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Jonathan's Jungle
News from
October
and November 2007
28th
November 2007
I acquired a beautiful new
baby royal python yesterday evening from some very
good friends of mine who had a clutch of eggs hatch
on September 1st 2007, meaning that he is just under
three months old! I have decided to call him
Aziza as this is a Swahili word for gorgeous which
seems very appropriate for such a handsome snake as
I'm sure you will agree!
The picture above clearly
shows why snake keepers in the USA often call these
snakes BALL PYTHONS. A royal python is able to
roll itself into a tiny ball, with its head hidden
in the coils of its body, which it would usually do
in the wild to protect itself from predators.
As you can see from these
pictures, Aziza is MUCH smaller than my adult male
pythons Nyoka and
Rafiki. In fact Aziza currently weighs
just 185 grammes, which is less than one tenth of
the weight of Rafiki! Whilst this may seem
very small he has actually already nearly tripled in
weight since hatching on September 1st, as he
weighed in at just 65 grammes on the day he hatched!
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9th
November 2007
As well as the baby bearded
dragons which have hatched today (see below) I also
found another lizard egg during my checking rounds
this evening. This egg belongs to a species of
gecko which is not featured on my website at all, as
I would never take them out with me as part of my
roadshow due to their nervous nature. Instead
this is one of very few species which I am keeping
purely for my own enjoyment. The geckos are giant
Madagascan day geckos, from the island of Madagascar
as their name suggests, and they are a species I
have always enjoyed keeping and breeding due to
their stunning colours and patterns. These are
my day geckos, they really are very beautiful as you
can see:
And here
is the egg which I found in their enclosure this
evening:
Day
gecko eggs are much more round or spherical compared
to the eggs of the other lizards I have in my
collection. This egg seems to be in very good
condition and assuming it is fertile, as it seems to
be, it should hatch in about 7-8 weeks. Watch
this space....
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9th
November 2007
After a wait of more than a
week the rest of my bearded dragon eggs started to
hatch yesterday! Between early yesterday
morning and the end of today 10 more dragons have
hatched, meaning I now have 11 in total with up to 5
more eggs still potentially to hatch. I am yet
to get any really good group pictures of the babies
in their new enclosure, but the picture below is one
I took this morning and particularly liked. It
shows a newly hatched baby sitting next to two other
eggs, both of which have dragons poking their heads
out of the shells!
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31st
October 2007
After what feels like
months and months (but is actually just under 10
weeks) the wait is finally over and my first baby
bearded dragon
has hatched! It is VERY cute indeed as you can
see below!
Here is the baby after it
had just slit through the shell of the egg using its
special egg tooth. Babies often wait for
several hours in this position before fully
emerging, and this one certainly did just that.
Here is the baby shortly
after emerging fully from the egg. Its skin is
still moist from the yolk sac inside the egg, so a
few bits of vermiculite (the material in which the
eggs are incubated) are still stuck to his or her
body!
This is how the baby looked
after drying out, you can clearly see the beautiful
patterns that these lizards have as babies.
They are just like miniature versions of their
parents and they are completely on their own from
the moment they hatch, with no parental care at all.
In the wild, if an adult bearded dragon did see a
baby one, there is actually a good chance it would
see it as a good source of protein and eat it.
Here is the baby as it
appeared this evening, looking quite at home in its
new enclosure. At the moment it is alone as it
is the only egg to have hatched so far, but I am
confident that its brothers and sisters will not be
very far behind! Watch this space if you would
like to see pictures of other new babies as they
hatch....
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29th
October 2007
Overnight last night the lovely
Ruby, my Mexican red knee
tarantula, moulted her exoskeleton, in the same
way that Fluffy the golden knee tarantula did in
June 2007 and which is described in detail both
here
and here.
Last night I found Ruby
lying on her back on a bed of silk which she had
produced, as pictured below, which is a sure sign
that a tarantula is about to moult.
This morning I woke up to
the sight pictured below, which looks like there are
two of Ruby in her enclosure! However, the one
on the left is nothing more than Ruby's moulted
exoskeleton (a bit like her old skin), which is
correctly called an exuvium.
Here is Ruby looking
gorgeous in her brand new and brightly coloured
exoskeleton!:
And here is Ruby's exuvium
pictured below. At the top of the picture you
can see the 'head' (which is correctly called the
carapace). This is the first part of the
body to be pushed off during the moulting process to
allow all the other parts of the body to be removed
through the holes which you can see in the centre of
the picture below. The carapace is still
attached to the rest of the body by a thin piece of
the exoskeleton known as the pedicle.
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16th
October 2007
The eggs laid by
Matilda the bearded
dragon
in August are getting closer to their time to
hatch, which I am looking forward to very much.
The shells of a reptile's eggs are soft and
leathery, rather than being hard and brittle like a
bird's eggs, and during their incubation they absorb
a lot of water from their surroundings as the
embryos inside the eggs grow bigger and bigger.
The
pictures below show how the eggs looked on August
24th when they were laid (left hand picture) and how
they look today (right hand picture). You can
clearly see how much larger they are now due to the
absorption of water and the growth of the babies
inside the eggs.
The eggs
may still be a few weeks away from hatching, and it
is impossible to predict exactly how many days they
will take to hatch, but you can be sure that as soon
as they do hatch I will be posting some pictures of
them here for you to see!
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1st October 2007
A really amazing thing happened overnight, as one of
my tail-less whip
scorpions moulted its exoskeleton! During
my morning checks on all the animals today I found
an empty exoskeleton hanging from the roof of the
whip scorpion enclosure, and the newly moulted whip
scorpion was sitting on the back of the enclosure as
you can see below!
This is
the first time that one of my whip scorpions has
moulted since I started keeping them so I am really
pleased about this. She looks absolutely
beautiful in her freshly-moulted new 'skin' and even
has some tinges of blue and green in her new
colouration:
The
exuvium (which is the proper name for the moulted
exoskeleton) looks just like the animal which has
shed it as you can see below, but it now just an
empty 'shell' or 'skin'! The top view is first
with the underside below! These creatures
truly are weird and amazing...
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