Madagascar Hissing Cockroach (Gromphadorhina sp.)

This is one of the very few insects that can genuinely hiss at you, and it does it in a way almost nothing else in the invertebrate world manages. Most noisy insects rub body parts together. A hissing cockroach forces air out through the breathing pores along its sides, which is how a vertebrate makes sound, not a bug. Hold one in your palm, startle it gently, and you get an audible, unmistakable hiss out of an animal the size of your thumb.

Introduction

Sold as the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, the Madagascan Hisser or simply the hisser, this is a large wingless roach from the forest floors of Madagascar, where it lives in rotting logs and leaf litter and forages at night for fallen fruit. We list ours as Gromphadorhina sp. rather than pinning a species name to it, and that is deliberate: Madagascar has around twenty large hissing roaches, several of them near-identical, and G. portentosa, G. oblongonota and G. picea get muddled routinely across the trade. Rather than print a binomial we cannot stand behind, we sell them under the genus. The care is the same across the group.

Appearance

Big, glossy and genuinely impressive. Adults reach around 5 to 7.5 cm, putting them among the largest cockroaches in the world, with a thick waxy shell in deep mahogany brown through to near black and no wings at all. Males and females are easy to tell apart once you know: males carry pronounced bumps or horns on the pronotum behind the head and have thicker, hairier antennae, while females are smoother-fronted. Those horns are not decoration. Males are territorial and shove at each other with them like miniature cattle, hissing throughout, and the winner is usually the one making the most noise. They will also stand up tall on their legs to look bigger, a display keepers call stilting.

Care

Straightforward, with one thing you cannot skip: they climb glass. The pads and hooks on their feet will take them straight up a smooth wall, so the enclosure needs a genuinely secure lid, and a smear of petroleum jelly around the top few centimetres is cheap insurance. Beyond that they are easy. Keep them warm and reasonably humid, which for most UK homes means a thermostat-controlled heat mat on one side of the enclosure for much of the year. Floor the tank with leaf litter, rotting hardwood and a base of organic topsoil, then pile in cork bark, hollow logs and egg crate, because these are animals that want to be under something. A shallow water dish with damp cotton wool or water crystals keeps them hydrated without drowning nymphs. Our accessories range has the substrate components and botanicals, including flake soil, and a springtail culture underneath them keeps mould in check.

Diet

Easy to feed and not remotely fussy. The staple is fresh fruit and vegetables, with apple, banana, carrot, squash and dark leafy greens all going down well, alongside leaf litter and decaying wood they can graze on between feeds. Add a little protein now and then, whether fish flake or a dried insect food, and clear away uneaten fresh food after a day or so before it sours. They are nocturnal, so put food in during the evening if you want to watch them eat.

Breeding

Unusual, and one of the more interesting things about keeping them. Where most insects lay eggs and walk away, a female hisser carries her egg case internally, incubating it in a brood pouch for around two months before pushing out live nymphs, sometimes as many as sixty at a time. The young look like small versions of the adults and moult through six stages on the way up. Given warmth, food and space a colony builds steadily, and adults live two to five years, so this is a long-term animal rather than a passing project.

Who is this for?

Almost anyone, including people who think they do not like cockroaches. They are docile, slow enough to handle comfortably, they do not bite, and they are large enough to be genuinely interesting to a child, which is why they are a fixture in classrooms and zoo insect houses. The obvious worry is worth answering directly: this is not a pest species and it cannot infest a house. It is a tropical forest animal that needs warmth and humidity to survive, so an escapee in a British home is a lost cockroach, not an infestation. They also make substantial feeders for larger reptiles. If you want something with more colour, the metallic Emerald Cockroach and the extinct-in-the-wild Simandoa Cave Roach are both worth a look, and the rest are in our cockroach collection.

Our hissers are captive-bred in the UK and travel under our live arrival guarantee, packed securely with moss and cover inside a double-walled box. We post Monday to Thursday by Royal Mail next day before 1pm, so nothing is left sitting over a weekend.