Can I keep it?
Setup
The numbers
Temperature
One ambient band, 28–34°C. This sheet states no warm side, no cool side and no night figure, so none are shown. Same scale on every sheet here, so two species compare by eye.
The sheet states28-34C (loves heat)
Humidity
The sheet states30-50% (drier)
Part of this is not on the page we cite. We opened it on 10 Aug 2026 and some of the degrees above are not stated there. The values above may still be right, but we cannot show you where they came from, and nobody here has checked them against a second source. Anything about a sick animal goes to a qualified exotic vet, not to a page. roachforum.com
Drag the sun. Red runner / Turkestan roach is Nocturnal, so what it is doing changes with the light.
Enclosure and conditions
What your climate adds
This sheet states a range to hold. Your local climate decides how much work holding it is. Pick the nearest city: nothing is sent anywhere, the choice stays in this browser.
What it needs
Every line above is deduced from a value this sheet states, and names which one. Nothing here is a general recommendation. What the sheet does not state is listed too, rather than left out: a kit that looks complete is worse than one that names its gap.
Food
Diet
Feeding rhythm
Twenty-eight days, one row. Each band is a meal window.
Why
The windows widen as they go because the interval is a range: four meals after a 10–14 day cycle land anywhere between day 40 and day 56.
The sheet statesVeg/fruit + grain/protein dry feed · 2-3x/week; keep dry feed out
Daily life
Behaviour and handling
Health
Common health problems
The species
Identity
Adult size
True scale, against a 1.75 m person
Logarithmic, the same axis on every sheet
The size the sheet states for a grown animal.
Why
Two drawings, because they answer two questions. The silhouette is at true scale against a 1.75 m person: it says how big this animal actually is, which no number does for someone who has never seen one. The bar under it is logarithmic and shared by every sheet here, so a 2 cm isopod and a 4 m python both stay readable on the same axis and two species can be compared at a glance.
Reproduction
Life course
Read from the lifespan and maturity the sheet states, for animals in care and not in the wild.
Why
The minimum commitment is the low end of that lifespan, and the reproductive window is what is left after maturity: both are subtractions on stated figures, not figures of their own.
Good to know
- Fast, tough and hyper-prolific - the go-to feeder when you need endless roaches, but escapees can colonise warm buildings
National law is not global, and we hold no national wildlife law for any country, Thailand included. Check your own authority before buying or selling.
Questions & sources
https://keepr.pet/husbandry/en/shelfordella-lateralis
Others in this group
What this sheet states
Every field this product runs on is stated here. That is not a claim that the values are right: it says what the sheet states, not whether it is true. Whether a human has read it is the badge at the top of this page.
UVB is measured but does not count: it is absent from 420 of 678 sheets, and on most of them that is not a gap, since a nocturnal snake's sheet has no reason to state a UV index. Counting it would call the library incomplete without cause.