Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My female is just about 6 months old, and she finally laid her first batch of infertile eggs, It took her almost 3 weeks of digging around the cage, while i experimented with laying boxes before she finally laid them christmas eve. I was getting worried hat she was holding them too long and would become egg-bound. She showed Receptive/gravid coloration for about a month, and for the past weeks she was constantly digging up the 5 inches of substrate and differnt laying boxes of moist vermiculite. X-mas eve she showed very intense colors while laying in the egg box, the next morning i found 42 semi-hard eggs! Is that any indication of how many she will lay when i do breed in about another 6 months?

That's a lot of eggs!
You said that she laid them in the egglaying box...did she bury them?

You asked..."Is that any indication of how many she will lay when i do breed in about another 6 months?" Yes it is. (I'm glad to hear that you don't plan to mate her until she is over a year of age.) I don't like to see mine lay a large clutch and have been able to keep the clutches in the 20's by controlling the temperature and the amount of food I feed my females. (I do use well-gutloaded insects and fruits and greens and veggies to feed them.)

Its not an easy thing to explain and not easy to do either....but I will do my best to explain what I do. For the first week to 10 days after the female lays her eggs, I feed her well to allow her to recover from the egglaying experience. I then cut the number of insects per feeding down quite a bit. (I don't want to starve her...just stop her from producing too many eggs!) Once I know that she is starting to produce the eggs again, I feed her more to make sure that the eggs she is then working on are going to get all the nutrients that they need. One of the hard things in this procedure is knowing WHEN to start to feed her more again. Its something that time and experience will teach you.

Doing it this way, I have kept the clutches to 20-25 eggs and have had almost 100% hatch rate and at the end of a month after hatching almost all the babies are still alive. Most of my females live to well over the three years of age mark...in fact the last three have lived to be over 7 years of age.

As I said, I gutload my insects. I also provide the female with greens, veggies, fruits and a pothos plant (well-washed on both sides of the leaves).

Hope this helps!