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Jonathan's Jungle
News from
August and September 2007
29th September 2007
Crested gecko
baby number 5 hatched today and I was lucky enough
to find it coming out of the egg. All five of
the babies which have hatched so far have been
really fit and healthy which I am delighted about.
There
are two more pairs of eggs in the incubator already
and my two females, Harley and Quinn, are still
producing new pairs of eggs on a regular basis which
is fantastic! It is brilliant seeing the
babies hatch and is the best part of keeping these
lovely animals.
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20th September 2007
Two more baby crested geckos hatched today! Despite
being clutch mates, meaning they hatched from one
pair of eggs, they look completely different from
each other as you can see!
Crested
gecko patterns and colours are so variable and one
set of parents can produce very different looking
babies, even from one pair of eggs, as has happened
in this case! This is one of the best and most
exciting things about breeding crested geckos, as
you can never tell what the babies will look like
until they actually hatch!
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3rd
September 2007 Something really exciting
happened yesterday, as my first ever baby
crested geckos hatched!
These two geckos hatched from the eggs laid on July
13th, which are pictured a bit further down the
page, which means that they took just 51 days to
hatch! Here are pictures of one of them
actually hatching and just after it had emerged
fully from its egg.
The next
picture shows one of the babies a few hours after
hatching, by which time its skin has dried out after
being covered in the yolk sac and liquid inside the
egg.
During
the night after hatching they have shed their skins
for the first time and now look like this, with
their colours looking so much deeper and richer than
they were the night before!
As you
can see the babies are tiny but absolutely beautiful
and they are also very very good at jumping! I
am delighted with them and now have more crested
gecko eggs in the incubator too, so hopefully there
will be more baby news to following in the coming
weeks! Watch this space...
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24th
August 2007 I was delighted to find that
Matilda, my female
bearded dragon, had today laid a clutch of 16
healthy looking eggs! I knew that she was
preparing to lay them as she was spending time
digging in the sand in her enclosure a few days ago,
a sure sign that she is looking for a suitable place
to lay. I placed a large tub filled with damp
coir compost into the enclosure for her to use, but
she just ignored it! I decided to try pouring
damp coir compost directly into one end of her
enclosure and within a few hours of being left alone
she had laid them! They are now being
incubated on a bed of dampened vermiculite as with
all my reptile eggs.
Reptile
eggs are not like a bird's eggs and they must not be
turned over during the incubation period as the
developing embryo can be drowned if this happens, so
the top of each egg is marked with a red 'x' to show
that this is the right way up. These eggs
should hatch in approximately 60-70 days, watch this
space for any baby news!!
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