She laid!Maternal incubation.

Well my female pastel from an earlier post finally laid her eggs yesterday. 10 healthy plump eggs. pretty good for a first time girl. I have decided to do maternal incubation for this clutch so i am going to keep this thread updated throughout the process. I have her on cypress mulch to hold humidity better and also added some moist moss to the cage. I pushed the water dish slightly back in the tub so she does not have to move from the eggs to get a drink. I removed her from the eggs to place a temperature and hydrometer probe within the eggs to keep an eye on them accurately. Temp is perfect at 89. I then blocked the holes on the side of the tub to keep in humidity. I checked the eggs by candling to ensure they were all fertile(which they were) and to make sure they had adhered to the tub and each other so that they would not roll. the pictures attached are when i first saw the eggs before this process was done. I will post to this thread as she moves along in the time cycle.
http://mob1077.photobucket.com/album...g?t=1365621245
http://mob1077.photobucket.com/album...g?t=1365621241
also i would add in a word of advice not to try this with females of smaller sizes say under 2000 grams going into the breeding season. I say this because they would not be able to properly cover the eggs as this girl was big at 2400 grams and can just cover her ten eggs. Also she is in the second tub to the top of the rack.

Awesome! Congrats!

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Nice, I've wondered about this processes a bit gonna have to mark this thread :)

I plan on doing maternal incubation when my spider girl lays too. Good on you for making a thread about it! :gj:

Good luck! I hope they do well for you with the maternal incubation!

You removed her to candle and place the probes and she wrapped them again? That's awesome. I didn't know if they'd do that or not.

Best of luck!!

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yes she went right back to guarding the eggs as soon as i put her back. To my understanding as long as the scent is still present they stay in maternal mode which is why breeders clean the female and her tub really good right after they take the eggs away.

Congrats and good luck! That's a lot of eggs!

Alright it has been 10 days since she laid so id figured id do a little update. All eggs still have strong veins and are nice and plump. The temperature fluxuates from 88.4 to 89.6 depending on how she is wrapping the eggs.this is a picture of the bedding. It is half moss half cypress mulch.
[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9755ad4e.jpg[/IMG]
This is how the temperature probe hangs ou
[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...ps5df9cdde.jpg[/IMG]
And this gives an idea to the humidity(second bin from top).
[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...ps734d8e5b.jpg[/IMG]
On day 7 i misted the FRONT half which is on the opposite of the eggs to add some humidity as one eggs that sits to the outside dimpled ever so slightly.

Very cool thread, very thorough! Glad they're candling well for you and everything.

That is really neat! Ive always wanted to try the maternal incubation thing, but just kinda afraid to do it...:P Please keep us updated! And what did you breed her to?

she was bred to a pastel at first and then a lesser once he got the hang of it.

Today is day 11 and i offered her her first meal in a while. It was a f/t small/weiner rat and she took it. I belive it is important to feed during maternal incubation but much smaller meals. she ussually takes medium rats.

That's very interesting tread...
In age of commercial production of ball python morphs is really cool to see different approach.
I for sure gonna keep an eye on this one...

I'm expecting my first clutch as well but gonna do incubator in this one... on contrary I really think about doing maternal later in the year with my House Snakes..

Good Luck and Gods Speed :gj::gj::gj:

Sorry to be a broken record here, but this is very cool - definitely subscribing :P Thanks for making this thread!

Great update bud. Keep on going! I absolutely agree... keep the meals small and she will have no issues at all. Looks like you got your stuff together!

I applaud you for the incredible job you are doing for these eggs. It looks like they will do great, especially with the way you are ensuring their care. Btw just a little piece of info from my personal experience, female size and the number of eggs usually correlates with each other. My female Mocha was just about 1500 grams and she wrapped nicely.

Btw, you HAVE to get some pics when those babies start pipping....mom wrapped around her just starting to hatch babies will make for some incredibly adorable photos!

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This is great thread. How do you tag/mark a thread to follow it?

I will definitely get LOTS of pics as the babies start to come out of the eggs. only 48 more days give or take.

I'm also interested in this thread. Please document everything as best you can, I'm sure we would all love it

As I'm thinking of going the maternal incubation route, I'll definitely also be keeping an eye out! Don't forget to keep us updated.

day 20 update and theres trouble in paradise. One of the eggs id not doing as good as the others and looks squished but still has good veinsBut what has me concerned is the fact that mama doesnt quite like her role as mom anymore. I find she is almost never completly on the eggs anymore and is never coiled around them like she once was. I will be keeping a special eye on all of them. more updates as things change.

We had close to 30 clutches last year, and were able to maternally incubate all but one (one female never showed any interest in her eggs). I wouldn't necessarily get too worried about the egg that looks squished. Maternally incubated eggs don't always look as pretty as those kept in the incubator, but they seem to turn out fine anyway.

As far as mom leaving the eggs, we noticed that some of our females seemed more inclined to leave their eggs than others. From what I could tell, there seemed to be two reasons for females to move off the eggs even though they were not close to hatching. One thing is stress. We have a few shyer girls that would leave the eggs if we checked on them too much, or if there was lots of activity in the snake room. The other trigger seemed to be temps. We are in FL, so sometimes during hot summer days the ambient temp in our room gets a little hotter than normal. This seemed to cause especially the females in the top tubs where it's warmest to take a break from sitting on the eggs. But, the eggs seemed to be fine, though, since the temps and humidity in the tubs were pretty close to what an incubator would be.

we are at day 55 right now and i thought it would be the perfect time to sum up all that has happened. I started off with 10 eggs but two started to "die off" around day 20. I know it is normal to lose eggs and everything in the cage was perfect so i removed one egg that went bad as momma kindly pushed it out of the nest, while the other remained out of reach under the rest of eggs. On day 39 the unthinkable tragic event happened that claimed the life of three more eggs. I was away and my mom was taking care of the snakes for the weekend. she Noticed the mommas water dish was full of substrate and was very nasty so she put some water in a deli cup until she had time to clean the dish. Hours later she noticed the deli cup got knocked over and soaked all of the eggs on the bottom. She soaked up what she could with a towel at the time. When i got home the next day i did what i could to get rid of the remaining water without disturbing things too much. I put vermiculite in all the cracks around the eggs to soak up some water. Sadly after all my efforts three eggs went bad a few days later. This left me with 5 beautiful eggs, which started to pip today! Momma snake is FREAKING OUT! she is totally confused and flinging herself about. so i dint think I'm going to get one of those cute pictures of mom with the babies.[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...ps59ed4720.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...psbe532a95.jpg[/IMG]
First baby appears to be a lesser.I tried to get in close on his little head.

Are those little lesser noses?? SO freaking cute!

yes cute little lessors so far. One other baby pipped and looks to be pastel lesser but i couldn't get a good look as he popped back in his egg when i got closer.

So everyone pipped as of last night but momma snake was causing destruction as she was squishing babies out of their eggs. So i took them out and put them on wet paper towels. I peeked into all the eggs and saw 2 lessors, 1 pastel(thought super pastel at first) and a sets of twins that appeared at least lesser and a very small baby lesser or pastel lesser. Unfortunatly the mother snake caused some damage to the twin egg and both hatchling perished last night They were only 22 grams a piece. The small baby was laying half out of the egg this morning and looked limp. I cut the egg to see what was wrong and noticed he had a hard yoke sac AND there was a dead twin snake in the egg that appeared to have died awhile back(very gross looking) so i tied of the cord and gave him some yoke and hoped for the best. Sadly he passed just now. This leaves me with 3 healthy babies with which i am more than pleased with. [IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...psa381b836.jpg[/IMG]This is the pastel which i first thought was a super as i did but a pastel to the mom swell but at second look i see just a beautiful little pastel.
[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...ps75792bc0.jpg[/IMG]This is one of the lessors and the dead twin.
[IMG]http://i1077.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0c653ef3.jpg[/IMG]This is the poor little dead twin.Although he passed he taught me a lot. He was only 19 grams. His yoke weighed more than him.
The lessors are 66 grams and look great. Just waiting on the pastel.And my next two clutches to drop.
EDIT: i didn't think to get pictures of the first set of twins

This is awesome, and a great thread! Thanks for sharing with us all!

I'm sorry to hear about some of the babies, too... but this is still a great and very informative thread....