Pastel Butter x Spider (Maternal Incubation)

good job:gj:
Congrats!!

Thanks everyone. :) The last little baby looks to be a female pastel butter, so she will be my holdback.

https://scontent-b-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/...30799189_o.jpg

I am so pleased that the MI ended up going through without any major issues. I hope that this thread will be helpful and inspiring to people who want to try maternal incubation themselves.

I won't be doing MI again until next year, but I plan to do it with every clutch (dependent on the females of course) from now on.

Congrats on the babies! You had great odds this clutch

Thank you for documenting this, it was very helpful, and great of you to take the time to do so. Congrats on your babies!

Wow that is an amazing clutch of babies. Congratulations! And that pastel butter girl is a sweet holdback. Maybe a real Queenbee next year :D

One last update. I was able to get a picture of my holdback girl in the middle of her first shed. I am so happy that all of the babies turned out healthy and strong.

I'm really looking forward to doing maternal incubation again next season, documenting things, and sharing the journey with everyone.

https://scontent-a-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/...77915301_o.jpg

This was an amazing journey to watch unfold! Thank you so much for sharing with us :)

Congratulations :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by meowmeowkazoo

I'm starting to transition more to pinstripe stuff, and I'm hoping for a three gene male from my pastel butter x leopard clutch.

---

Great answer. Have a direction and focus for your collection and stick with it. I think other people have a very hard time not holding back the 'most valuable' animals just because they have more genes. Selective breeding for quality and focus is the way to go! Congrats

Congrats on a beautiful clutch!

However in my opinion this entire thread makes maternal incubation seem complicated, risky, and elaborate, not to mention time consuming. I can assure you and everyone that is reading this thread that maternal incubation is simple and can/should be much more hands off than this. I must add that I didn't read all 21 pages of the thread, and I'm not an expert but I have successfully hatched out my last 8 clutches using maternal incubation and to my surprise have lost 0 eggs.

It's really quite simple for me so I'll let you know what's been successful for me and I maybe you will find some of the information helpful in the future.

1. Right when the female is about to drop her eggs I take her out of her tub and clean it, putting nothing back into the tub except her water dish (no substrate).

2. She lays her eggs right on the bottom of the plastic tub and as soon as I discover this (usually the same day) I do one of two things. I will either take her off the eggs and put moist cypress mulch in the tub with the eggs WITHOUT them touching the eggs to avoid the eggs getting too wet OR I will just put cypress mulch in with her while she is wrapping the eggs....but then you risk getting bit so I just take her out. That way I can just count the eggs and remove the slugs. I then just put her back in with the eggs and the newly added cypress mulch. She ALWAYS re-wraps the eggs. If you are uncomfortable with this idea then that why the second option is not to remove her when you put the cypress mulch in.

3. This is the easy part. Just WAIT. Don't worry about the eggs. Don't worry about the mother. She's got this! If you want to try and offer her food, go ahead....but she doesn't need to eat. If you think that her not eating for a few months is going to affect her ability to gain size enough for next season, I would say that you are wrong. Her feeding response after the eggs hatch will be INTENSE and she will gain weight back just fine.

4. If you are patient enough, the eggs will hatch perfectly every time!

The only issue I have every encountered is that the eggs developed too much moisture while mom was laying on them, almost like they were sitting in a puddle of water. So when this happened and it only happened once, I just put some paper towels under the eggs to soak up the water and reduced to humidity a touch.

I just think that you were a bit too worried! It's hard not to be when it comes to something you are so passionate about. Maternal incubation is all about letting the mother and nature do what it's supposed to do....without us....right? So I just figure let's let them take care of things as much as they can. It's worked for me.

I'm glad they all ended up hatching successfully! Hopefully you can have a less stressful/complicated experience next year!

Thanks for that post, it has some excellent advice in it that I wish I had seen before I attempted this, LOL. ;)

I realize that me documenting every little concern and fear I had may make maternal incubation seem complicated and risky, but my purpose in doing that was simply so that other people who might experience the same fears would be a little reassured that somebody else has gone through it, and so that any mistakes I made could be learned from.

I went through your list and added a few comments that might help people reading the thread, as well.

1. With Charlotte, I added the substrate shortly before she was due to lay eggs, and this seemed to work fairly well. I simply made a large circle of "blank" space for her to lay the eggs on, although next time I may just leave a large square in the back of the tub for her instead.

2. Humidity is tricky, and I get the feeling that your humidity in North Carolina is a fair amount higher than my humidity is in Utah. I think it's pretty important for everyone who wants to try MI to see where their snake room is at as far as humidity goes. Generally too much humidity will be worse for the eggs than too little, but I also think that my low humidity made the shells on two of the eggs a bit too tough for the hatchlings to break out of. It's important to get the humidity figured out BEFORE the female lays eggs, otherwise you'll spend the entire time battling it like I did.

3. While I knew that females can go without food while they incubate, a big part of the reason I offered food was because people said they "won't" eat while on eggs, and I wanted to prove that wrong. The other reason was because I wanted Charlotte to have that extra energy after 60 days of not eating and then laying the eggs. It was pretty neat to see how she hunted prey without leaving or harming the eggs.

And yeah, it was very hard not to worry, especially because of my struggles keeping the humidity high enough. There's not a lot of information available on maternal incubation, so I was largely playing it by ear. You should consider making a thread on your experience with MI with some pictures. It would be very helpful to people, I'm sure. :gj: