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Jonathan's Jungle
News from
January - March 2007
29th
March 2007
Leia, my female
Imperial scorpion, is
heavily pregnant and has now been pregnant for at
least 7 or more months. Imperial scorpions
give birth to between 20 and 30 live babies after a
pregnancy lasting anything from 7 months to one
year, so I am hoping that Leia will give birth to
her babies some time soon.
As you
can see from this picture, her body is very swollen
and the whitish membranes which connect her body
segments together are massively stretched due to the
babies growing inside. As soon as Leia has
given birth I will post some pictures here so watch
this space!.........
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22nd
March 2007
Two of my female
leopard geckos have laid
eggs in recent days. One laid a single egg on
the 16th March and the other laid a pair of eggs
today.
I am incubating them in my
home-made incubator at 82 degrees Fahrenheit on the
surface of some moistened vermiculite, a substance
which holds moisture very well. Vermiculite is
commonly used to incubate reptile eggs as they need
to absorb water through their leathery shells during
incubation, otherwise the babies growing inside would
die. These eggs should take approximately seven
to nine weeks to hatch, the last leopard gecko eggs I
incubated at this temperature hatched after 52 days
(seven weeks and three days!).
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3rd
March 2007
During the last week I have
had a few giant
Australian
prickly stick insect babies hatch. As you
can see from the picture below these 'giants' are
quite small when they first hatch, especially when
compared to the size of the adults they will grow
into one day! The eggs that have hatched had
been incubating for 6-7 months and were laid by some
of my own females during last July and August.
The eggs, or ova as
they are correctly named, are just like little seeds
as you can see below. Each one has a little
'cap' called a capitulum which the baby has
to push off before it is able to come out.
Watching the babies hatch is quite amazing because
each one is really squashed up inside its egg before
starting to hatch, so they seem so much bigger than
the egg when they are finally on the outside and you
wonder how they managed to fit in there!
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7th
January 2007
One of my
hissing
cockroaches gave birth to about 25-30 baby
cockroaches! This is the fifth time in the
last few months that baby hissing cockroaches have
been born, and I now have quite a large collection
of them of all different sizes!
Hissing cockroaches are
quite unusual amongst the insects as most insects
lay eggs rather than having live babies. When
hissing cockroaches are first born their bodies are
soft and white, but within a few hours they harden
up and go dark in colour.
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