This year I am preforming a research project on my ball pythons. We are using two incubators and incubating at 91F and 86F to see if their are any differences in vigor, incubation time, size, sex or growth rate in the first 30 days between the hatchlings incubated at the different temps. We are splitting each clutch into part A 86F incubation and part B 91F incubation.
I weighed the bone dry vermiculite 280g and added 366g water for each clutch. I like this level of wetness normally but I would normally adjust through out incubation as needed for each clutch. But with this experiment it is a constant so I can't change it. But it is alittle wet and the eggs in the 86F have not even started to dimple because they have absorbed alot of water. So when the babies pipped in 91F incubator last night I placed 1in slits in the 86F eggs to allow alittle of the albumin to leak out so the babies can emerge when they want to.
Ok so there's the background, anyway last night the eggs incubated at 91F pipped on day 59 and the first pipper was an albino. After checking the other eggs we have 1 het and 4 albinos from a het to albino pairing!
I will post more pics to come. If anyone is interested in the outcome of this project it will be running until the last hatchling of the season is 30days old so pm me and i will put you on an email list for the final write up. I hope that the science will be good enough that I can publish it.
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