Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I had a female I thought was pregnant very early on in the season, but never filled out fully. She just drop her eggs last week, whenI was expecting them by early June.

Well, long story short, she laid 8 eggs, but one was an obvious slug. The other 7 were in a hovabator within 48 hours of them being laid (about 3 from the time I first noticed them. Still, so far, I've lost three to greenish yellow bacteria. And one looks like it is on the way out.

Three of the remaining eggs have good veins, but they are denting after 10 days in the incubator. The hottest it's gotten in there is 91.2, and the coolest is 86.6, but the overall temp since it's stabilized has been between 88 and 90. The humidity has held steady at a 99.7% the whole time, so I'm not sure why the eggs are denting.

I'm using a hovabator and the no-substrate method with the eggs on a light grate elevated slightly over the incubator's own water lining that has about 1/8 of an inch of water in its chambers. The environment seems right, but the eggs keep failing....

Anyone have any kind of tips?

they might all go bad....and turn green from the inside....

...as for method in a HovaBator....?

you have water in bottom and screening covering it and eggs laying on that....HovaBators use TOP heat....

you have the eggs in a container or just in the incubator?...

top heat is bad for the method....use other containers inside...
and don't use the bottom that came with it...find a Styrofoam box that the top will fit well on and use that ((fish shipping boxes etc..)

.....good luck....I used HovaBators for 20 years....I used vermiculite right in the Bator with no inside containers....
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........JY

Thanks for the quick reply... I have them on light grate over the water tray, but no other container in the incubator. I'm going to look for vermiculite at the garden shops around... I got perlite last year, thinking it would work, but the perlite I got had been treated with fertilizer.... it killed the eggs.

Gotta read the fine print.

So I shouldn't use the no substrate method with a hovabator? Is it better to custom build an incubator for that method using heat tape or some other heating system and thermostat setup?

Thanks for the info and the help. Kicking myself right now for not being more prepared. This is my second clutch ever and I was hoping to get it right this time since my first was an utter failure... lol.

Guess I still have a lot to learn.

Dave

for no substrate method ...I would say the homemade 'bators are better...and people use secondary , inner containers too I think...

perlite works for this method...perlite doesn't hold water actually...

vermiculite works in HovaBators because it holds water....I used it for 20 years like I said...it works....it can also fail...and I have had 'bators full of eggs go bad due to an oops...it sucks to watch potentially 10,000$ go down the trash can....

....good luck....keep reading all you can....

...
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........JY

JY, thanks for the help!!! I got a separate container and some pure vermic at a local garden store and set up the incubator the correct way.

I transferred the remaining eggs like I said before, and they kept dying. Well, three of them made it through!! No new mold, no slick see-through spots...everything seemd to be going well.

Once a week, I checked the humidity and temp (both stabilized at 99% and 90 degrees). When I checked the environment, I'd candle the eggs really quickly too, to make sure they were still growing. Well, about a week ago, I stopped being able to see through the eggs, and started getting a little worried. Then, at the beginning of this week, the eggs started to collapse, and the top of the incubator was constantly coated with condensation.

I bet you can guess what's coming next...

I checked today, and two of the eggs were empty. The third has a little head poking out of it!!! Not sure yet if any of them are pastel, but the two that are out had some serious blushing in the head and in between the saddles, pluss little to no darkening in the yellow areas... It will probably take a few sheds to know, though.

Thanks again for all of the awesome and timely advice. My first clutch in an incubator... 3 of 8 isn't the best hatch rate, but I'll chalk that up to rookie mistakes. Besides, I like to think of it as nursing 3 back from what would have been a doomed clutch.

Dave.