2021 ANIMAL STORIES MAGAZINE

2021 PET MAGAZINE LINCOLN DAILY NEWS JANUARY 21, 2021 Page 19 Continue p Robert’s mom talked about taking care of and getting to know the bugs. “They were honestly a pretty easy pet. They stayed in a ten-gallon aquarium with a screen top and wood chips. They can climb any surface so the screen top was a must. We also used Vaseline around the top rim of the aquarium to keep them from getting out if the screen was off. They had a gelled water that they loved and they also ate dry dog food. As a treat, we would feed them fruit. Oranges were their favorite.” Mindy said that they did have differing personalities which was interesting, considering they were a bug, and people don’t often think about bugs having personalities. “The male liked me better, the females liked the guys (Robert and his dad Andrew).” When the babysitting job came along, the male of the pair was named Rocky. When Robert got his own set he named his male Rocky 2 and the female was Rachel. Mindy was asked if it took a lot of coaxing for her to agree to have the large cockroaches in her home. “No. Snakes would have never made the cut, but I probably would have been okay with about anything else. Honestly, I was fascinated by them, he started out babysitting for two, but they soon had babies and we gave 18 back to Jen (the family friend) and kept a male and female. They had babies as well. By the time we passed them on, we had about 30.” When Robert was in college, the family decided that it was time to give the bugs new homes. Over the nine or ten years that they had the roaches, they had lots of babies. Robert gave several of his bugs to local schools for the kids there to learn about and enjoy. In all, the whole family enjoyed the bugs. They also had pretty good luck with taking care of them. Rocky 2 outlived his lifespan by a couple of years, and became the most beloved of all of them. “The average lifespan is about five years. We had Rocky 2 about seven. We lost several