Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My female henkels is eating her eggs then hopelessly nesting about 1 week later. Sad.

This has happened several times. Let me first note that I bought her with a tail that flops over her back and is twised. Typically I'll come home and find 2 smudges of calcium / shell on a wall. Once I witnesed her eat an egg. Other times she will haphazardly slap a egg on the glass and leave it. With these, in-cage incubation has always failed. I've read here that unburied eggs are generally infertile.

Here's the thing -- with the last 3 of these failure egg-layings I've observed her nesting almost exactly 1 week later. She digs a hole, sits in it, and even carefully covers up her work.

So I'm thinking the eggs might be fertile and her tail injury / issue somehow forces her to lay early, in some traumatic way.?

Hopefully she's simply not getting fertilized by the male and just going through the motions / cycle, but I really don't know if female reptiles have an ovary cycle like this.

Its like she's trying so hard but just has the order backwards!

if the eggs were fertile she would lay them, and not stick them to the wall, eating the eggs is a way for her to gain an uneeded loss of calcium back. as for the burying " no eggs" that is a bit strange, but i've seen something quite similar with my female lineatus. she'll lay some inferts, and a few weeks later i'll walk in to look at her with her whole back end buried, only to get excited and find nothing lingering below after she leaves.

i think the broken tail thing might be your first bad sign, cuz i had a female crash very rapidly pretty recently and the first thing that happened was that her tail flopped. but obviously yours has had that for a while, so perhaps she got over whatever was making her ill. but as andrew said, it's not uncommon for inferts to be eaten. as for the nesting behavior....dont know what to say other than it sounds pretty peculiar.
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-Mike Martin
North Carolina

Thanks for getting back to me folks. I just wish I had gotten on here sooner.

Yeah the lineatus' behavior sounds like the same thing as mine. I've never observed them mating or even being rowdy so the eggs probably are infertile.

So now here's the real questions.

Will a female eventually crash from even infertile egg production? If so, how do I get her to stop so she can recover? If not, how do I get some fertilization going, so to speak?

I've been to the vet and it costs about $400 for x-rays for both the tail and potential calcium deposits in the ovaries(?). I told the vet this was too much and she kinda took the stance of "well then I cant do anything for you". I felt like saying "ok then I guess I'll just chuck her in the garbage."

When she lays these eggs for nothing its like I'm wasting precious (and rare) DNA. It should have a chance to come to life but instead I'm scraping it off the sides of the cage and, well, chucking it in the garbage.

you need to first off get to vets office because no one on here is going to be able to answer you truthfully because we are hobbyists and not vets. Secondly, stop fretting over eggs that don't have a chance to begin with. Its an egg is laid on a wall, its infertile. seriously, its not wasting DNA thats rare. whats wasting DNA is people with perfectly good breedable animals who are not breeding them.

jason

your animal shouldnt crash as a result of laying infertile eggs. many times, if you leave the eggs behind in the cage with them, they will be consumed, giving the animal the opportunity to resorb the energy that went into forming the egg. also, just make sure that you supplement the diet for your geckos. im not sure about lineatus, but if they're anything like the other larger uroplatus, you can probably find the calcium reserves which can sometimes be seen as swellings at the back of the jaw, on the underside of the head.
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-Mike Martin
North Carolina

my female linniatus does have calcium deposits like a normal uro. hope this helps.

There are some awesome people here, very knowledgable and always willing to try and help.

We understand your frustration, as we have all been there, and some are still there (ME TOO)

It took my female over a year to finally lay fertile eggs, I went throught the same things your experiencing, eggs layed on branches, glass, all infertiles.

It takes time, use this time to condition your female, give her plenty of extra calcium, good food , well gutloaded insects, fresh water, and soon she will lay fertile eggs. Sometimes the males can be LAZY, I have 2 males in with my one female.

Anyway best wishes, relax, it will happen!
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PHEve / Eve

Contact PHEve

Thanks for the welcome and the encouragement. I'll keep you folks posted -- btw the female henk just shed cleanly and looks great!

Louis

i have a female mossy who did the same thing this past season. she layed six clutches of infertile eggs(they were all good looking eggs, almost perfectly round) ontop of corkbark or on the glass. Five to six days after she would lay the second egg, she would go to her egglayin g spot and dig a hole and sit in it while clutching her two hind legs together as if she was holding something. i know for a fact that she was not nutritionally deficient in any way. my male isnt mating with her. i m not sure if the male has something wrong with his hemipene because it is always hanging out like a dried piece of skin.

that sounds like an everted hemipene. It should be surgically removed by a veterinarian if possible. I don't know if you have a vet in your area that would be willing and/or capable of doing something like that.

If its dried up, it will probably get dry gangrene and fall off eventually, provided it doesn't get other side effects in the meantime.

Once the everted hemipene has healed, hopefully he'll breed again? I know snakes can breed with only a single hemipene because my boyfriends male ball python had the same problem and the everted hemipene was removed.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon sometimes happens with all Uros I have bred. Sometimes they start laying good eggs, sometimes they never do.
The reason is not clear, I've seen it in wc and cb animals.

If they start laying good eggs, the duds and "empty-nesting" might still
happen at the start and end of the breeding season.

Neil Meister

yeah, after this season,(laying all those duds) that female stopped eating. i put her in a cage by herself, it was slightly warmer but more humid. after about a week she just dropped her tail without any physical disturbances. a couple days later she started to eat and now shes eating like normal and her tails growing back fast. i think her dropping her tail was due to the warmer temp, climaxing in the mid 80s. i have another female[mossy] that stopped eating right after this breeding season, around a month and a half ago(i aquired her in may, she was in poor condition, but she turned around and did well for a while). Shes getting thinner but she will take baby food mixed with vitamins and calcium. they both stopped eating around the same time, and they were housed together at the time.