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Jonathan's Jungle
News from
January
- February 2009
25th
February 2009
Apologies for the lack of
updates throughout February - I have had some
technical problems with my website software but if
you are reading this they must be resolved!
I had a really lovely
surprise this evening as I found my first two
crested gecko
babies for 2009 just wandering around inside the
enclosure of one of my adult breeding groups!
This was a real shock as they have hatched much
earlier than the first babies of 2008 or 2007.
In fact hatching so early in the year means that
these eggs must have been laid sometime in December,
which is much later in the year than I have ever
known eggs to be laid before!
The babies are absolutely
tiny and very beautiful as you can see above.
As these babies are newly hatched they haven't even
shed their skins yet, which means that despite
already being very attractive their best colours are
yet to come...
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29th
January 2009
Very exciting news tonight
as I have just discovered that my pregnant
imperial scorpion has
given birth at some point during today! This
is my third successful breeding of this species in
the last year and a half and I had known she was due
to give birth any time, so I am very pleased that it has happened tonight!
Female scorpions carry
their newly-born babies on their back and as you can
see from these pictures they look a lot
different to her in terms of their colour.
This is because their exoskeleton is very soft at
birth and they are little more than scorpion-shaped
blobs of white jelly which certainly cannot look
after themselves! Once they have moulted for
the first time they will be more able to fend for
themselves and they will begin to leave the safety
of their mother's back a few weeks after being born.
You can see from the
pictures above that the babies cover most of the
female scorpion's body and even the head area!
There are likely to be 25+ babies in this brood, the
last two I have had contained 26 and 27 respectively
and this one looks every bit as big as the previous
two. Having all those babies sure is hungry
work and as you can see from this last picture the
female was keen to tuck into a big juicy cricket
tonight!
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It would appear to be a
very popular time for my scorpions and their
relatives to be pregnant! As well as the one
above and the pregnant desert hairy scorpion
pictured in the news story dated 15th January below,
I have discovered tonight that
Malt the vinegaroon is
also definitely expecting babies!
I have suspected that this
was the case for some time but because she is so
secretive and spends much of her time underground in
burrows, which she digs for herself, it has been
hard to confirm. Tonight I have seen her on
the surface of her enclosure's substrate for the
first time in weeks and she has an extremely swollen
abdomen despite not having eaten much in recent
weeks, a sure sign that she will be having her own
babies in the near future! Watch this space...
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15th
January 2009
It would appear that I have
another pregnant scorpion in my collection! As
you can see in the pictures below the abdomen of my
female
desert
hairy scorpion is looking very swollen indeed
and she is also acting in a very defensive way, both
of which are sure signs that she is carrying babies!
You can see just how
swollen her abdomen is when compared to that of the
male in the picture below!
This pregnancy means that I
have scorpions of two species expecting babies at
the same time, and you can be sure that as soon as
babies have arrived I will be updating this page
with pictures!
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7th
January 2009
I have been very busy
indeed since the start of the new year both with
visiting schools and preparing to attend a three-day
conference & exhibition hosted by the Association
for Science Education and held at the University of
Reading. I expect that it will feel really
strange being back at the University as it was there
that I did both my first BSc degree and my MSc a few
years later!
I will update this page
with a few new animal additions soon after the
conference is over, but I couldn't possibly update
this page and not share with you the very latest
addition to my collection. He is an Australian
rainbow stag beetle and I truly think he may be the
most beautiful animal I have ever kept in my life!
These photographs do not
even come close to capturing the incredible
colouration and metallic shine of this beetle and do
him no justice at all, he is truly astonishing.
Depending on the type of light you view him in he
can appear golden, purple, green or a combination of
all three! I think I will need to wait for a
nice bright day to photograph him in natural light
without a flash, then I will update this page
further along with my other new animal additions!
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