I had a lot of babies of several species hatching in tanks from overseen clutches. Besides of course many geckos, this includes also species with more sensitive egg incubation conditions like green basilisks, jewelled lacertas, Gallotia galloti eisentrautii, veiled chameleons, green ameivas and even plated lizards.

Leaving clutches willingly in the tank also can enable us to detect hitherto unknown brood care of some species. Or did you know that plated lizard females as well as jewelled lacerta females do guard and defend their egg laying place and even to some extend regulate the humidity level of it?

We never find out about such things if we immediately remove eggs.

The mass of overseen clutches in my tanks (distributed over many years)is mainly due to the fact that I do only use naturalistically furnished tanks with thick layers of natural substrate.

Also of some species which are not easy to trade or sell, I do sometimes just leave the eggs willingly their and do not even catch the hatchlings. Still some survive till adulthood.

To soem extend you can guess the success of a clutch buried in the tank:

If THE perfect egg laying place is present, female lizards do not dig a lot around. They just dig a hole or tunnel and relatively quickly lay their eggs. This can easisly be overseen , especially for species or specimens which do not loose much weight upon oviposition.

A female which digs a lot at changing places till she finally lays their eggs, in most cases does so, because she is unable to find THE perfect place. So I´d say clutches from the first case have a much higher probability to hatxch than clutches form the second case.

I would assume that in a well furnished cage, uro eggs would hatch as well as all th eother eggs.

But incubating in an incubator is much safer. You exclude any strong humidity fluctuation and leftover feeder insects which could prey on the eggs. As in nature, hatching rates in the tank are often significantly below 100%, whereas with some experience with the respective species, you normally have 100% hatching rate from healthy females eggs in an incubator.

Its always very thrilling to find unexpected babies in a tank. But quite often not all may hatch and often the parents do eat them before you find them (last week I found 4 Babylizard tails in the tank of my jewelled lacertas). Even Uros may eat their babies.

In an incubator its safe and if the conditions are apt, hatchlings are as healthy as possible.





Ci@o



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