Reptile & Amphibian Forums

a little over 30 honduran eggs so far.
Pretty good for not being may yet.

shannon brown
West Coast Hondurans

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NP

>>a little over 30 honduran eggs so far.

you're ahead of me, shannon--by a little over 30! but give me a few days and i'll start catching up. of course you're safe: i can only compete with the hondos & pyros, not on the other neat things you keep and breed.

pretty snake and nice looking clutch, by the way. check out my kingsnake post on pyro morphs and naming...i'll appreciate your participation in that discussion--and of others from this forum, too, see how we apply what we use with the milks, especially the hondos, to the developing pyro morph world.

terry

Terry,
42 hondo eggs and counting.Seven have laid and I have 24 more to go.

Anyways,Thats a great thread in the kingsnake forum and one I have been wondering about for some time myself.

Talk to you later,

shannon

>>Terry,
>>42 hondo eggs and counting.Seven have laid and I have 24 more to go.

well, i think you might out-produce me this year: you've got 31 females, if i read correctly, that are going to lay. I've got 43, so far only 40 have laid. But if i had to predict, based on how the breedings have gone, i'd anticipate only maybe 60% of the eggs being good.

What do i base that on? A couple things:
1) I had females i must have caught late in their window of opportunity that only bred once and then stopped accepting the male's advances when they were put together again later.
2) I had a few females that didn't eat aggressively til a month or so out of brumation and only then started breeding, not the usual productive cycle.
3) And lastly, more than ever of my females bred after only one post-brumation shed, and in the past i've gotten consistently good results from females that bred after their second sheds, but only so-so results of the ones that only shed once before breeding--they lay slugs, or resorb their eggs, or their clutches have lower fertility.

(I TRY to wait for a second shed but sometimes females go five, six, seven weeks after their first sheds and don't go into a shed again...they seem to be postponing the shed in order to breed...so rather than miss their window of opp completely i go ahead and breed them...but in the past it's been the OTHERS, that rushed quickly from shed 1 to shed 2 and then bred, that seemed to be the best producers.

Just as i learned a LOT about the pyros from my mistakes last year, and am having a great year with them this year, I suspect i'll gain some new insights into the hondos this year too, and do even better next year. It'll be interesting to see how closely my egg-fertility guesstimate pans out. I'll know in about a month.

(with my pyros this year 64 of 76 eggs were good, or about 84%. And if you take out the two earliest clutches, with all 7 eggs slugs, 64 of 69 were good, or almost 93%. And some females appear to be compelled to double clutch. I don't know whether any of those eggs will be good, i'm putting the ones that ovulate again back with the males, but i'm not seeing much action: the fertility may have to do as much with retained sperm as with the males' followup actions.) But with a big group of hondurans like i have, i'd kill for 93% fertility any day!

peace
terry