Reptile & Amphibian Forums

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Pleas pay attention here as I will reveal things you may not know or understand yet.

Option no1
Usually egg production starts with a healthy female, if the resources (food,heat,water) available to her are low she will produce little or not at all. This is simple enough to understand.

Option no2
Now lets say it’s a good year and life is blooming, plants and insects every where in profusion, this same female will have plenty to support for egg production and will lay a large clutch, so far this is easy to understand.

Option no3
Now this female is in your care, you are providing her with all the best options she can ever hope for, let’s see what happens?
But first let me remind you that your husbandry skills are still at option no1 and you are still not fully understanding option no3 yet, but you will soon enough.
Ok this female is starting to cycle at regular intervals like clockwork, she is so constant that you can predict her nesting day, this in turns allows you fine tune your husbandry furthermore (nesting options).

When you feel like your at the top of your game, that you know all about breeding your dragons, then you realise its only the beginning.

Option no4
Many years ago I opened up one producing female, I was amassed to see a full clutch of ¾ developed ovum’s next to an other cultch of tiny little developing ovum’s, I remember thinking how exceptional this female was to be producing 2 alternative clutches at the same time, this meant that by the time she would have nested the second clutch would have been at least ¾ in size if not more?

Then it occurred to me that this female was the lest productive in a trio, what about the most prolific female in the trio? I just needed to know, sorry for those this may offend but be warned I study reptiles and don’t see them as pets like most of you guys, so pleas forgive me if this is to much for you.
I dissected the Alfa female the day she nested and sure enough she was nursing 2 more clutches, first was ¾ in size and the other was 1/8 in size both numbering in the 20s.

Sins then I understood that all is related to support, lizards have amazing abilities far beyond what we expect from them.
This information you will not find anywhere, at least not that I know about, I am reserving this for my up coming publication. But now that you know about this, can you see the possibilities?

Rgds

This is something I have also observed. Not in the same means as you perhaps, but still I have seen this. I had a female that died with a fully developed clutch, eggbound. I opened her in hopes of saving the eggs. Much to my surprise there were not only the clutch of ripe eggs but there were strings of much smaller eggs already developing behind those. I have discussed this with a couple of other breeders who have also saved eggs from deceased females and noted the same in those cases.

I have always been impressed with the reproduction capabilities of these animals! Now I just need to get my armata going!

regards,
Marcia
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Marcia - FroggieB Dragons
www.froggieb.com/MHDHome.html

I am glad you have seen this, as now you know where I am coming from.

I feel that you will see far less egg bond females and a lot more good nesting in a near future.

I am willing to bet on your armata success, no worries!

Soon enough you will be posting photos of little babies.
Rgds

I sure hope so! I am a bit worried about my females though. They are all showing great color and the largest, even though she isn't colorful, looks like jewels when I take her out. Her scales glisten! But she is so fat! I can't get any of the animals in her viv to eat from the feeding tongs except for her. She doesn't need to be hand fed! So, I put plenty of feeders in the bowl for all of the animals and of course she pigs out. But then there will be enough for the others when she is done. Otherwise the rest are thin as rails and dark. So, with her being what I consider obese the others are very nice looking and showing great colors.

I doubt that she will breed being so fat and worry that if she did she would have problems with egg binding.

Any thoughs or insight on this?

By the way, I do have 2 vivs set up with armata. This group is the 1.3 and is the one with the 40watt bulb basking spot over the vines on the top corner. I don't see them using it much but then I am not home most of the day. I check and do my chores in the morning an check again in the evening.

The other viv does not have the basking spot and the animals don't seem to be eating nearly as much and are thinner and darker.

Marcia
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Marcia - FroggieB Dragons
www.froggieb.com/MHDHome.html

Of course I can help!

Learn to read your lizards, start with a simple observation technique.
Watch your lizards when they are sleeping, you want to look at the rhythm of there inflating thorax , this tells you about there metabolism.
nighttimes should be slow and relaxed.

Then watch this in daytime, you should see a significant increase, a faster rhythm= faster metabolism. if not then your lizard needs a wormer gradient.

A simple way to see witch temps gets them pumping, hang a 65w flood in your tank, switch it on and let the temps go up in the low 90s, you should see your lizards hart rate increase as they heat up, take temperature readings at this point, you now have an approximate thermal preference.

All you need to do now is adjust your set up.

In some of my cages a 65w flood goes on 1h at noon every day, this really gets the fuzzy eaters going.