Shelford's Cockroach S1, Female, profile | Shelford's Cockroach S3, Female, Body | |||||
Animals Plants Info |
| Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||||||||||||
| Order: | Cockroaches (Blattodea) | |||||||||||||
| Family: | Cockroach (Blattidae) iNaturalist Observation | |||||||||||||
| Species: | Shelford's Cockroach (Robshelfordia sp)| This Photo: | 🔍S3, Female, profile🔎 | Thank you Matthew Connors (Matthew_Connors) for identifying and Jiří Hromádka (Sabutaro) for confirming the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere ~6.5 to ~10mm long females. Tentative id. Males are fully winged. We thought it was Temnelytra sp; perhaps T. truncata Notice how unusually hairy these are for cockroaches. Plus the strange white bulbous cercii. When we asked Matthew about the white bulbous cercii he said "It's a secretion of sticky stuff at the back of the roach that makes it more difficult for predators to attack the rear end. It's especially pronounced in some species where it covers the entire end of the abdomen (e.g. Austrostylopyga immunda)"
| |||||||||||