First eggs of the season for me. :)

[Quiet Tempest]

The photo quality is lousy, I know, but I can see my babies to be fluttering around in there now.









I got a video clip of one of the eggs being candled as well. There would have been more but the rest of them came out way too dark to make anything out.

http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/1294/v96.mp4

[Quiet Tempest]

I uploaded the video to youtube so it's easier to access. The other one was giving me trouble.


http://youtu.be/SDxh8NHutqs

[ahunt037]

this is awesome i am very interested in trying this especially if it means healthier stronger hatchlings cant wait till 2011/2012 season im gonna be glued to this thread for awhile thanks!

[Quiet Tempest]

I wouldn't say that maternally incubating guarantees bigger and healthier hatchlings especially with newer methods of artificial incubation that more closely simulate the conditions that a brooding mother provides. The study is a bit dated, after all, and I've seen some whopper babies hatching in incubators. I'm most comfortable with maternal incubation, though. I haven't lost a maternally incubated egg yet and I feel it's because a brooding mom knows how to care for her eggs a thousand times better than I ever could. All I need to understand is how to care for her. She does her job, I do mine, and we end up with healthy hatchlings in about 60 days.

[akaangela]

Ok here is a silly question. With mom incubating the eggs do you notice that the hatchlings eat better or have less reaction to stress? They are being moved (even just a little as she coils and uncoils around them). What is your percentage of male vs female? It would be interesting to do a study of one year material incubation the next artificial incubation. I don't know how you would test the stress levels of the babies but it would be a cool experiment Thanks for keeping us updated. I look forward to more photos.

What kind of flashlight do you use to candle?

[Quiet Tempest]

Ok here is a silly question. With mom incubating the eggs do you notice that the hatchlings eat better or have less reaction to stress? They are being moved (even just a little as she coils and uncoils around them). What is your percentage of male vs female? It would be interesting to do a study of one year material incubation the next artificial incubation. I don't know how you would test the stress levels of the babies but it would be a cool experiment Thanks for keeping us updated. I look forward to more photos.

What kind of flashlight do you use to candle?

Maternal incubation is the only method I've ever used with balls so I don't really have anything to compare it to. Last year I had three females on eggs. There was a 4-egg clutch, a 5-egg clutch, and then another 4-egg clutch from those girls. The first 4-egg clutch gave me 3 males and 1 female, the 5-egg clutch gave me 4 females and 1 male and the last 4-egg clutch gave me 2 males and 2 females. The first two clutches started eating shortly after their first shed but the last clutch took nearly 2 weeks of persuasion before the babies started eating on their own.

For the most part, the eggs don't move much when the mom leaves the nest or adjusts her coils because they adhere together shortly after being laid. That's not always the case, though. Last year one of my clutches was "snowflaked" and didn't stick together so each time the mom moved, they'd be pushed around and one rolled out of the nest twice. They all hatched without any trouble but that rollaway egg had me anxious. I was candling it several times a day just to be sure it was still flitting around in there normally.

The flashlight I was using is some little cheap 9-bulb LED light that came from an auto parts store, I think. The logo on it reads: PT Performance Tool.

This looks like it - http://www.amazon.com/Wilmar-9-LED-P.../dp/B000N35JFA

[Dusty]

Would you be willing to keep a closer eye on the temps through out the incubation of another clutch?

I know things in nature aren't as set in stone the way we try to get them but I think that more info should be put out there on the maternal vs incubating.

The avg temps for incubating has been set by many and seems to work but I am more interested in the maternal side.

What kind of temp fluctuations in the room around the eggs ect....

Just one of those things to make me wonder how set in stone some things should be other then "this is what works" do it this way.

[Quiet Tempest]

I'm expecting my second clutch sometime in the next week or so and I'll see about getting a thermometer probe placed in the egg pile once that female is finished laying.

[Quiet Tempest]

This was taken yesterday. Sorry it's so short. My 6 year old apparently filled the camera with her version of video blogs and I couldn't bring myself to delete them without getting them over to the comp first. lol I'm starting to see the patterns in there now that we're over the halfway hump.

[Jay_Bunny]

Oh this is so exciting. A much belated congrats on the clutch. I'll be following this thread and will be waiting for updates! And yay for them moving around!