14 year old Hatuey Corrie, a student of Form 3 Apha 4 of the Christ Church Foundation School has started an environmentaly friendly and sustainable - not to mention financialy rewarding - foreign exchange earning small business captive-breeding Barbados Preying Mantis Insects (Stegmatoptera septentrionalis) for export to Europe.
With a little guidance from his father Damon Corrie - the well know local expert on Reptiles & Amphibians made locally famous by the 2006 Snake searches in Barbados that were frequently publicised in the news media, Hatuey has already exported his first shipment of live specimens to Rico Kuntz in Zurich Switzerland in March 2007 - with a second order due for Dario Trautman in Germany to be
exported soon.
Being born on an Arawak reservation in the interior of Guyana, and growing up in Barbados from the age of nine months old with a 'wildlife dad' like Damon who has been captive-breeding various species for worldwide export since 1990 - the firstborn 'apple' Hatuey did not fall far from the tree.
The Mantis Farm idea came to Hatuey because he always loved the insect but realized that they are pretty rare over much of Barbados nowadays, he collected a few as pets and set them up in plastic ventilated terrariums purchased at Carters, they were easy to feed on smaller live insects purchased from Rico Sandiford - a 16 year-old Barbadian Cricket (Gryllus Sp.) farmer - and it wasn't long before the females laid Ootheca (egg cases) which subsequently hatched several days later. Now Hatuey has several hundred babies and un-hatched Ootheca and about 24 breeding females and 6 males, under ideal conditions these two dozen breeding mothers could be worth $6,000
annually - and since they are only occuppying 10 cubic feet of Hatuey's bedroom space - there is room to expand.
"There are people with personal biases and little to no foresight who are actually opposed to what myself and my son are doing in captive-breeding various species to earn aditional foreign exchange in an environmentaly friendly and sustainable way, but my son has taken a rare local species which is not only an undemanding pet but a good biological control species, and bred it in captivity to the stage where if the Ministry of Agriculture were to call to place an order for a few hundred to release somewhere in Barbados to control a pest species - my son will be in a position to help; just because we see opportunities where others see none - does not mean we do not have a contribution to make to society" said his father Damon.
Hatuey's small business is called 'Microcosmos' and he plans to captive-breed other species of Invertebrates for the
export pet trade - thereby earning his own money and living up to the National Pledge by being 'a credit to his Nation' and earning foreign exchange for Barbados.
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Shirling Normellia Corrie
Hatuey Francis Corrie
