Is "The Truth" owed an apology?

[Serpent_Nirvana]

That "truth about Deserts" must be the "substance" that BG is talking about huh?

... This intrigues me. If I wanted to play the BG "read between the lines" game, I'd suggest that he is insinuating that maybe there's some magic bullet -- some external factor that the desert gals are lacking -- that some breeders have shined on, without which the desert gals are slug-factories ... And I don't mean temperature, as was suggested on the BLBC thread. I mean, like, OvSynch for snakes -- ie, a hormone protocol.

... Not a bad idea, if it's true, but is it "cheating?"

If it isn't true, though, I'll say that in my mind desert female fertility, like caramel female fertility, is going to come down to statistics. In the thread that Robin posted a link to I posted my tally of all of the caramel female clutches I could find on the Internet with actual numeric data, and it gave me about a 2:1 ratio of slugs:eggs total.

Does that mean that caramel females are totally sterile? Nope. It just, to me, means that they are significantly less than "fertile." Sub-fertile would be the best way to describe it.

... Maybe caramel females' fertility could be improved with a little external hormonal support?

... At any rate, my guess is that the desert girls will have a similar fate. I don't think, based on skimming the BLBC thread, that they will be entirely sterile. (I also think that the OP of this thread has implied, a few times, that they aren't flat-out dud factories ... It's more complicated than that.) However, I don't think that they are going to be fertility queens, either, because if they were, we'd know it by now. If it were as easy to raise up and breed a desert girl as it is spiders, pastels, mojaves, etc., the Internet would be crawling with pictures of desert females on eggs with the tagline "neener neener neener" ... But it isn't. (And yes, I know not every breeder with a quality collection posts on the Internet, but still ...)

Does that mean I won't get into the desert project eventually? Hell no, I think deserts are gorgeous. It does mean that I'll only pick up a male, though, and what I do with holdback females will depend on further information revealed.

So ...