Reptile & Amphibian Forums

okay so any how, with my little experience hatching leos; i have always had clutchmates that are incubated together (same deli cup) hatch out within 24 hours of each other. this last one it has just been over 24 hours now. is there any need to worry? the egg is huge and ready to pop, im suprised it hasnt already. it is the biggest egg i have ever seen. this is a picture of it a few weeks ago. the one that hatched yesterday is on the left. you can see how much bigger it is then the other and it is fertile because it glows red.

My albino tang baby's clutchmate never hatched, the situation was exactly like yours. I actually talked to Mr. Tremper about this, he said give it 24-48 hours max. I waited for 4 days, the egg never went bad. I finally gave up and slit it, absolutley no development inside, just fluid. Don't give up on the egg yet, but after a while, I'd go ahead and say the egg is lost.
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1.0 Hypo Tang Leopard Gecko
1.0 Giant Jungle Albino Leopard Gecko
0.1 Normal Leopard Gecko
0.1 SHTCT Baldy Leopard Gecko
0.1 SHTCT Leopard Gecko
0.1 High Yellow Lavender Leopard Gecko
0.1 Albino Tangerine Leopard Gecko
0.1 Unusually Patterned Tangerine Leopard Gecko
1.0 African Fat Tailed Gecko
0.1 Crested Gecko
0.1 Splendida Kingsnake
1.0 Ball Python
1.0 Sinaloan Milksnake
1.0 Kenyan Sand Boa

i can actually see veins and stuff but it still hasnt hatched, going on like maybe 30 hours now. i have 2 other eggs where one was just a vein and it finally died and it is going dark inside. the other i thought was fertile but now that its almost time for it to hatch it is just yellow inside. bummer...it was gunna be this little girls baby and it would be tang albino.

I have split open a lot of eggs over the years, and I don't think I could say that I have ever "saved" anything. Most of the eggs were way over due and when opened either were infertile and full of fluid, or rarely contained a fully developed dead baby. Only once can I remember opening an egg that contained a live baby ready to hatch. I may have saved it, but most likely it would have hatched out within a few hours anyway.

On the other side, I have also opened up eggs that I thought should have hatched to find live babies that still had large yolk sacs to be absorbed. Out of the 4 of 5 of these eggs over the years only 1 ever survived. So even if I did save 1, which I doubt, I killed at least 4x that many.

Long story short....don't open eggs, leave them alone until they go bad. Your chances of saving a baby are low, but you are very likely to kill one.