The following applies primarily to pardalis.
I see some talk of diapause and timing again, and wanted to address expectations. To help illuminate on some of what we have learned from results, it is our opinion that a deliberate diapause will greatly increase your ability to time the incubation period, such that you can predict your hatch window down to 1-2 weeks, with a total incubation time of 5 1/2 to 7 months, depending on the length of the diapause periods that you use. In explanation, this means that you can target the hatch window to a 2 week time-frame centered around as little as 5 1/2 months, or you can use longer diapause segments and have it center closer to 7 months, give or take two weeks. Without a deliberate diapause, the incubation period for the clutch can be 7-12 months. We know that more subtle changes than a deliberate diapause period can also have the same net triggering effect, but we don't know what those are, and suspect that they can vary from one clutch to the next to some degree. For example, two clutches laid at the same time, with the same deliberate diapause, would be expected to hatch within the same 1-2 weeks. The same two clutches put on a shelf somewhere, at a more or less constant temperature (no planned diapause), could hatch up to 2 months apart, give or take, possibly more, where different trigger events had obviously occurred. In all cases, with or without diapause, about 90% of your clutches will hatch such that all babies emerge within a few days of each other. For instance, in Dez's clutch, the span of time between first and last hatch would be 2-5 days. In the other 10%, the gap between first and last hatch can be up to two months, sometimes more.
Congratz!!
