How I set up a clutch of eggs.

[MarkS]

Someone asked me one time about about how I set up my clutches of eggs so I thought I'd take a few pics of setting up my most recent clutch. This is a female that I've had for a fairly long time. She's normally around 3500-4000grams and has always given me either 7 or 8 eggs. Here is a pic of her on the eggs.

Here are the eggs sitting on top of the egg box they'll be going into, it's just a 6 Qt sterilite latch top box.

Here they are in the box, I use a mixed substrate of vermiculite and perlite, I just take a bag of each and dump them dry into a 5 gallon bucket and mix them up by hand so the perlite and vermiculite are equally mixed together. Then I dump in a gallon of water and seal up the bucket. I scoop handfuls of mix out of the bucket when I want to set up a new egg box. I make little indentations in the mix in which to lay the eggs and then brush the mix up the sides so they're about half buried.

I cover the eggs with a paper towel to soak up any drips that may fall on the eggs due to condensation, this year I also started using the glad press and seal plastic wrap on the top of the box before putting the lid on, in past years I relied on the lid only to hold in the humidity but a lot of times I'd end up adding water before they hatched because it's not a real tight seal and it would dry out, in a few instances I even lost eggs when I didn't catch it in time. I'm really glad I started using this press and seal stuff and wonder why I never tried it before. I think it was Rapture who mentioned it to me on another thread... Thanks for the tip...

Then I just write down the parents, number of eggs and the date they were laid on a piece of masking tape which I attach to the top of the egg box then put it in the incubator.


One thing I should mention about this clutch... This particular girl always gives me a nice clutch of good looking eggs. However, half the eggs end up dying on me within the first week. I haven't candled the eggs yet, I'll do that when I get home tonight after it's dark out. But I wanted to document this girls eggs this year to see if I can come up with any answers on why this always happens.

Mark

p.s. oops, I just noticed that I wrote down the date wrong on the tape, LOL Oh well. Actual laid date is 5/26/08

[ShawnT]

Interesting idea with the paper towel...Do you ever replace the paper towel with a new piece throughout incubation?

[MarkS]

Interesting idea with the paper towel...Do you ever replace the paper towel with a new piece throughout incubation?

Yes, I often end up replacing it a few times as it'll mold if it stays wet for too long.

[MarkS]

Well, I candled them last night and every single egg has nice big bold veins showing. So now we wait and see what happens.

[Spaniard]

Good luck with her eggs this year Mark, thanks for the pictures.

[littleindiangirl]

Sweet looking female! Awesome info

[Patrick Long]

woop woop