of males for breeding.

Since the males are h-ployd, you don’t need to worry about negative recessive genes, since they filter themself out. 

And if you trow in a mutagen at a queen, you increased Our likelyhood for interesting workers for male egg production! 

Also if you breed for a peacefull character, you just need a single one that os not agressive even when banana smell is around and you can produce the males for peacefull next generation!

The thing is the spontaneous development of ovaries in workers has been documented in both vespula and polistes wasps however with wasps in the Vespula genus it is sporadic and unreliable.  We do have polistes here, but they are far less common in the city, which is where I reside.

The only reliable way to generate fully reproductive females is through feeding a concentrated high protein diet to the larva.  But I feel like if I can get several colonies established I might be able to select for that trait.

There’s also been some good research find into artificially introduced hormones, so that’s where my brain is today.

@foggygoofball hormones are suprisingly easy to get of you think outside tge box and make your own experiments. However i have little knowledge about insect hormones…

Is the hormon known that causes the transformation?

As it turns out, there has been very little experimentation on the reproductive success of fertility induced workers, they are documented as occurring naturally, and I found one really good paper detailing experiments done with several different hormones and hormone blockers.  

I made a technical document with the help of an AI tool, and I’ve made revisions to maintain accuracy.  If you’re curious, the final chapter of the manual goes into experimental techniques for inducing fertility. 

Probably no one is that interested, but I’m posting it on the biology forum anyway.

Posted by: @foggygoofball

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I’m not brown skinned, but the possibility of going and being detained is too much trouble.

nah mate you’ll be fine. don’t let silly little fears get in the way of your dreams.