Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This is the female that a friend picked up for me at Daytona last year.. You may remember that i posted a pic of her up a while back.. She is a big girl and i was hoping for a large clutch, but instead she gave me 8 huge eggs a few days ago..

~ Mike Russo
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..And, some other alterna eggs.. Isn't the blue one nice looking?

~ Mike Russo

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Of course Mike the blue one looks great maybe a blue alterna will hatch
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Greetings Malte

www.lampropeltis-alterna.de (german site)

Nice looking clutches Mike. Good luck with them. What temp are they incubating at?

Thanks Coach..

I have always incubated at 82 degrees.. but, this year I lowered my temps down to 79.. As expected I have lost a couple of eggs.. like the blue one in my pic... but, so far most of them look to be good and are growing normally..

I also have a few more females (6 or so) that locked up later in the season that are due to lay in the next few days..

Hope to see you @ White Plains next weekend..

~ Mike Russo

Lol, that's funny! When was those loma eggs laid?
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Gray-Banded Kingsnake

without a doubt, i want that blue one...it HAS to be a keeper!

sweet, she looks just like a juno I produced about 7 or 8 years ago.Very cool.

L8r

Mike, she looks good, I found this this morning, fairly small snake 9 good eggs.

Best of luck with your eggs Jim, buttttt---How do you know they're good???????? Did you candle them???? I had pearl white eggs laid by a Xmas one year that looked great for 80 days. When I opended one to see it was like solid cheese as were all the rest. From the outside they never went bad. Dave Doherty always said it was hard to kill a good egg but they have to have life in them to begin with. "Can't always tell a book by its cover"
Nonetheless, best of luck to you with your clutch. What do you plan to incubate them in? BA

>When I opened one to see it was like solid cheese as were all the rest.

Ummm! Snake egg cheese. There has got to be a market for that somewhere. Put them in some fancy packaging and price them at $1000 each in a high end specialty food store. Some stupid hipster will buy them all and ask for more.

I have the same issue and am very curious to see if my eggs are good or not they look nice and white but I wasnt sure about candling or any other techniques.

What does it look like when you candle them? Is there any other way to know?

Thanks
James

James,
The easiest way is to get a small mag-lite or Coleman flashlight. Move the eggs to a very dark room [closet] where no other light filters in. Then put the small beam of light up to each one of the eggs. If you see veins or the inside of the egg is pink then you have a fertile egg. Don't hold the light on the egg for more than a few seconds. Some lizard breeders claim you can damage the embryo by doing this but I don't think that has been proven. If they look good on the outside then they generally are good but not always. See my above post. Best of luck with getting them out of the egg. A good friend of mine had over 30 go full term last year and not hatch out. Nobody knows for sure why alterna seem to "drown" in the egg so much but almost everyone who has bred alterna has had this happen to them at least once. Its always the pretty ones too!!! Good luck. BA