Lizard eggs!

Last Tuesday, Matt was feeding the beasts while I did something really important (probably playing Bejeweled or something), when he said in a voice that indicated something exciting had happened, "Um, Liz?"

I came running to see, and there were two little eggs on the shelf with Grendel!  Grendel, ourlittle princess leachie gecko had laid eggs!

We thought that was pretty exciting!  Of course, we don't have a mate for her, so there was basically no chance they were fertile.  Right?

Well, we did a little bit of research, and it turns out that there are quite a few anecdotal accounts of parthenogenesis in rhadodactylus species, though none confirmed by Science.  Also, leachies have a spermathaeca, where they can store sperm for years at a time after a single mating.  We got Grendel as an adult, so it seemed quite likely that she'd been introduced to a mate at some point before she came to us.

So we built a little incubator.  Yup, it's a tupperware with moist dirt.  Leachies like basically the same temperatures as humans.  Their eggs incubate between 65 and 85 degrees F, and we keep our house at 72.  Perfect! 

Fun Fact: Reptiles are cool for a lot of reasons.  One of those reasons is that the sex of the babies is determined by temperature during incubation.  Eggs incubated at lower temperatures will take significantly longer to hatch (like, up to 100 days longer), and have a higher chance of producing females.  Eggs incubated at higher temperatures develop and hatch faster, and are more likely to produce males.  There's an art to temperature maintenance in breeding circles.   In leopard geckos, there's also something called a "hot female", which are produced by eggs incubated just above 85 degrees.  They tend to be kind of crazy, and are sometimes less hardy than normal females.  It's fascinating, I tell you.


Ok, so we kept these eggs around for a few days, and then we decided to candle them and actually see what was inside.  Candling is really simple.  You hold a bright light behind the egg, and carefully look through it.  With lizard eggs, you must be careful not to rotate them, because that could kill the embryo.

A fertilized egg with a live embryo will generally glow a sort of soft pink, and you might see veins or a dark mass where the embryo and yolk sac are.  Unfertilized eggs tend to glow yellow.  Here are our eggs:

Yep, definitely not fertile.  But it was still a fun thing to have happen!  I wouldn't be surprised if Grendel continues to lay an egg or two every season now.  I wonder if lizard eggs are good to eat?

This incident did get us really excited about the prospect of jumping into the world of reptile breeding.  A month or so ago, we bought the first female for our Russian tortoise breeding colony.  Meet Rasputina:

She has the cutest little stripey face you ever did see.  And we like to think the little crown on her shell is reminiscent of St. Basil's Cathedral (but we're also aware that we're delusional). She's still too little to breed, but now we're on the lookout for a bigger female to maybe get things going!  Just imagine all the baby tortoises!  Oh man, that's going to be amazing.

It's unlikely that we'll delve into the world of breeding leachies, though.  They tend to be more inclined to fight than to mate, and it can actually be dangerous for the females to be introduced to new males.  Plus, they sell for $400-600 apiece, meaning it's a lot of money lost if your pair doesn't take a liking to each other.  But that's ok.  We don't mind that Grendel's one of a kind.