egg transport......

hi guys. i need advise on which is safer, transport a gravid ball or wait for her to lay then transport the egss....

for those curious as to why i am even thinking about transporting such precious cargo, i'll be incubating at my friend's facility which is about an hour away. his incubator has cooling and heating control. i have a diy incubator, but it can only heat up and not cool down. with the kind of summer we are having (i've recorded peak ambient temp at 35 C, so far), i'm afraid that the eggs will overheat if there's no control on bring temps down. i'm blasting the herp room with a fan blowing over a tub of water to help keep down temps, i see my snakes cope by doing a lot of soaking, except foor momma snake, she is coiled over the moist moss i've provided.

i hope to install an a/c in the herp room in preparation for next year in case the temps get crazy high again, but for now the emergency measure is to incubate at a better facility. so please help me choose. she's on day 20 after POS, i think.

I incubated some eggs for a buddy last season. Rather than stress the females, we waited until they laid at his place. I had him place the eggs in a tub and covered them with completely with vermiculite. He drove the 30 mins to my house where we removed them from the container and set them up with a proper egg box setup. I figured covering them completely would lessen the likelihood of the eggs moving around during transport. All the eggs hatched without any problems.

thank you very much. good idea about burying the eggs for transport. did he separate the eggs or put vermiculite over the whole bunch? i do not want to disturb the orientation, i've extracted eggs from turtle and lizard nests because i can gently pick them out one by one, but i imagine it can be tricky to dig out a whole clump of python eggs.

x 2 on transporting the eggs not the gravid female.

I always separate eggs.


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Thanks guys. I'll be waiting for her to lay and move the eggs as recommended.

I don't separate my eggs until they're about 1 or 2 days away from hatching. I leave them how I find them. He did it the exact same way that I do. Hope it helps, and good luck.

What is the best way to separate eggs, out of curiousity?

Very carefully!!! I personally only separate the eggs if they are very lightly stuck together. I usually just keep the clumped together and use a bigger box if I need to keep the eggs from touching the sides or lid. I use either a 6 or 15qt sterilite tub. I separate the eggs only a day or 2 prior to hatch, they tend to almost fall apart from each other at that point. Others do separate them, I just don't want to tear an egg. If it doesn't separate with minimal effort, I leave it.