Reptile & Amphibian Forums

...of 23 viable eggs.
Laid this morning, my friend says, "come get 'em."
I'm a colubrid guy, and know little about beardies (or other lizards, for that matter).
They are incubating in moist sand, around 85F.
How long will it be and what else should I know?
Thanks.
-Jack
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...and I think to myself, "What a wonderful world."

If I were you I would change the soil to vermiculite. They seem to incubated real well in it and its easy to keep it moist etc. Others use perlite and dont have a problem. Are the eggs in a incubator? I use a thermal hovabator, only around 38 bucks and it works great. You have to buy a digital thermometer for it though because the one it comes with is highly inaccurate.

Keep the incubator at around 82-84 degrees. The babies should hatch anywhere from 60-75 days. Sometimes a little sooner, sometimes a littler later.

Be prepared to have many aquariums or bins (rubbermaid) to house the little guys. You dont want to put too many to a cage or you will have some major mutilation problems. I try not to put more then 3-4 hatchlings to a ten gallon aquarium. Occasionally I was forced to put 5-6. But only for a week or so. As they grow you need to seperate them by size and make sure you dont have many to a cage.

The biggest thing with the babies is they eat ALOT! One baby beardy will eat anywhere from 30-60 crickets a day. Some eat 70-80. Make sure the crickets are no bigger then 1/2 the length between the eyes. I usually order 1/4 inch crickets as soon as the first one hatches. It can take them a couple days to get a appetite. Order alot of them!

Of course your going to want to heat and light the cages. Keep the basking spot around 105-110 and the cool side around 80. Dont forget the uvb/uva flourescent bulbs

Dont forget to supplement their crickets with calcium daily and herptivite approx 2 times a week. Offer them finely chopped greens and veggies daily (removing them at night).

For water you can spray them daily, give them baths a few times a week and/or use a small syringe and drop little drops of liquids on their nose and they will drink it. Some put a SHALLOW water disn in their cage. But in general baby beardies are not very good when it comes to drinking water out of bowls. They just dont get it!

For a substrate I would highly recommend non printed, white paper towels. Easy to clean and you dont have to worry about them eating sand etc when they eat their crickets.

This is not a detailed caresheet, just some basics. You might want to read some caresheets, read some posts and learn as much as you can, before the babies arrive. Congrats and goodluck. LindsayMarie

yeah basically what Lindsay said.

I too inherited a clutch of 8 eggs from out of the blue, however I wasn't so lucky... I didn't get them until a month well into the incubation time and they were just in really wet dirt, no heat or anything. I managed to get 4 to hatch successfully even with all that abuse done to the eggs. Out of those four, only 2 made it past the 1 month mark. Of the 2 only 1 thrived, the other was in an ever spiraling downward depression cycle over the next 2 years. Would eat fine for a while and seem normal, the starve himself, back and forth. Eventually he passed away this month. Nine months after getting that clutch of eggs, I found myself inheriting the parents of those eggs. Got a clutch in the oven now as we speak...laid last week.

Babies do eat a lot. I find that fruit flies (flightless) get a better feeding reaction out of babies during the first month than did the pinhead/week old crickets...the darker color is easier for them to spot apparently. By two months, they were tasting/nibbling on greens and by 3 months actually eating finely chopped greens/veggies willingly.

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Wyvern