Curious

[JLC]

Randy, good luck with all your poss.hets! Hopefully you'll get some live albinos next time around. I hear it can be difficult to get the hang of successfully breeding these guys, despite their willingness to copulate in captivity. How soon before you can start proving out any of the other hets?

[RandyRemington]

I did try maternal incubation on one clutch for the first time last year and all of those babies came out fine.

The kinked babies where in a home built refrigerator incubator with a proportional thermostat and a small fan. Clutches that overlapped their incubation slightly on both sides hatched fine in the same incubator so I'm wondering if they got too hot slightly before being laid (I'm told that they are well started at laying). The other possibility I can think of is that as some of the eggs in the clutch went bad early on (quite possibly infertile, I didn't candle them) on advise I tried to save them with foot fungus powder and perhaps the foot powder caused the deformities. I don't know why I didn't think to separate the good eggs first

With those albino babies both parents where possible hets (66% X 50%). After loosing the albino babies I sold the proven het mother to fund another project. However I have three of her sisters so hopefully one of them will prove this year (although I may only breed one of them to the now proven albino het male as I have other projects for the other two and a 25% chance het albino girl I purchased).

The new het ghost is a male, wouldn't want to spring for anything expensive I did have a chance to buy a screamer 1,000 gram female ghost for $800 right before NERD started coming out with the cool ghost crosses and they went back up in price so now I’m stuck with the long slow road.

I have a shot at proving out possible hets for both stripe and pied this year. Most of the 25% chance het daughters are in the 1,300 - 1,400 gram range so it's a little iffy on even getting eggs but I'll certainly try.