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Monthly Update: July 2020

This is a bit of a late update for July, but a lot has changed in a short period of time very recently in Melbourne. It probably comes to no surprise to many people that stage 3 and 4 restrictions in Victoria have had an impact on daily life and the running of Sans Vertigo. Let’s start off with the most pressing and important changes.

COVID-19 Impacts

Stage 4 restrictions in Melbourne have decreased postage and logistics to 2/3rd their normal running capacity, and there has been a huge surge in deliveries needed. This means it’s going to take much longer for express service parcels to arrive- which is not safe for live goods such as plants, shrimp, fish and others. 

For the safety of our animals, we can only send dry goods until express services are no longer delayed.

In the meantime you’ll notice that all of our livestock will remain out of stock until then. If you’d like to stay up to date for when we’re able to ship live goods again, follow our Facebook page for the latest news.

International shipping is still impacted for certain countries, generally it’s best to look through our Etsy because it has more comprehensive information on shipping. If you are unsure of shipping to your country, feel free to message us and we’ll look into it! 

Beetle Grubs

Earlier this year we’ve mentioned a lot about our rhinoceros beetles and breeding them. It’s been many months and recently we have confirmed that there are at least eight beetle larvae of various stages of development in one of our tubs! We have a second tub of substrate that may have more larvae on the way. The plans for these little bubs are to keep and breed more of them to establish a larger population over time, before they can be sold in our store. 

Charms

This is not the newest of news, but midway through July we restocked on Red Bee Charms and introduced our finished Betta Charms- which come in a variety of Halfmoon and Plakat fin forms! We have limited stock for the time being, since we’re still waiting for more supplies to arrive- which are still heavily delayed thanks to COVID-19. Despite that, it was very satisfying to have at least some of them fully assembled and ready to send out! Hopefully we can get the rest in stock soon too. You can find these in the Merch section of our store, or on our Etsy (int’l).

What are we doing in Lockdown now?

The restrictions has the whole family staying at home now, and it’s close quarters for 24/7. It’s made a lot of things harder for the creation of videos, so a lot of work and preparation has had to go on the shelf. It’s very difficult to film with extra noise and less space to work with. 

Instead of videos, energy is being spent on improving our shrimp lineages and aquariums. We’re going through and culling carefully to see where we can push and improve the quality of our shrimp even more than we normally would. Some of our colonies- namely our blue and orange cherry shrimp still leave much to be desired in the consistency of their colours and offspring. Other than that, we’ve basically gone into maintenance mode until restrictions are lifted.

Working on culling suspect juvenile bloody mary shrimp...

In which suspect juveniles are separated to see how their color develops. 

We were supposed to rehome some scorpions to lighten the load of weekly maintenance- one difficulty of the lockdowns is that getting feeder insects on demand locally has become much harder. Since we can’t reliably ship live goods- rehoming will have to wait. I’m currently anxiously waiting for a shipment of crickets next week, since I have some mother and baby scorpions that need to be fed! 

One of our young urodacus armatus... there are many mouths to feed!

That’s all I have to update from Sans Vertigo for now. I really want to say that I am thankful for everyone who has supported this little store so far, and those who read these updates. It’s been a frightfully turbulent year for everyone on this planet and I think many people feel disheartened by all the things happening. This is a storm we can weather through, as resilient human beings. Don't give up, where ever you are finding yourself at the present.  

Stay safe and healthy everyone.