Reptile & Amphibian Forums

First off, let me say hi to everybody. I haven't posted in months, but I'm always lurking around. I'm a high school teacher and a coach so I stay very busy throughout the fall and winter. I also got married this November, which has also contributed to my lack of posting. I'm sure I'll be posting with more regularity in the future.

Anyway, some of you may remember that I was trying to sell my pair of adult IJs early this fall. My goal was to try to pare down my breeding efforts to include ball pythons only. My IJ pair had been kept together all year, mainly to save space.

Anyway, to make a long story shorter, my new years got off to a suprise arrival of a small clutch of IJ eggs!! I'm embarrased to admit that these eggs caught me completely off guard. We had witnessed a few copulations, but I somehow missed the ovulation. We were working in the snakeroom Friday, when my wife alerted me to some unusual sounds comming from the IJ cage. Low and behold, mom was incubating a clutch of eggs. The eggs could have been there for as much as two days. We got our incubator up and running and now have the eggs under ideal conditions.

Unfortunately, prior to us finding them, the cage conditions were not at all conducive to incubating eggs. I'm still in "cool down" mode, and I'm afraid the temps were way too cool. In fact, the reason we found the eggs was from mom "twitching" in an effort to raise her temperature (first time I've witnessed this in person with any of my pythons).

Although all of the eggs looked good, some are obviously infertile or even dead. I'm afraid the low temps may have caused me to lose some of the eggs. I've quickly candled the eggs and atleast a handful of them appear to be viable (nice color, veination) at this time. A couple of the eggs are obviously bad with mold and a smell. I don't know if they were infertile, or once fertile and now dead. I'm hoping to salvage at least a few of these. I'm going to heat up my workroom tonight and seperate the obviously bad/dead/infertile ones. I'll also try to take a candleing pic tonight (I just got a new camera). I'll keep you all up to date.

If you have any thoughts about the situation, I'd love to hear them. Also, feel free to check out my website for more pictures. Thanks!

Joe Pociask Pythons

Eggs to start the year! That's neat. Just in general, I'd rather have a couple of days of temperatures that were too low rather than too high. Better chance of survivability, I would think. Good luck.

-Joan

Thanks for the reply. I usually take a hands-off approach with my snake eggs. My experience has been that there is an inverse relationship between mucking around with them and hatch rates. My nose however told me that they needed a look see. I heated up the workroom (bathroom) to 90 and took the eggs in for some maintainence. I found one egg that was really, really, really bad. Although it looked OK on the outside, it had a horrible stench. The scientist in me cut it open....wow, what a stink.

A couple of the other eggs had a little mold growing on a bit of caked-on blood on the surface...not really on the egg itself, just the dried blood. Has anybody ever seen this? I scraped the bloody mess of the eggs as best as possible. The other nine eggs smelled OK and otherwise seemed OK.

Now another question about candling. When candled, the other nine eggs all showed veins, although some had a nicer "pink glow" than did others. Does the presence of veins always definitely mean that the egg was/is fertile? In other words, have you seen veins in infertile eggs?

Thanks for any input!

The remaining eggs sound like they are good.
The bits of dried blood are not a problem remove it if you want
or can.

Best of luck, now just to wait and see

MArdy

the bad eggs if any will weed themselves out (brown up, rot, dry out etc...). I had a few "close to call" eggs last year and I think only one of the 2 or 3 bad looking ones didn't hatch out. Good luck. Frank Kincade.