my last Hondo clutch of the season is out!

I don't keep my eggs in a tightly controlled environment, just in a closet, within a plastic “shoe box”, so the temps fluctuate between 74-82 everyday. The gradual decrease in daytime temps, due to our harsh Florida winter pushes hatching times out a week or so.

The sire: Triple Homozygous

Don’t have any good recent pics, so here he is as a neonate:



Here are a couple close ups of him with a snow for comparison (he’s lighter in color than the snow):





The dame: Hypo Het Snow



This clutch was really weird/unique too, for a few reasons.
1) The female (Hypo Het Snow) was "gravid" for well over 65 days. I set her up per my usual schedule after her “pre lay shed” but no eggs. Shortly after her not laying I offered her a meal, she then started to feed, although sporadically. She maintained her swollen/gravid state and I was very concerned for her health… until I checked her one day and saw two slugs in her cage. I immediately prepped an egg box and she laid a few more slugs over the next few days. Unfortunately, she decided to lay right as we were leaving for a (short) weekend vacation. When I returned home, I found only two eggs that were laid in the "egg chamber" so the others had dried out. ( I did try to re-hydrate them, but no luck.)

2) This was the first clutch, which I’m aware of, in which a Triple Homozygous has been proven (sire or dame)!

3) I thought I had another Triple Homozygous! When I candled one egg about two weeks ago, as you can see by the following photo, there was no visible sign of a banded Hondo inside. All I saw was a faint shadow of a “transparent body”. I would have put money on it at the time! I even called a couple of my friends to “predict it”…(insert foot in mouth here)!
I guess this observation is just another tid bit of information about when Hondos really start to develop color/pigment. (I don’t typically candle my eggs after the first few days of being laid, but around day 75, I was concerned that the eggs weren’t fertile or had gone bad… due to no signs of egg indentations. My eggs tend to dent in around a week or more prior to pipping.)

Late Candling Shot:




Example of denting eggs:




Here are the HUGE clutch photos!


1st Pippage (day 83):


You can actually see the Tricolor banding in the egg on the right. Sometimes you get these opaque windows in the eggs, it's kinda like a smoked glass appearance.

1st out (day 86):

Tangerine Hypo Het Snow @ 22 grams






2nd out (day 88):

Tricolor Hypo Het Snow @ 24 grams




Both are very chubby evenly banded Hondos...and being 100% Het for Snow is just awesome!

Hope you enjoyed the post…

-Rusty

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