Leopard gecko breeding

[lizrd_boy]

Hi! So 19 days ago, my female leopard gecko was ovulating. I put her in with a male and saw them mate so I know it happened and everything.

I made my own incubator out of a styrofoam cooler, flexwatt, water bottles (to act as thermal masses), egg crate (to rest the egg boxes on), CPU fan (to prevent hotspots by moving air around), plexiglass (for a window), and a cheap Inkbird thermostat. I'm calibrating the incubator right now for 89* F to produce males.

I just had a couple questions... First, when the female has eggs developing inside her, do they both grow at the same time or is it more one and then the other? Lenetta definately has at least one egg which is getting pretty big, but there is a smaller round mass the size of an ovulation but whiter. Is that another egg or is it uncommon for the eggs to develop at different times?

Also, can someone please post pictures of gravid geckos at different stages of egg-development? I'd like to see what it normally looks like.

Last, how long after copulation will leopards lay? I though it was 16-22 days, but a friend of mine (he breeds ball pyhons and rodents, but his leopards "accidentally" laid eggs. He never got them to hatch, but still... he got further than I have!) said it can take up to a month??? He didn't know when his geckos mated so he doesn't know how long it was for him. Also a website I saw said it can take 2-5 weeks? I'm confused!

Thank you!

 

[acpart]

First time breeders can take awhile to lay and may not lay fertile eggs the first time. Usually they lay 2 eggs at a time every few weeks. Occasionally they may lay 1 or 3. I have found that it's easy to obsess about when they're going to lay and whether the eggs are fertile. Breeding is primarily a waiting game, and also a situation where if something isn't working you give it a good chance and then try to tweak it. What I would do while I was waiting for the eggs to hatch (or the gecko to lay) was to do a lot of documenting so I could spend my obsession in a productive way. Here is an article about the yearly life cycle of geckos which includes some specific examples of what can go on during the breeding season:

The Yearly Cycle with Geckos - Gecko Time

Caring for geckos is a skill that can be learned quickly at a basic level, but can deepen over the course of years as the keeper learns more about a species in general and his or her own geckos in particular. More

geckotime.com

Aliza

 

[lizrd_boy]

Awesome, thanks!

Update: Lenetta (my female) just laid! Two beautiful white eggs! I'll try candling them after they harden up a little. I'm going to put her back in with the male. When should I do that? I was thinking in a day or two? She's in pretty good shape, but I'll still fatten her up a little.

 

[lizrd_boy]

Ok, so I just candled the eggs and one has the ring of life in it!!!!!

Should the ring of life be anywhere in particular in the egg? This one is on the left side of the egg and I'm not sure if Lenetta turned the egg after she laid it, but there is a certain time period after she lays where the egg can be turned with no detrimental effects, and the egg was still sticky when I found it so the time period probably isnt up?

Also, the egg without the ring of life looked mostly yellow, but the right side looked a little whiter. Does that mean anything?

I'm soooooo excited!!! If the egg is fertile than I can probably hatch it... incubation doesn't seem that hard.

 

[acpart]

Just pick an orientation and leave it that way. Good luck.

Aliza

 

[lizrd_boy]

Alright, thanks!

 

[lizrd_boy]

Ummm so The humidity was getting low inside the incubator and I wasn't sure if it was affecting the reading on the thermometer and so I put a dish of water and in 10 minutes it was 113*. And hot to the touch. The incubation medium was not very hot and the air temp inside the box was 90 (which is a little higher than I was going for but not gonna kill them) I'm really worried and confused. What is up???!!!

 

[acpart]

What was 113 and hot to the touch? How are you measuring the temp and what kind of thermostat do you have? Ideally you would have a proportional thermostat which means that it lets some amount of heating happen on a sliding scale (like a light dimmer) as opposed to just turning on and off. Here's a link to an article below about a situation where I thought that putting my thermostat probe inside the egg box would be better than having it in the body of the incubator. Luckily my son is a mechanical engineer so he wrote this article to explain it all (note that the first part is a little hard to understand, but keep reading, it gets better):

Editor's Question Answered: Incubator Temperature Control - Gecko Time

Do you know how your incubator works? Does it matter? In the case where there's a choice about where to put the thermostat probe, it can matter a whole lot: More

geckotime.com

Aliza

 

[lizrd_boy]

What was 113 and hot to the touch? How are you measuring the temp and what kind of thermostat do you have? Ideally you would have a proportional thermostat which means that it lets some amount of heating happen on a sliding scale (like a light dimmer) as opposed to just turning on and off. Here's a link to an article below about a situation where I thought that putting my thermostat probe inside the egg box would be better than having it in the body of the incubator. Luckily my son is a mechanical engineer so he wrote this article to explain it all (note that the first part is a little hard to understand, but keep reading, it gets better):

Editor's Question Answered: Incubator Temperature Control - Gecko Time

Do you know how your incubator works? Does it matter? In the case where there's a choice about where to put the thermostat probe, it can matter a whole lot: More

geckotime.com

Aliza

The water was what got hot. And I'm so stupid. I totally forgot that I had put hot water in the bowl. As it let off heat, the incubator heated up. I let the heat out of the incubator, took out the bowl, and took the eggs out of my hovabator and put them back in this incubator. Now the temps are staying between 88.3 and 90.6.

I have a cheap Inkbird thermostat. It is not proportional. here is a link to it on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0152LYY0I/?tag=exoticpetnetw-20

I have it set so that if it goes above the set temp of 89 it will shut off, and turn back on if it gets to 88.

 

[NearMeGeckos]

DIY incubators are a supper big hit or miss. I would recommend buying a gecko egg holder, pangea egg substrate, and a reptile incubator. You could do a chicken one but they normally won't get low enough to incubate leopard gecko eggs, do you will have to mess around with cracking the lid to get the temp right. The egg holder has a lid on it to keep humidity in, I pop a whole in the lid for the probe. Then use duck tape to fill in the excess hole. Buy a hight quality digital thermometer hygrometer with a probe. It's really best to buy the best equipment and do it right, then everything will be so lucky easier and cheaper in the long run. I have had a 100% hatch rate.

Make sure you are not turning the eggs, you can mark a dot of sharpie on the top of the egg. The embryo can attach on any side if the egg, so don't worry about that. Candeling gecko eggs is different that anything else, they should look pretty solid and black at the end.

Make sure you know the morph and preferably family history of your breeders.

As for now: Get an incubator asap and move them into it, you can put some damp organic perlite in a deli cup and pop the eggs in. I'd also get a digital thermometer and hygrometer. The eggs should still hopefully be ok if they get a steady proppper temp and humidity going. They need a super steady temp. Fluctuations will kill them.

 

[lizrd_boy]

Okay, so after not checking on the eggs since Wednesday (don't ask me how. I'm pretty sure I'm going crazy) I opened up the incubator this morning and candled the eggs. One had mold growing on it (the same one with mold the first time) and it looked too wet, even tho the medium is reasonably dry. The other egg, in the same type of setup, looks fine. When I candled them the one with mold looked empty. No veins, just yellowish

. It doesn't stink yet, so it's still incubating, but it doesn't look good. The other one has veins still, and doesn't look too wet. Also no mold.

Any ideas why one went bad? Am I doing something wrong, or was the embryo just not able to develop for some reason?