Why I would NEVER do Maternal Incubation.

[Mike Cavanaugh]

I guess if your breeding on a larger scale like yourself, I see your point. If someone like myself, who will only be looking at a couple clutches (like you stated) it probably isn't as big a deal. I'll be breeding my pin, pastels, spider going the long route to some(hopefully) bees, lemonblasts, super pastels and so on. Since I'm not worried about the money so much I'm looking forward to trying maternal incubation on a couple clutches.

It has nothing to do with scale... assuming in your example of breeding simple morph male to simple morph females... If for whatever reason you had 1 more egg hatch as result of an incubator vs loosing one because of maternal incubation, you have more then paid for the incubator, even on such a small scale.

That said, there is nothing wrong with someone trying out maternal incubation for whatever reason. With all the threads lately going around about the subject, I feel it is important for especially newer people to see why some of us would never even consider maternal incubation.

iwhile we may have the knowledge to artificially incubate eggs, the balls themselves have been doing it for much longer and much better than us. the eggs seem to hatch out bigger babies that are stronger and exit the egg sooner. their are benefits to both.

1.) The idea that moms know how to incubate better then us while being forced to live in a man made unnatural enivroment is a stretch at best.
2.) I have never seen any information that suggests that babies resulting from maternal incubation have been bigger or stronger then those incubated in incubators.
3.) Babies do NOT exit the egg sooner during maternal incubation. The opposite is the norm.

IThe first female I ever bred maternally incubated her clutch and all eggs hatched out perfectly healthy. She has done this three years in a row now and I've only lost one baby due to severe kinking that I believe came as a result to a heat spike in the room (since more than one clutch was affected with abnormalities).

This is the kind of freak thing that can be totally avoided with a properly set up incubator. Can my incubator suffer from some kind of freak heat spike? Yes, but because I use a second thermostat specifically to protect against this, the eggs would be fine.

In fact, short of the room catching on fire, I am pretty well covered in almost any scenario... and even in the event of a fire, I would much rather my eggs be in the incubator then a rack.