After 5 years, I just got eggs this year. I started out with 0.0.2 and as they grew I could see they were females. 3 years ago I got 0.0.3 and as they grew I could see that my colony was 1.4. I bought two surplus males and they started breeding activity. One day a few weeks ago the oyster substrate that I use had craters in it. I put in a nesting box and soon found one egg in there, but another was laid on the surface, under hide box. I set up the eggs in pretty dry vermiculite and incubated them at 85 degrees and today one had hatched! I'm pumped.
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Egyptian hatching
juswanderin
Sep 09, 2008 02:33 PM
Replies (3)
lizardlance77
Sep 09, 2008 03:31 PM
Post a Pic if you can. We all love Egyptian Torts.
Lizard Lance
egyptiandan
Sep 14, 2008 06:28 PM
How long was your incubation period? It sounds like it was just "a couple of weeks".
Danny
juswanderin
Sep 15, 2008 05:59 PM
Here's what happened for the incubation time: I noticed that one female was leaving craters in the oyster substrate. I put a nest box in there of some sand and clay and she got in and started to dig out a nest. A day or so later I carefully combed out the sand and found a single egg. This was about August 4th. I have a few hide boxes in there- plastic tubs with newspaper covering them and cut fringes of newspaper over the entrance to make it like a plant that they enter. I moved a hide box and found an egg on the surface. That was the second egg I found. That same day I looked carefully over the entire enclosure (4X8 with UVB lights in some areas and heat lamps in others) and found another egg which was partially buried. The eggs were all placed in a perlite box and incubated at around 85 degrees. These are fairly young animals: 4.3 in number and the 2 oldest females are only 5 years old and 2 older males only 3 years old. I wasn't sure that they were fertile and one egg candled as pale yellow, never had any vessels. It "went bad" while two looked fine, becoming more calcified. I was surprised to find there had been a hatchling and can only conclude that one egg survived for a month or more in the enclosure and did just fine. So, one did hatch "in a few weeks" as measured by when I found it but I was really surprised when it did because of the implication that it survived in the enclosure for weeks.
