Well, I had a feeling that something was probably wrong with
my Diamond Python clutch when the one egg was pipping prematurely
(at 45 days of incubation) for this taxon on this past Tuesday.
In fact, I was already worried a couple of days prior to that
when I noticed more "caving" and "spotting" than would be normal.
Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed last night.
The excessive "caving" and "spotting" at 45 days was what
I was afraid it was -- indicative of late-term egg death. The
one hatchling that managed to pip his/her egg on Tuesday was
obviously stressed due to the deteriorating condition of the
egg. When I peeked at him at that time I detected very little
motion, and I detected no motion at all in the other 9 eggs when
I very carefully manually pipped them that same evening. Still,
I decided to give them all the benefit of the doubt until I
opened the egg tray last night and there was no longer any doubt.
Apparently, most of babies died in their eggs at perhaps
around 75 to 80 percent of the way through development. While
I can't be certain of the cause, it looked like the structures
of the eggs had simply ceased to sustain any further development
of the babies. Frankly, it's amazing to me that the one baby
had managed to pip his/her egg at all. I've seen this happen to
just a few eggs in an occasional clutch with other taxa, but
never before to an entire clutch. It's very disappointing, but
there's nothing that could have prevented it in this instance.
My incubators are expensive, digitally controlled units in
which I have incubated many clutches successfully over a number
of years. The incubation temperatures and humidity were
optimum. The Coastal Carpet clutch hatched successfully on
Monday in the same incubator, and those babies are just fine.
The Children's Python and Northwestern Carpet Python clutches
are still incubating in there and still seem to be progressing
successfully so far. It should be noted that the eggs in this
Diamond Python clutch were not nearly as well calcified as the
eggs in the other clutches, but otherwise there's no plausible
explanation really. This clutch just simply wasn't meant to be.
It's a shame, because it looked like they would have been nice.
This was the first breeding of the two adult Diamond Pythons
that produced this clutch. The female is seven years old and
the male is four years old, and both are really sharp looking
animals. At least now I know that they are fertile and will
breed readily. I can always try again next year. This kind of
thing comes with the territory occasionally. In the case of
pure Diamond Pythons, there are a number of reasons why they are
high-priced and this is one of them. They're not carpet pythons.
They don't mature nearly as fast, and their husbandry is much
more challenging. They should remain expensive for some time.
Mitch Hiers
Hiers Herpetoculture -- http://www.hiersherp.com
mailto:mitch@hiersherp.com
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