Nature Features

Ian and his foot long Giant Stick Insect

Wiltshire homes are rarely hit by fruit fly outbreaks, overrun by giant escaped bugs or even have foot long insects take up residence in their garages…

But at 17-year-old Ian Batten's home, in Colerne, it's all in a day's work and a fairly profitable day of work at that.

300 Giant Snails

It was back in 2004 that the Wiltshire teenager first started up his exotic bug business in the back of his parent's garage…

"I started when I was about 13," says Ian.  "My mate and I got a pair of land snails, which were incredibly boring, but they multiplied so rapidly and we soon ended up with about 300 eggs or so.

"It was really annoying when they hatched because we had loads and loads and we didn't know what to do with them."

With a mammoth batch of 'boring' giant snail hatchlings, threatening to overrun his bedroom, Ian was forced to come up with a way to get rid of them:

"We sold a few to the pet shop and sold a few online," says Ian, "and when I was selling them online I realised there was a bit of a market for these insects but much more of a market for the praying mantis and stick insects."

An Australian Giant Prickly Stick Insect

The Fruit fly Incident

Four years on and Ian's bug business has not only increased its revenue by over 3,000 per cent but has made the move from Ian's bedroom as well:

"I was in my room, to my parent's horror," says Ian "and we had an incident with fruit flies.

"I left one of the fruit fly nets open and they were all over the house, all over the tooth brushes and the fruit and in my sister's room.  So it was shortly after that that, that I moved into the garage."

Since the forced relocation, Ian's exotic insect business has got even more exotic, stocking amongst other things a giant stick insect:

"It's the biggest I've ever kept," says Ian, "and it really is an absolute monster. It's just under 30 cms which for a stick insect is extraordinary.

"I picked this one up for £15.00, which was an absolutely bargain.  I put 20 eggs from this girl on an auction site and they got up to £22.00 so that's nearly £2.00 per egg bearing in mind that she'll lay in excess of 150 eggs."

Violin Praying Mantis

Violin Mantis

But it's not just monster insect eggs that are up for sale on Ian's InsectStore website.

In amongst the nets of blue bottle flies, plastic cups of fruit flies, mating Idolomantis and nurseries of hatchling Wide Armed Mantids there's also an enclosure of extraordinary looking Violin Mantids:

"They're one of the nicest looking in my opinion," says Ian, "because they look so bizarre almost like a violin.

"They will only really feed on flying insects so I had to hatch out some blue bottle larvae, from a tackle shop, and feed the flies on a mixture of honey and water to get a bit of nutrient into them and then put them straight into the cage for the praying mantids."

Eaten by your dinner

With a reputation of taking 'dinner and a date' literally, biting off the head of its lover after a spot of mating, the praying mantids can also face the threat of being eaten by its very own dinner - especially if it's partial to a cricket or two:

"It's usually when they've freshly shed they're skins," says Ian, "when they're quite moist and vulnerable that I've been into one of the enclosures and all I've seen are a few legs left of the mantis and the cricket's had the whole thing."

A Giant Hermit Crab

Bugs by post

Despite the threat of his exotic stock being eaten by each other, or by its own dinner, Ian's bug business is doing well.  With over a million hits on his website, since 2006, he's not only shipping his mini monsters out to customers around the world but shipping by post?:

"I always use the special delivery service which is guaranteed next day," says Ian.

"There's a lot you can send in the mail.  I'm not sure our postman knows, they keep changing actually, but the people in the Post Office know and they're quite intrigued by it.

"But I'm not sure if all the post people, around the UK, if they knew that they were dealing with live insects they'd be too chuffed."