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Maternal Incubation: Candling Video

Quiet Tempest

Quiet Tempest

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Last year was my first year breeding ball pythons and I allowed my female to maternally incubate. I thoroughly enjoyed watching her with her eggs and was pleased with a 100% hatch rate on Day 53 of incubation. This year, I've got two females maternally incubating and at least one other female due to lay eggs soon. Here are some video clips. :)



In case the youtube coding doesn't work..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hTQpE5Mtxc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukk7hs0us4w
 
Very nice!! What is your set up like, and what (if anything) out of the ordinary did you have to do in order to maintain the temps and humidity stable enough?
 
TheFragginDragon said:
Very nice!! What is your set up like, and what (if anything) out of the ordinary did you have to do in order to maintain the temps and humidity stable enough?
Click to expand...

Last year I kept my female in a 40 gallon breeder tank with a Sterilite tub as a laybox. I lined the laybox with about 2 inches of moistened sphagnum moss. The laybox was placed directly over the heat pad under the tank and I kept a thermometer and hygrometer in there. The temperature fluctuated in there from 80F to 90F in the course of the day and the humidity stayed around 60%-70%. I worried about humidity in the beginning and misted the box regularly to bring the humidity up to at least 80% but the female tightens her coils to trap humidity around the eggs and loosens her coils to release it. I stopped misting so frequently when I realized that she was controlling the humidity for her eggs just fine without my help.

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^ My female with eggs last year.

This year I'm keeping my gravid females in tubs in a rack system. The two that have already laid their eggs did so 3 days apart so I expect them to hatch within days of one another as well. :) I'm going to candle them again next week and post video just to see the changes in the embryos.

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how does that effect them for following season, in the feed department like my females as soon as the eggs are taken away they usually eat in a couple of days. and going that way seems that the female is off feed for another two months. do they breed later in the season?
 
gsrept said:
how does that effect them for following season, in the feed department like my females as soon as the eggs are taken away they usually eat in a couple of days. and going that way seems that the female is off feed for another two months. do they breed later in the season?
Click to expand...

The female I bred last year took a rat as soon as her eggs hatched. I did offer her a mouse a few weeks into incubation but she wanted nothing to do with it. I offered her a small rat the day that the last baby left its egg and she wolfed it down. She was back up to weight in just a few weeks and is one of the mothers in the above videos. :)
 
WOW , very interesting ... i have seen this done with anthill pythons but never BP's !
about how much weight did the female loose after incubation ? thanks
 
FelixatRI said:
WOW , very interesting ... i have seen this done with anthill pythons but never BP's !
about how much weight did the female loose after incubation ? thanks
Click to expand...

I'm really not sure because I didn't weigh her or her clutch after she laid. I know that she was just under 1300 grams a few weeks after the eggs hatched because I was curious and weighed her then and she was around the same weight when I started breeding her. I know a lot of keepers track weight gain (and loss) in their reptiles but I don't routinely weigh mine. I weigh hatchlings, females that I'm thinking about breeding, and animals that have given me trouble with feeding otherwise I usually don't bother. Thankfully, I haven't had that last problem in quite some time.
 
I neglected to mention in my last post here about an incident with Dewshine's clutch. For whatever reason, one of the eggs from her clutch (the weird snowflakey eggs) was rolled out when I checked on her the other day. She loosened her coils when I opened the tub so I was able to carefully place it back with the other eggs. I did candle it before placing it back because I was afraid that something might have happened to it after having rolled. It was still moving around inside so I closed things up and left her alone. I came back later that night and the same egg was rolled out. I actually pulled Dewshine off of the eggs and held her with one hand while I put the roll-away-egg closer to its sibling eggs with the other. When I was confident that all four of the eggs were sitting snug together, I placed Dewshine back in the tub. She immediately coiled around them and I made sure that her coils held the problematic egg in place before I closed the tub again. I haven't had any further trouble with roll outs. The egg I was so worried about is actually the egg featured in Dewshine's vid above.
 
gsrept said:
thats very wierd that it is not stuck with the others. usually a roll out is an egg that will go bad they know some how Good luck, love that your doing something different.
Click to expand...

That particular clutch is just weird. None of the eggs stick to one another and they've got "snowflaking" on the shells. It's identical to a corn snake clutch I had last year. I can only guess that because they don't stick to one another that when she adjusted her coils, the egg must have slipped out.

Thanks for the well wishes! :)
 
Yesterday the same egg that had rolled out of Dewshine's clutch twice before (several weeks ago) was sitting outside of her coils again and for whatever reason, I decided to snip that egg. I regretted doing so immediately afterwards because I had told myself all along that I would wait.. yesterday was lousy and I guess I just wanted to assure myself that it was okay and candling wasn't enough. I don't get my reasoning either. Anyway, I placed the slit egg back in the pile with its mother and she coiled around the group. Today makes Day 59 for Dewshine and Day 56 for Ailynn. I checked on them after I got up this morning and found this:


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The egg I snipped yesterday was blowing bubbles through the slit last time I checked, but hasn't come out yet. I didn't get a good pic of that egg because the mom is partially covering it. She's going into a shed cycle, which might explain the moodiness, and I didn't want to disturb her any more than I needed to to get a few pics of what was going on in there. So far, all I've seen look like normal babies.

I'll check on the moms again later today to see if I have any new pips or any babies out of the eggs.
 
The egg I cut last night has a cute little head peeking out now. :)

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That's the egg that rolled out of the pile a few times.
 
All of Dewshine's eggs have pipped now but they all look like normals to me. I may change my mind when they leave their eggs, but I'm thinking 4 normal babies here. :)

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Ailynn has two eggs pipped so far and these also look like normals to me. :)

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