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After last year's LOUSY season with my pyros (operator error LOL) i've had a very good year in 04. I just tallied the results (there's still another clutch or two to be laid) and thought the data would be interesting here:

--64 of 76 eggs were good, or about 84%.

--if you don't count the first two clutches (7 eggs, all slugs), 64 of 69 of the subsequent eggs were good, or almost 93%.

--if you don't count the first two clutches, nine of subsequent 14 clutches were 100% fertile

--of the five clutches that were not 100% fertile (not counting the first two clutches of slugs) each of the five had only a single egg that was not good, so the positive resutls were pretty widespread.

(I DO realize some eggs might go bad as the season progresses, that always seems to happen; these counts are based on appearances when the clutches were laid. On the plus side, it's been three weeks since the good clutches began appearing and so far no eggs have gone bad.)

--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.

--fwiw, i think the reason i did poorly last year and well this year was timing. Last year i waited for the females to shed before putting them with males. Major mistake. This year i routinely moved the females to males beginning the first week after they were warmed. All but one bred before her first shed.

peace
terry

Thanks for the great info. BTW, what are the ages of your breeding stock?

>>Thanks for the great info. BTW, what are the ages of your breeding stock?

the females that laid successfully this year ranged from 1996 hatch to 2001 hatch.

My hypo het/albino male is an 02 hatch and fathered 3 clutches with 15 of 16 eggs good.

I doubled-up the two albino males, using them both with the females i wanted bred X albino. Fertility was good from those clutches. One male is a 2000 hatch, the other an 02. I saw good sperm samples from both males.

The hypoerythristic (anery) male is of uncertain age but very probably pre-96. The first two females bred x him slugged out, and subsequent clutches had very good fertility.

terry

Terry,

Good feedback, the only poor year I can recall having low fertility and poor egg production with mt. kings was my first attempt at breeding them. They were all 2 yrs of age and had only been cooled for aprox 2 months at 60-65 degrees. I had 0 good eggs with a few females not even producing slugs. This was a group of four types of mt kings with 2.2-2.4 in each group. pyro woodini was one of the groups with the other 3 being zonata.

In following 6 or 7 seasons the production and fertility was exceptionaly good. The only difference being all were cooled for 3-4 months at 48-55 degrees, and were at least 3 yrs of age. Pairs were maintained together year round seperated only for feeding and egglaying. There were 2 or 3 years where I used a refridgerator for cooling and in a some cases did have pairs seperated during the cooling period. But when they were warmed they were put back together on day 1. At some point I added a small group of pyro pyro's and recall one of the females from that group double cluthing, she did this at 2 yrs of age! That was the first and only time I have been able to double cluth a mt king.

Tad