Posted by:
jfmoore
at Sun Oct 15 20:11:50 2006 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by jfmoore ]
Hi - I too have had two snakes hatch out of one egg, which definitely results in them being smaller than normal, with one often being even markedly smaller than the other. I can't find my records for that, though.
I've also had the situation where for whatever reason a hatchling in a normal-sized egg didn't absorb a significant amount of the remaining nutrient and emerged quite undersized. I just hatched out an Angolan python clutch where the hatchlings were around 80 grams, but one came out weighing 57.9 grams. When I examined the shell contents I found a big 20 gram blob left behind.
I occasionally used to get those half-sized eggs that ball pythons are known for. I found one record from 1987 of an eight-egg clutch where two eggs were these small ones. The hatchlings from the six normal-sized eggs had a mean weight of 83.3 grams. The two smaller hatchlings were 37.6 and 43.6 grams.
-Joan
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