Hello all,

I am a graduate student working on the differences between live bearing and egg laying in Eryx. Data for these species is limited, so I was hoping that Eryx breeders could help since most of you likely collect this data anyway.

All that I need is the weight of females before mating, and either the weight of all the hatchlings combined or, for egg laying species, the weight of the eggs combined right after they are layed. Plus the number of hatchlings or eggs.

There is a theory that clutch mass should be lower in the live bearers than the egg layers because live bearing is more costly to the female than egg laying. That there are both kinds of reproduction in Eryx and that egg-laying seems to have evolved from live bearing makes this a really useful group to test this kind of thing in.

Many thanks,
Vinny
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“There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” -C. Darwin, 1859

Natural Selection Reptiles

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• Sand Boa info - vjl4, Fri Oct 27 15:39:20 2006