First Eggs Of The Year

Well they came a little early from previous years, but the first Juarez female has laid her eggs. She laid a dud right after her pre-lay shed, but tonight she dropped 4 out five good eggs. I'm really stoked about this clutch. It is the first time ever I've bred my really best light orange male to my best light orange female. Here is a pic of her laying tonight and a pic of the male sire.

Prego Females

So I was just down in the garage cleaning a few cages and I snapped off a few pictures of some of my adult females. They are all very pregnant and already starting to go into their pre-lay shed. I also got a great pic again of Mrs Pinkie Martir in situ in her little vermiculite cup over the heat. She seems to love this place the best to digest her meals. Lastly is a pic of an upcoming male from 2008 that should be ready to breed next year if I push him. Enjoy. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

Loving The Microscope

So I was down feeding the little guys earlier today and I wanted to see if I could get another sperm sample from a first year breeder male. So I threw him in with the girl that my twelve year old male hit up a few days ago. They hooked up as you can see from the picture below. They were probably hooked up for about twenty minutes and then he left a good sample for me to analyze on the shavings. After setting up the wet slide with a drop of water on top of the sample and a half drop of red dye to stain the slide, I proceeded to look at it. I searched far and wide on the slide on all different magnifications and couldn't find a live swimmer. So this tells me that he was either to small to produce good sperm or he is just plain shooting blanks. The microscope is already paying for itself. It's to bad because this is just a smokin' male holdback from 2007.

Microscope Update

After some refreshers on how to set up a wet slide and after practicing the scope on various pond scum organisms, I finally hit pay dirt earlier tonight. I had been trying to get/find a good sperm sample from any of my males the past few weeks, but I was stopped out in this endeavor. Tonight I threw in my oldest male(12 years) with my number four female. I had thought about holding this girl back this year from breeding, but she has really been eating like a pig the last few weeks so tonight was her lucky night. The pair almost immediately hooked up. After about a half hour hookup, the male left a nice looking sperm plug on the paper towel in the cage. Talk about excitement. I rushed into action and set up the microscope.

It took a few minutes to finally find what I was looking for, but I finally got to see some Agalma living sperm, LOL! It was exciting to see all those little swimmers looking for an egg to fertilize. I would find them in pockets on the wet slide, but I'm pretty sure this boy will produce some babies this year. It will be interesting to see what the fertility rate will be for this girl this year. I'm just wondering if I need to see many more little swimmers on the slide or if this will do the job. It's my first time looking at this so time will tell.