hatchrite for egg icubation

[Olimpia]

Flux, have you tried that faster incubation time for panthers as well? And how did the hatchlings compare to those that take a longer period of time to hatch? Did you find them just as robust?

I'd always heard bad things about keeping the eggs warm and shortening incubation. So this is interesting. I assume it's different because you're cooling them down at night, but I'm just curious.

 

[fluxlizard]

I did but I don't recall any more what the results were. Possibly similar- I want to say 6-7 months. By the latter part of the 90s I was taking the lazy way and putting them at room temperature (where one time I got a 13 month panther chameleon clutch!).

Believe it or not, when I started most people were incubating in the low 80s. Low temperatures were kind of a new idea to me. I remember learning about panthers and veileds hatching out after being incubated in the mid 70s and wondering if the day/night temp swings I had been using shortened incubation because more development was occurring during the low temp hours rather than the higher temp hours.

Now I'm pretty sure the temp switches back and forth just end the diapause sooner.

And yes- hatchlings at those temps tended to be large and robust. Sometimes I have believed there was a pretty big difference between those and some that sat on the shelf at room temperature for a long time. Other times I think it may have just been tricks of my memory or my imagination- I didn't collect hard data on hatchling size. I am pretty certain though that the longer the clutch sits before hatching, the smaller the hatchlings. *Might* be my imagination, but seems like I've noticed that trend over the years. Not sure why except I have a hunch that hatch occurs sometimes out of desperation and a last ditch effort to develop and hatch out because they've been incubating so long.

I think probably diapause has the most dramatic effect on the variance of incubation duration, rather than temperature during development which for most lizards results in a difference of at most a few weeks and there is not much going on during diapause development wise one way or another, so shouldn't effect size of hatchling to shorten incubation by manipulating things so diapause ends sooner.

And even if there is faster development and not only shorter diapause- unless babies are coming out of the egg with a lot of yolk attached, really the same amount of resources are available to grow the hatchling no matter how quickly it uses them to develop.

I would think anyway...

I guess the other conflicting thought I have is that if I take 2 baby lizards and feed them 100 equally sized crickets over time, feeding one 5 crickets per day for 20 days and the other 10 crickets per day for 10 days and measure and weigh each when each runs out of crickets, The one that eats 10 per day will be larger and heavier after finishing the same number of crickets, so from that standpoint faster development might in fact result in a larger hatchling.

I don't know- I'm totally speculating to reach that conclusion. I guess it doesn't take into account the fact that out of the egg the lizards have to use a certain amount of energy from the crickets for moving about, cognitive function, hunting, etc and not just for growing. In the egg everything goes to growth so it isn't really the same. It may be that resources are spent more equally toward development regardless of speed of development.

My main thought though is that if all we are doing is breaking diapause, the hatchlings should be within the same ballpark (2 or 3 weeks) as far as actual development time. The rest of the duration variance *I would guess* would be the dormant diapause time when nothing is growing in the egg anyway.

I'm trying a couple of things now with eggs (the warm for a couple weeks, cool for several (I have some doing that now until the end of December) , warm for a few months, and the same for another group but using my old day/night temp swings during the warm cycles).

Maybe in the coming year when I have a few more clutches to play with I'll give my old method of day/night temp swings throughout and do a constant room temp and a constant warm temp and then compare data when everything has hatched and see if I notice any interesting differences other than incubation duration.

My most recent batch of veileds incubated upper 60s to upper 70s depending on the room temperature that time of year in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. They took 10 months to hatch. The babies have been very strong- didn't loose a single hatchling and at 6 to 9 weeks old nearly all were over 5 inches and several nearly 7 inches in length. So- could be my imagination about incubation duration and hatch size, or could be trends in hatch size depending on time of year they were laid and room temp at different parts of development for that matter...

Interesting stuff to think about...

 

[Hoj]

WOW great post!!!

 

[Olimpia]

Yes, very interesting!

 

[StickyTongues]

My most recent batch of veileds incubated upper 60s to upper 70s depending on the room temperature that time of year in the cabinet under the bathroom sink. They took 10 months to hatch. The babies have been very strong- didn't loose a single hatchling and at 6 to 9 weeks old nearly all were over 5 inches and several nearly 7 inches in length. So- could be my imagination about incubation duration and hatch size, or could be trends in hatch size depending on time of year they were laid and room temp at different parts of development for that matter...

Interesting stuff to think about...

This was a very interesting post indeed.
Fluxlizard, I think the best way to test this part would be spit eggs from the same clutch and incubate them with the various methods you mentioned. This way you will eliminate the temps vs time of year laid variable.

Danny