Reptile & Amphibian Forums

we bought a female lizard for our male. i've split the 40 gal breeder tank in 1/2 (longwise) with hardware wire in frame. the female was obviously tooting eggs when she arrived but now she doesn't seem to be. she has dug several tunnels, one she covered up (it was about the size of a quarter. the other tunnels are not closed up. it would be my guess she has buried her eggs.

is it okay to put her in w/ the male and leave the partition up to safeguard possible eggs for the 30 day incubation?

thx
ps. can't post photos until we replace broken camera

You can't leave in eggs for fertilization anyway. Male schmale, even the mom'll eat a hatchling. So if she lays, they've got to come out. (Plus, you can't just leave their tank as moist as an incubator. The great outdoors has drainage. A few inches of sand in a fish tank don't. You can use a little plastic storage tub for eggs, though. I've got boys I hatched that way last year who are now as big as and bigger than their father.)

They MIGHT be stressed by being exposed to each other, and if so you will have to deal with the situation immediately, with possibilities up to and including the puchase of a second tank.

However, as is, there's no "might" about it. They ARE stressed by having less than 2 square feet per lizard. I've seen a gravid female stop running about 2 feet away from my TV-watching chair and then in one hop fly right up onto it. Unless the male is big and the female is little, I think excessive confinement is the biggest evil here.
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0.1 2006 Western Hognose (Bebe)
0.1 age unknown Cane Toad (Hengo)
1.0 2006 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)
1.0 2006 Madagascan Speckled "Hognose" (Sigmund)
1.0 2008 Bullsnake (Winkle)
1.2 2008 Eastern Collared Lizards (Pancho, Lupe, and Chica)
2.0 2009 Eastern Collared Lizards (Cesar and Nino)

I meant to say "can't leave them in for incubation," obviously, since fertilization is internal. But the main point, which was to try them together in order to mazimize their space, still stands. Your biggest quarrantine issue is mites, which can spread from one half of a tank to the other anyway...
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0.1 2006 Western Hognose (Bebe)
0.1 age unknown Cane Toad (Hengo)
1.0 2006 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)
1.0 2006 Madagascan Speckled "Hognose" (Sigmund)
1.0 2008 Bullsnake (Winkle)
1.2 2008 Eastern Collared Lizards (Pancho, Lupe, and Chica)
2.0 2009 Eastern Collared Lizards (Cesar and Nino)

k. THanks for all the help, but i'm still unclear.

we dug through the sand and no eggs. if we found them, we don't have an incubator and we've tried with a homemade chicken egg incubator with very limited success. and, we don't want to spend $50 on an egg incubator when we can't run it. it seems the female would find the right place.

the female has buried herself below the sand. about 3" deep. she dug herself out this morning, then buried herself again. she is loosing weight. we offer crickets and she shows a little interest but doesn't finish the chase, that we notice anyhow.

if we decide the time for her to lay eggs is over, and we want to dig out her burrow and look for some (new place where we haven't dug) can i put her w/ the male? my original question is more about her safety. he is very interested in her and i wonder if it is out of wanting to eat her. if we do this, and going by our past history with a home-made incubator, we'll just kill the eggs by taking them out.

either way, is it safe for the female, and even healthy to be with the male? it seems mating season would be over, but maybe he'll not care and be aggressive

You cannot add her to the male until after keeping her in quarantine for 30 to 60 days to ensure she is disease, tick, and mite free. The best way to do this is to provide her a 20gallon tank with the proper lighting and substrate, such as play sand or critter carpet. She might also be digging and hiding those burrows for her hydration needs, I would recommend a soak in room temperature water and not in the sunlight.

She is clearly stressed from the loss of weight and appetite so put her into the seperate habitat away from the male. Provide proper lighting, water, and food with a couple of hiding areas.

Was she clearly carrying eggs when you purchased her?? If she is carrying eggs when you bought her she might be 'egg bound' due to the stress of her current living quarters. Egg binding means that the eggs have become a mass and she is unable to pass them or lay them and that can kill her.

Don't concern yourself with the possibility of eggs this year and concern yourself with her immediate health and quarantine.

my question was more geared towards them fighting. do males and females cohabit-ate well this time of year?

and she must have reabsorbed her eggs or laid them. she's dug maybe ten tunnels on her side. or one huge labyrinth with ten openings. we'll probably put them together after double checking with a local person (who bred these beauties for years), if we can find him. how far down are these eggs? the sand is now ~8" deep; the deepest i've seen her dig is 6" (on other side) and there is a heating pad underneath.

please, no psycho fatalist answers making this seem difficult.

I would love you to quarrantine the female in an appropriate sized cage while still giving the male a full amount of space as well. However, you have not chosen to do that, in spite of obviously knowing what the suggested minimum WAS, right up until the moment that it became slightly inconvenient for you... which is why I tried to play the room I was in, rather than blow a lot of hot air about what somebody who was actually willing to spend a little money on a 20 dollar "junk lizard" would do.

This isn't me making things difficult, this is you buying two lizards for one minimal-sized tank and then getting cold feet (right when there were free hatchlings involved) and chopping their moving space in half. If suggesting that at this point you should have chosen the least of at least three evils makes me a psycho fatalist, then so be it.

If it makes you feel better, I've also been the wishy-washy guy who buys animals faster than he is actually ready to house them. But eventually I decided "psycho fatalist" had a more fun ring to it.

My first response to you was obviously very upsetting so I will try to simplify the answers this time, in order to not make this seem difficult:

Big male fight little female. If female be close to male size, though, then male love female. Owner have to be careful both eat. Love or not, strongest lizard still be greedy.

Me think lizard want lay eggs deep down, but deep down too hot. So she lay them in dryer level. Eggs dry out and die. Or, she dig down deep and eggs over-heat. In that case, eggs still dead. Nothing to dig for.

Eggs dead. Lizards need more room. If no want put lizards together, maybe good if breeder who want make more lizards be able to afford second tank. As they say in day when this dialect invented: perform gottagopupu ritual or get off volcano edge. Meanwhile, both lizard that you actually have still need room.

Me go now. Me party with cave-Sartre.
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0.1 2006 Western Hognose (Bebe)
0.1 age unknown Cane Toad (Hengo)
1.0 2006 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)
1.0 2006 Madagascan Speckled "Hognose" (Sigmund)
1.0 2008 Bullsnake (Winkle)
1.2 2008 Eastern Collared Lizards (Pancho, Lupe, and Chica)
2.0 2009 Eastern Collared Lizards (Cesar and Nino)

Wow. I've been sparse around here. Was trying to catch up on what people have posted. This thread.....what can I say....I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I do like the "perform gottagopupu ritual or get off volcano edge" line. But still, this doesn't seem like a nice thread. I'm surprised to see this in the Collared community here. It used to be such a nice place.

I just had to comment. I for one, believe we should try to be helpful with "newbies" who are clearly just seeking advice. I'm surprised no one else had anything more helpful to say.

But then again, my last posting here got yanked for no apparent reason because I guess I was saying something that I shouldn't.

$&^#$%@ like this is pretty much the reason I don't hang out in any KS forums any more.

Yeah, i was looking for help and all i got was "you can't do this and must do that." what is the word, pessimistic? i thought i was going to get help from people like will willis (sp?). i too have drawn away from the forum and getting your message via my email account is the only reason i'm back. i will rarely use it in the future. if at all

i had a post get yanked, but didn't know the rule about sourcing for a vendor. it was my bad. but still, it seems the site helping me in that search would help both the site and the community. i've guessed it is b/c the site wants people to pay, which is cool, but not for me.

the female has been with the male for a long time now. the eggs disappeared from her belly and i've no idea what happened to them. the male and female have a huge labrynth under the sand and i rarely see them. only about twice a week can i grab the female before she disappears into the tunnel matrix.

in summary, it was a confusing and overall bad experience getting help on the KS forum. the female and male are happy and i'm back into planning our next backpack trip.

if you get the chance. let me know what you think about the new law disallowing people to pick up reptiles and other animals along the side of roads. i, think it is just another tax that swallows up money but will hopefully reduce the wild capture of animals but placing restrictions on it. i don't understand the entire law as what would one do if they caught a wild one as a baby and have had it for years? turn it loose? could it survive? i had a great lengthy conversation with a person near el paso. we both agree the tax will support underfunded (how can anyone say any part of our gov't is underfunded with the taxes paid, btw?) bbbbbbbut hopefully this step is a step in any direction and wild populations i've heard existed in the 60's and 70's will return.

take 'er easy...rosco