Kitty and Agnes

Lovely girl, Brad. Congratulations.

We incubate our veiled eggs in a special closet set at 78 degrees, but it fluctuates a tad throughout the day by about 2 degrees.

We diapause our panther eggs at room temp for 3 months, an then move them to the 78 degree closet.

Our clutches seem to be doing well, although there is sometimes 1 or 2 eggs in a clutch that just don't make it.

We do have one female veiled who always lays yellow-egg clutches that don't make it. She is as healthy as a horse, very active, a real pig, gets supplemented with a bit more calcium than the others, gets the typical vitamin schedule. Eats cockroaches, crickets, and superworms, but still only does wet looking yellow clutches. I feel sorry for her. She digs good deep tunnels and really puts her heart into it.

Agnes is a real beauty. Looking forward to seeing those first offspring from this handsome pair of yours.
 
I cut the last two shriveled up eggs open today (they are seen in the incubator explanation picture , and are not counted among the dozen that I still think are going to make it) and found expired half developed neonates.
As heartbreaking as that is, it actually made me happy ... at least they are fertile ... it gives me hope for my good ones.

-Brad
 
In my last few years of incubating veiled eggs, they have been set up in the exact same place and same way. Almost all the clutches took about 240 days to hatch, the babies were all about the same size (not huge, not tiny) and there was almost 100% hatch rate of fertile eggs. A couple of clutches that were incubated through a particularly hot summer took a different number of days but I noticed no difference in the size of the hatchlings. I have never had any eye problems with any of my hatchlings (thank heavens!) or other deformities for that matter.

Brad...Agnes is beautiful! I hope her whole batch will be fertile this time!

I'm sorry and glad that you found half developed babies in the eggs...for the same reasons you expressed.

Eric...the two sisters...were they kept in separate cages or together??
 
They were kept together in a large cage. I hand fed them, as I do all my animals (most of the time), so I know they recieved equal food and supplementation. It's weird.

I should note - the temps that summer that lead to the deformity - these were ot normal incubation temps! I checked them in the morning and after work. The sun hit that room during the early afternoon directly, and the teps in the closet were above 90! When I realized how high they were, I removed them... and bought a digitial thermometer with high/low memory - very important to know the whole picture.
 
I am keeping my eggs in a center of the house closet where the temps don't fluctuate much. Here in Florida our thermostat (A/C) is always on 75. Granted, we had some cool weather the past several months, but I haven't done anything to counter that temp change. I don't think our house got below 70 as it is very well insulated.

So, in 2 months we will see what I have. I have several clutches all at different hatch dates. I haven't gotten an incubator since our house stays so uniform and I just felt that in the wild there is some fluctuation. We can all compare our notes over the next year.
 
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