Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Well, it's the first time in a long time for me to see a big red throat indigo baby sticking 6" out of the egg! I wanted to post a photo of the new snake, but he or she snuck back into the egg. Hopefully, I can get a photo later today.

The clutch was laid on February 3rd, and the first pipping is on April 18th, just 2 1/2 months after parturition. This is the earliest ever for my eggs to hatch.

I used to incubate them in the mid 70's and they took 4 months to hatch. Then I started incubating them at 82 and they took 3 months to hatch. This year I tried to acheive 82 degrees, but the temperature slipped back to 80 most of the time.

But I feel lucky now. Oh, by the way Dean, congratulations on your beautiful clutch of Easterns from your April 15th post.
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congrats Robert!

That has to be the earliest clutch of hatching couperi I've ever heard of.

Have you ever had any earlier than that
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Hi Dean,

I checked all my records. This is definitely the earliest clutch I have had in terms of both date of parturition and hatch. These eggs were laid on February 3rd. They began to hatch on April 18th. Most of my clutches are deposited in the month of March. I did find one clutch from several years back that was deposited on February 16th, but it hatched on June 28th. That was when I thought they required low temperatures in the low to mid 70's. All that did was prolong the incubation period of the eggs. As you will see from the photos of the hatchlings that I will soon post, the babies appear perfect in every way. I don't know for sure why some people find kinks in their hatchling indigos, but I believe I can almost rule out temperature as the offending variable.

Hey Robert, I,m wondering if the higher incubation temps will have any long term or permanent effects on these animals as far as metabolism. In other words, will they now have a tendancey to thrive at higher cage temps than previously thought normal? Wil their bodies be inclined to prefer a warmer environment than normal?

Congrats on the younguns!!! Let's see some pics.

Tony.

P.S.I am waiting for supplies from bigapple, so I can get those cages built for th white lips.

Hi Tony,

I never put two and two together to come up with the fact that you are the "Snakeman" from the forum. Your white lips are doing great, and feeding on what seem to be enormous frozen rats for their size.

The question you pose is interesting. And I remember thinking in graduate school that the more interesting our questions, the harder they were to answer. Of course the most interesting questions really cannot be answered using the scientific method and are often philisophical.

I don't know of any scientist who has performed a controlled experiment to determine how incubation temperatures affect physiological attributes of adult and subadult indigos. There may be a physiologist who has done this with some fast growing species of prolific reptile, but I don't think it's been done for indigos. They are simply too difficult to produce, and take too long to raise. Then there are the Federal restrictions.

That said, I never noted any behavioral differences in the animals incubated at 75 and 82 degrees. And I raised a lot of them. I bet you could do such an experminet with cornsnakes and really determine if there are different temperature preferences, but, still, cornsnakes don't bask like indigos.
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I posed a question in another thread above, but will ask it again here. Would snakes who's genes originated from snakes in say,... south Florida, be more inclined to need or at least tolerate higher inc. temps than the ones in Dothan, Alabama?

In other words,...would snakes from farther south have a higher tollerance, or need for warmer incubation temps, and would that characteristic be past on through the family tree? After all I know for a fact that there is a pretty wide variation of temperatures at certain times of the year between the northern range and the south end of this species. Having lived in both.

If this is the case, maybe you have snakes from a more southern bloodline. What does everyone think?
Tony.

2 1/2 months! Wow, that's quick. I had a guy tell me a while back at a sho in Florida that he hatched Easterns and Texans in 60 to 70 days and I just wrote him of as being "full of it". Maybe I should rethink that....

I'm keeping my rubidus eggs at 82 to 83 during the days and down to 77 to 79 at night.

Pretty cool! Congratulations.