I sure wish I could report some good news. All of my armata eggs were duds! My capra eggs were duds! Only things cooking that look good are the coronata eggs! I am down to 1.2 armata, the big male, the submissive female and the tiny female.

I guess that's what happens when you work too much!

By the way, my last gravid armata was pretty fat but her belly seems to be shrinking now. When I palpated her this morning I would swear the eggs are shrinking. There didn't seem to be many to start with. Do you suppose she is re-absorbing them? Why would all of the others die egg bound and this one, the submissive female, survive, if in fact she does?

I lost my largest female this weekend with her second clutch. I opened her and will report that the liver was what I am accustomed to seeing as a normal liver color in any animal I have ever butchered, not particularly dark by the standards of any I have ever seen. She was different from the other females I lost in that she did have some fat layers just as I had expected to find, as she looked so healthy. There were no egg follicles developing indicating that this would have been her final clutch. There were 16 eggs. The eggs on one side were all congealed together in a white waxy substance. In the other side they appeared to be normal. All of the eggs were gone, already hard and rubbery.

This has been a very hard winter for me! These last two females and the coronata female that I lost were all in a glass tank with moss and oak leaves over peat and coir fiber. There are 2 fluorescent tubes in the peak for daytime light and a 25 watt bulb on one end 24/7 for heat. They had a variety of mealworms, roaches, and nightcrawlers for feeders and their supplements were liquid calcium with D2 syrup and Stickytongue Farms Mineral-I. I was also spraying to make sure they were drinking daily. For future reference, did I miss anything?
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Marcia - FroggieB Dragons
www.froggieb.com/MHDHome.html

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