Just to be clear, on the first page of the thread, I have three pic's of my three clutches laid this year. They are in order of when they where laid. The first pic (top of the fist page dated 8-23, with the ?'s) was of my green pastel (From Bailey's reptiles!!!! ) and my black pastel. She(green pastel) laid 8 eggs and as I candled them only 4 where fertile. I put ?'s on the ones that where infertile and since this was my first clutch ever I followed the things I read by other more experienced breeders in threads. What I was taught was to always leave the eggs how the dame laid them, also if I found them stuck together to not separate them. Well I did just that and the bad eggs started to mold and rot. I then checked other threads and was told to use anti fungal powder which in my case didn't help me at all. So upon the advise of another thread I tried to remove the bad eggs by cutting them away, which I did successfully. But then the fertile eggs started to turn brown and smell bad. I found maggots in the vermiculite on one occasion and had to change the substrate. The last pic of this particular clutch is the pic of the 4 brown eggs. All eggs where at 55 day so I went ahead and cut them which was a big mistake, in this case because out of the four, 3 where severely under developed(looked like they stopped developing around the first few weeks) As for the 4th it was alive but wayyyyyyyy premature, and due to me cutting it's egg it didn't survive but a day or two . SO I'M IN NO WAY SAYING DEFEATIVLY that they died due to me leaving the "bad" eggs with the good, BUT there is an ole saying I'm sure everyone has heard at one time or another......"ONE ROTTEN APPLE CAN SPOIL THE WHOLE BUNCH" well maybe it's also true for eggs!

Now the pics of the eight baby snakes just posted was from my second clutch and what I did different was I separated them and laid them out in the egg box(as the second pic show) and they all hatched no issues at all!!!!! Tim Bailey posted a thread on this forum(back in 2009 called the "the upside down egg experiment) the link(http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...Egg-Experiment) that talks about an experiment that he did by rotating the egg a few time during incubation and his findings where that it suffered no ill effects from this. So from now on I WILL ALWAYS SEPERATE THE EGGS!!!! It just works for me and based on Tim ground breaking test I'm confident I'm doing the right thing!!!!