So, the numbers are in, and I am pleased with how things went.
60 days post deposition, eggs (14 in total) start to pip and I find mom with a baby next to her. Over the next 3 days hatching proceeds resulting in 8 healthy baby Womas.
Two eggs at the center of the clutch go full term but apparently are not able to pip through multiple layers of eggshell and life support shuts down before they can get out. Sad but probably happening all the time in the wild.
3 eggs go bad within a few days of being laid (infertile)
I still have one that I incubated artificially at a lower temp, egg is still alive but has not hatched yet...I am hopeful that it will go full term before life support shuts down. I suspect it might be a runt.
So it was an interesting experiment in maternal incubation with Womas. I have not heard of others doing it so I figured why not, I dont breed these for $ anyways, just fun so why not learn something about them.
Things learned:
Womas (at least mine) have a strong maternal instinct to incubate thier eggs and it appears to work very well.
In two years when I breed her again I will probably remove her upon seeing the first hatchling pip, I think it would have been possible to save the two had I manually pipped the egg as she remained tightly coiled around the clutch during hatching and that, coupled with being at the center of the egg mass, probably posed some serious challenges to those two babies.
My female seemed to watch over her young, getting very fiesty whenever I peeked in to look at them and on several occassions gaped and hissed with some bluff strikes (this did not occur during incubation she would just sit there).
She also appeared to smell the babies as they hatched and seemed to take great interest in checking them out.
Conclusion:
I will probably not use artificial incubation with Womas anymore, it was FAR easier to let her care for them and her health did not suffer from lack of food or the increased humidity.
Setting her nest box up to accomadate incubation was very easy and did not take any additional maintenance other than a spritz with the water bottle a few times a week to maintain AH.
The whole process was interesting and allowed me to see behavior in my animals that I had not witnessed before.
Now I have 8 more Womas, gee life is tough...
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Cheers
Lateralis
"I would rather be precisely wrong than approximately right"
Marion "Doc" Ford
