Need advice on breeding carpets

[chamlover]

I will be picking up numerous wc carpets soon. I'm hoping to keep most of them and try my hand at breeding them. My concern is that I am not aware of anyone else doing it and I'm wondering why. Are they extremely difficult? Or are raising the babies difficult? Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

[Dooley1]

Go for it. I've been breeding carpets for years through multiple generations. Most-likely all of the females that you receive will be gravid already, or will become so from retained sperm.

They are not as easy as panthers or veileds, and many people have difficulty with incubation. Once you end up with some CH'd babies though, it gets much easier from there. They grow fast, and can be very robust animals

Incubation takes an average of 9-12 months. Good luck.

Kevin

 

[Dr O]

i've got 2 WC and 1 CH from Dooley here (and what a sweetheart she is!), and they are my first carpets. when i got the WC's, even though the female appeared gravid she still mated with the WC male. everything i read told me that the egg laying was trouble; they just don't seem to dig nests as well as other species. so just to be safe, i gave her a big nesting container that took up 75% of her cage bottom and left it there, hoping she would get the idea. and so i didn't miss a possible nest, i raked the top with a salad fork to give it even lines; that was to tell if she disturbed the area.

didn't matter one bit! one morning after my mornng watering and feeding routines, a buddy came over who is currently building my new outdoor enclosure. after several delays, he had finally made it over that AM so we could discuss site planning and the construction. of course he's browsing though the chams that i have, and he says "hey, your little girl here has eggs all over the place."

wouldn't you know it, but in the hour that passed since i had just watered her she dropped 11 eggs all over her cage, most on the wet PVC floor, a few on the soil, a few stuck to a leaf or two. what timing......had he not been there at that moment, i never would have seen them until way later in the day and they would have been all dried out. i'm running around trying to get a vermiculite container together and picking up these eggs (that thankfully were mostly sitting in the puddling filtered water). they were so damn slippery, it was like picking up ballbearings out of a tub of pure oil so there was no way for me to keep the top sides up, and i just hoped that they were so fresh that it wouldn't matter.

and here i am 4 months later, all 11 going strong in their bedding with one that was almost hard-dry so i soaked it like crazy and even that one seems viable. a big YAAAY for timing and luck!!

and about 3 weeks ago, my new little girl (Gem) from Dooley and the male (Solo) did the nasty, so here we go again.......i've got my eyes on that cage like a hawk!!

imo, the price of carpets is crazily unbalanced with the difficulties in hatching. i personally go gaga over their colors and patterns and think only F. minor comes close in terms of gravid beauty. but for a typical 10 month +/- incubation time and all of the other difficulties, they just don't command a high price. particulalrly with WC's still coming in for about $50 a pop. hopefully that will change as the WC export diminishes and the CBB population takes off more and more.

and don't get me wrong, i love my panthers! but the carpets are more active, LOVE to bask, are very sociable, and eat like pigs. whenever i'm showing someone my chams and we turn to the carpets, i tell them that they essentially just never stop changing colors and patterns. you could take a time-lapse photo every 30 seconds and something always changes. having the ones that i have now is just a boyhood dream come true for me; i never intended to breed them. but boooyy are they addictive.........

i heart carpets!

 

[Dooley1]

Kevin O.,

I heart carpets too! And your girl is captive-bred, not
captive-hatched. She is an F2.

As far as the rotation of the eggs go after being laid, it doesn't
matter at all with lats. They haven't vascularized yet upon laying,
and I pay no attention whatsoever to the position they were laid in
when I dig them up.

Before you know it, you will have no problems nesting them like this...

I am happy you are heading in the breeding direction with your trio

Kevin

 

[Dr O]

Of course she is CB and not CH. That was a fat finger on my part.

I cannot wait to see them nesting just like your photo! With my WC doing what she did, I'm sure that my cage (as good as it may be), looks nothing like Madagascar. So she probably just did not like what I offered her. I do think a CB would be more likely to nest given that it's their instinct and what we offer them is basically their only choice. I would bet that most "horror stories" about nesting issues with carpets is because most of them are WC.

And thank you for letting me know about the vascularization, that was something I did not know about lateralis.