I only had one die early on and it was one that was layed a little later and I caught it when it had stuck to the snakes basking shelf and a later of the shell peeled away.

I am not ruling out other causes for some of the eggs dieing (and I am glad to have the majority hatch), and I am sure my stresses messing with some of them was a cause too, but there will be some subtle changes I will be making to the diet of the female next year to see if it makes a little difference.

Over all, I really am not worried about the way the eggs turned out and I am glad I have this info to document for other people wanting to work with them.

I realize they might be a little harder than some of the other Latin American colubrid eggs I am familiar with, but Bryan (who took the pictures) would varify that some of these were shockingly tough and even quite difficult to manually pip. One egg that did hatch even bulged a lump in the bottom and I would suspect it was partly to do with the difficulty the rest of the egg had in swelling (or it had a little layer peeled away when I removed the egg from the cage, and this one just got lucky and made it...or a combination of each).

Again, not something I am too worried about for the future even if the next clutch looks exactly the same.

[ Reply To This Message ] [ Subscribe to this Thread ] [ Show Entire Thread ]