People always said these don't infest, need extremely humid and warm temps to reproduce, etc. Well I have found out the hard way this isn't exactly true. I was given a free colony of the awful roaches and needless to say, they are infesting. As soon as we hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit, lobster roaches started appearing everywhere in our warehouse! I am seeing them race up walls, along cham enclosures, across the glass of my reef aquariums, in the parking lot, and even in dubia bins. Luckily, baits, and pesticides are doing the trick and their population has quickly been put to a halt. This is the second nasty roach species I have had to deal with in the past decade. The other terrible roach species was the red racer or B. lateralis. I recommend hobbyists stick to dubia. The last thing you want is a bunch of fat roaches racing around your mom's shower or all over her bed. My guess is you will never hear the end of that one!
Hey there-
I've used lobsters for over a decade, and like you I had a problem with lateralis (horrible experience with those).
Lobsters aren't like those, at least in conditions here (southern va). I don't know where you heard they need humidity or heat- they do not. They breed all winter here in years past even when the lizard building had temps in the 50s and 60s, and they can take very close to freezing, maybe even light frosts outdoors. Lateralis can take hard freezes and snow on the ground for a couple of months and still come out alive. Lobsters cannot.
If you get rid of them- they will dissappear after a while (few months). I have had summers here where I fed over a million lobsters out to lizards. (literally over a million- not a figure of speach). And my cages aren't exactly lobster proof for babies- almost impossible to do. So in summer there are always more than a few running around the cage area, which is right next to the house (lobsters aren't allowed as feeders in the house- they are restricted to lizard building and outdoor use) and in the winter few creep into the house. But by a few I mean a handful. we might find a dozen over the course of the fall and early winter but by mid winter they are gone not to be seen again. Similarly- if the cages aren't outdoors, we don't see the lobsters any more. A few are always loose in the lizard building, but they don't "infest". The loose are escapees- I think conditions in some of the cages are actually suitable for their culturing, but conditions outside of the cages are not, so any unintended larger scale reproduction is going on beneath the humid substrate in some of the cages. If boxes or banks of cages are moved, etc, we don't find a population of them building up and establishing in tight dark spaces. This is very unlike the lateralis. Maybe with your fish tanks things are more humid in your building though and if they can find some nice warmish dark humid areas, they might set up camp- I don't know about that.
Possibly here they prefer the outdoors and leave the building and cannot survive the outdoors once winter sets in. I don't see them all over the place outdoors though, unlike the lateralis incident which went on for several years after their brief use was discontinued. In fact, other than near the caging outdoors I can't remember seeing them at all.
Still- because they are so hardy my policy has always been no lobsters in my home and every post I've ever mentioned them I've always issued that caution. I allow dubia and would allow things like discoids (I have a giant hybrid that I breed from the same genus) but not lobsters. They aren't my favorite roach- lots of them together makes an odor that "clings" and lingers and I don't like the climbing thing. But they are pretty nearly perfect insofar as they are very soft bodied, eat anything and everything, and babies are small enough for baby chameleons, and they have an unrivaled reproductive rate. Because of their soft and thin exoskeleton, baby bearded dragons can eat any size nymph and not get the twitches unlike crickets where size has to be carefully selected. So I have a love/hate thing going on with them as feeders.
If your warehouse is open to the public or close to other businesses lobsters are a bad idea... But I think if you discontinue using them they will fade out significantly over a few months and disappear altogether over the winter...
Sounds like you are already on the way to clearing them out with the AC.
