Eggs, Eggs, and More Eggs!

Did I mention it's egg laying time? Okay so here's the tally for this year. I only have one female left to lay. As of right now I have 28 fertile eggs out of a total laid of 40 for the Juarez girls. That comes out right at 70% fertility rate which has been about my average since I have been breeding these agalmas. As for the Martirs, my first female crapped out on me and laid five bad eggs. Ughhh. This doesn't give me much hope for the second clutch due to be laid today or tomorrow. The same male is the breeder for both. My theory is that it is the boys fault when I get bad eggs because of no viable sperm. I didn't get any samples from him this year to check out under the microscope. I'm hoping for a miracle on the second clutch, but I'm pessimistic to be sure. So I should have lots of little Juarez babies out and about around three months from now. If you ever wanted to get a pair of these from me, this year would seem to be a good year. Although I've been getting screwed on the sex ratio with high males the last few years, I'm hoping the odds turn around this year and I have more girls hatch.

Egg Laying Has Commenced

I had my first Juarez female lay seven eggs yesterday. Ony two appeared fertile in that clutch....bummer. However this morning I have my nicest Juarez female laying a huge clutch. Nine eggs are already laid and they all appear fertile. She looks to have one or two more to go to finish. I'm pretty giddy about this clutch. More egg laying updates in the next few days to come.

April Update

So it's been a few weeks since the last blog. A lot is going on right now, mostly good, but one tragedy. It appears that all the adult female Juarez(5) and both Martir girls are gravid. In fact a couple of Juarez girls have already started refusing food are deep in the blue for their pre-lay shed. Fingers are crossed for good fertility.

On the tragedy side, I had smaller male Juarez holdback male get killed and eaten by a first time breeder female. This is the first time this has ever happened to me in working with agalma. I had a female Santa Cruz zonata a while back try to eat the male any time I would put him in the cage, but never had any signs of that with my Juarez line or Martir animals. My routine is that I feed all the females, wait a day, and then rotate in the males during breeding season. So I came down to the garage to check on and feed everyone about three days since I last checked on everyone. When I pulled out her cage, the first thing I noticed was that the paper towel I have in the cage to help during feeding(so that shavings don't get stuck on the thawed mouse)was all balled up. Then a split second later I saw the last few inches of the male sticking out of the female! Holy shit I said. "You bitch!" I was furious with her. I said their is no way I am letting you keep this male in your gullet and I started pulling him out of her inch by inch. I thought their might be a chance that the male was still alive but he was deader than a doornail. So sad. This was probably my best looking male I had produced and raised. Needless to say that now I know this female is a known cannibal, she will always have a chaperone looking on(ME)!) when a male is with her again. I'm hoping that the little male bred with her before he got black widowed so I have something to show from his genes.