Hey everyone sorry to spam the forums I was just asking for help about an egg the other day and now I'm back with some info. In my other post (https://ball-pythons.net/forums/show...672-Egg-Advice) I noted that my egg was dying and moldy and some of my other eggs had mold. This was super weird to me since I've incubated ~10 clutches before with no issues even close to the ones I experienced here. I realized that the only thing I did different with this clutch compared to my previous ones is that I decided to reuse Pangea Hatch for the substrate instead of using new. For those that don't know, Pangea Hatch is a clay incubation medium that advertises that it can be boiled and reused (https://i.imgur.com/pGIek0l.png). I brought it to a rolling boil for 10 minutes stirring frequently, gave it a rinse, and then used that for my substrate. About a month later my eggs had mold on them and problems continued to escalate until sadly the entire clutch was lost by day 65. I decided to investigate if perhaps reusing the substrate was the problem. I purchased sterile applicator swabs and dextrose agar plates and set to work.
I swabbed the substrate currently in my incubator (top plate), some older and dried substrate that had been used for a previous clutch (second plate), and then I boiled those two substrate samples for 10 mins in the same way I had done prior to reusing and swabbed it a few minutes after boiling (third plate). Lastly, I opened a fresh bag of Pangea Hatch and gave a sample a swab (last dish). The then placed these dishes into my incubator at 88 degrees F and allowed them to culture for 3 days.
Unsurprisingly the top two plates were teeming with bacteria after having eggs hatch in it. Unfortunately, you can see several spotty bacterial cultures and a large mold culture managed to survive the boiling. The fresh bag of Pangea Hatch shows no signs of contaminants, the only thing visible in the plate is the markings from the applicator dragging along the dextrose.
This little experiment showed me that boiling and reusing Pangea Hatch can certainly introduce pathogens into an incubation environment. I take full responsibility for what happened to my eggs, and I will obviously never do this again in the future. Hopefully this will also help guide anyone who stumbles upon this post that is considering reusing Pangea Hatch.
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