Well.....it finally happened.
This year was the first year that my one female Biak Green Tree was large enough and old enough to breed. My male was smaller but I thought he would do the job. So, I started cooling my trio back in Oct 2003 along with the rest of my pythons. Cooling was done in the exact same way as all my other pythons in that their heat was shut off at night and they were allowed to drop down to room temperature which is in around 68-70F.
It turned out that my male was too young/small to breed so I sent my female over to Lance and Peggy Townsand to breed to their male in the middle of Feb 2004. She was bred and they returned her to me on March 29th 2004. It was at this time that she ovulated. She kind of threw me off as she didn't shed after she ovulated. She ovulated March 29th and laid eggs May 4th without shedding inbetween......and since she wasn't all that big and was getting a little smaller because she was off food I was starting to second guess if she was even gravid to begin with.
At any rate I gave her a next box on the weekend and since everyone told me to let her maturnally incubate the eggs I was going to allow her to do so..........However, things didn't go as planned. This would have been the first female I was going to let maturnally incubate the eggs as I didn't have an incubator set up for GTP eggs......I've only got my ball/blood python incubators that are sitting at 90F which is too hot for GTP's.
I was sitting at my computer and looked over into her cage and noticed that she had decided not to lay her eggs in the nest box.....she had decided to spread them over the heat tape at the back of the cage.
Since I was going to allow her to maturnally incubate the eggs I gave her a bigger nest box, picked up her and the eggs and put them in the nest box.
This of course did not work. She sat on top of them and was defensive but she definately wasn't going to maternally incubate them.
So, I whipped up an incubator using a cooler, heat tape, fan and helix basic system. I decided to go with the no substate method above open water. Here are what the eggs looked like once I removed them from the "nest box".
The eggs in the deli cup (with no lid) was placed in a rubbermaid with water in the bottom. The deli cups were raised up using upside down water dishes.
This is what the whole setup looks like. A lid is placed over the rubbermaid to allow the eggs to be in a sealed container. Their is also a thermometer wedged inbetween 2 eggs so I know exactly what the temps of the eggs are.
I'm incubating the eggs at 30.5C (or 87.3F) and I won't be fluctuating the temperatures..........it'll be 30.5C during the entire duration of incubation. In my experience the more you mess with the eggs the more you screw them up.
I just thought I'd share my experience.......Hopefully these guys hatch.
Corey Woods
