I'm seeing something new with a clutch of Appalachicola kings that have been cooking about a month. One egg is nearly doubled in size of the others. Is this cause for concern? Have you seen this before? Should I just stop fussing and let them cook. I'm not good at being patient.

Justin,

No cause for concern. I've had eggs swell and stretch to an amazing degree. They're bound to do that as the embryo inside grows and the egg takes up moisture from the surroundings. In short, it's normal and I see it every year.

-Cole

Cole,

Thanks for the comment, it easing my concerns. Does this usually result in a larger neonate?

Justin,

It can! I do seem to see it more often when incubating a lower temperatures, which typically results in loger incubation and larger neonates. Must be some correlation, there.

-Cole

Incubating at a nice and steady 82F. What temp do you use? My temp has been pretty consistent.

Justin,

I've tried a number of different things and still experiment a little. I tend to shoot for 78-80F, but have had excellent luck in the 82-84F range, too. At 78-80F, the eggs take a little longer to hatch, but the hatchlings are larger. For instance, Pale Milks tend to incubate for ~6 weeks at 82F, but take 8-9 weeks at 78-ish degrees. The hatchlings are generally 1-2 grams larger at the cooler temprature, too. You're cooking brooksi at 82F, which should be just fine for them. They're a southern critter - warm is the norm. LOL

-Cole

I've been incubating some clutches of gentilis at a range of 72F - 86F this year. Can't wait to see what pops out!

I started incubating at "room temperature" a few years ago. As I get older I tend to get away from the rigid protocols we are told to follow. I think "stressing" is actually a good thing. Make em' fight a bit, like in the wild. So I set colubrid eggs on a counter in a non-air conditioned room or in my garage. Here in northern california we get the benefit of hot, dry days (some times over 100F), but then at night the delta breeze kicks in and drops the temps 30 to 40 degrees. It also makes having a brew on the patio in the evenings quite enjoyable!

You know - twins out of the same egg are possible. I had it happen twice both with lizards but the eggs themselves didnt look all that much larger. I also had an extremely large chain king hatchling come out of a WC shipped mom the egg was same size - but one neo was Super Burly - Oddly and it had an enlarged heart - so enlarged you could See it wringing and see how big it was and easily feel it as the snakes ventris slid across my fingers. It was a male and it ate well and I liked him I thought he was so interesting - so thick, muscular but he died suddenly. Probably his heart.

Scott I had thought about incubating in the Garage, but this is the fourth year I've tried to breed these. So I really wanted to make it work. I lost 11 of the 19 eggs. They went bad nearly right away. The remaining eggs look good. I love these snakes, the female is huge and a joy to work with. The male is kind of off... He does that open mouthed slow motion bite that Kings are famous for, and he sprays the walls with musk. I'm hoping the offspring favor the female. These snakes are garbage dumps and will eat anything I give them.

The first snake egg I ever incubated was one I found lying oddly exposed on the forest floor in Tikal National Park, Guatemala. On a lark I whirl-packed it in a bit of loose dirt and carried it back to camp in my shirt pocket after hiking around with it for a couple of hours, then set it up with whatever materials I could find at hand. That turned out to be a small glass jar half-filled with sawdust (mahogany, no less!) that I obtained from the park's carpenter and covered with a bit of mosquito netting held on by a rubber band. I couldn't do anything about temperature, so I just set it somewhere that I would naturally see it often and could tell if/when it turned bad and so throw it away before it stunk: on the floor beside the toilet in the shack the park was then letting us use (the shack was so dilapidated that we actually set up our tent inside it under its best remaining piece of roof and lived in the tent). For moisture I occasionally (rarely, really) trickled a bit of water through the top into the sawdust beside the egg, based on how the half-buried egg looked to my inexperienced eye. I really didn't expect success, but several weeks later the egg hatched into the cutest little Coniophanes imperialis you ever saw!

So I too tend to think snake eggs are a lot tougher/can handle a lot more environmental variation than we generally give them credit for...

Gerry

Cool first egg story Gerry
My first egg was a starling that i found but my first reptile egg was a foundling too - it was in the bag that some ribbon snakes had arrived in, so it was a mystery what all could have passed through the cloth bag.

I put it in moist aspen bedding in a deli cup and a couple months later a very exotically marked, adorable sky blue gecko appeared - It was a Standings Day Gecko!! Her name was Lisa and she lived free range in the reptile room.


Yes *The Egg* is full of mystery and surprise . . its resiliency and toughness has a kind of epic legacy.

Aweseome......

Dear Justin, there are a number of factors that may cause an egg to swell...and some have been commented on here. I think you should consider your incubation technique, are all the eggs getting the same exposure to the moisture/humidity available at the same temps? Consider eggs are semipermeable and they may absorb and release moisture/water. Sometimes, if they are too damp, they may abosrb too much water, causing the egg to swell and even burst, so great is the internal pressure form the water absorbed. Also, sadly as many a Green Tree Python breeder can attest, overly swollen eggs may result in near term neonates drowning within. The good news is most Colubrid eggs and especially Lampropeltis getula are very durable and forgiving of excesses either way. I have sometimes added dry paper towels to absorb some of the dynamic water with a too damp incubation chamber, and also added damp towels over eggs that were too dry and indented. Good luck and let us know how this little mystery solves itself. I have an enormous Indigo egg that is an equal mystery...I am hoping it is a large or normal neonate rather than twins, which have a poor prognosis in this taxa...
Best of luck, Vic

Would you agree Vic that there ought not be a sheen on the egg - the presence of sheen a marker for it not just being big in size but swollen. The water equilibrium of the egg does have a windowpane of correction (resiliency) air / on dry paper towel , and it can work the other way too.

Mmmm...I don't really know if it is diagnostic or not, but I think I would tend to agree. Chalky and dull is good...shiny and bulging is not in my limited experience. However, regarding chalky, I have seen some eggs that were "poorly calcified", that had a smooth and opaque look, not chalky, often on one end of the egg, that hatched. Some of them were attacked by fungi, but they still hatched.

As others have said, these eggs are quite resilient and durable if you give'em half a chance. Getting fertile eggs is the real challenge, hatching them (colubrids) is easier. Vic

Your humility is only equaled by your eloquent perception.

I feel I should also add my observations... A swollen egg is almost certainly due to extra water being absorbed by the egg. This has happened to me before and usually, there's no harm to the baby. However, I have had a couple eggs get so swollen they ruptured. Drymarchon eggs are, in my experience, quite a bit more sensitive than lampros, but I've learned to decrease the moisture levels in my Drymarchon egg boxes as a result. Hopefully all will go well!

I had one huge egg last year. It resulted in a huge hatchling, that is now a huge yearling. The hatchling was about 2x the size of her siblings and has kept most of that lead...they're 200-300, she's almost 500 grams. Sort of freaky, I'm kind of wondering how big she'll get.

Dudes,

I agree that excess moisture can be an issue and can cause eggs to swell, subsequently leading to embryo death, egg rupture, etc. However, Justin said this:

(emphasis mine)

... which leads me to suspect that the egg clutch isn't being "mismanaged" or he'd have issues with the others, too. Also, having no experience with Drymarchon, I can't comment on their eggs. However, Lampro eggs tend to be pretty tough. If they've got too much moisture, they "sweat" (that's a good sign that you need to dry them out, obviously). They also will make a pretty remarkable recovery from being dried out. If Justin's eggs were too wet, I suspect he'd have mentioned them sweating and he'd have more than one egg getting larger. Anyway, just some additional thoughts.

-Cole

Well the wait is over, 5 of 8 have pipped. Here's a couple quick pics. More will surely come.

Lampropeltis getula goini or meansi whatever you like

Congrats! I am curious to see how the larger egg looks when compared to the others. Please share.

-Thomas

The large egg pipped but it's not showing it's face. Only three of the eggs had anyone showing themselves. I'm pretty excited to get them out shed and feeding. I think I have homes with friends for all of them now. The parents are awesome animals so these should be good babies.

Since the eggs have just started to pip Im sure more beautiful pics will be on the way - so the cigars are out but not quite lit yet thus its within etiquette (i hope) to add this post . .

I dont think anyone was implying the eggs were being "mismanaged" . . Justin brought up the topic of Large Eggs - and everything from larger hatchlings to twins to water absorption was simply explored by others. In this way a subject in forum becomes a kind of genre of clues for other people present and future that would click on the topic ( Lampro Breeders???) that has relevence to their own concerns. Otherwise we might as well just email or phone text individuals directly , rather than post them here.



Not necessarily. Although I cant speak for hovabator situations , in an egg box there isnt always total uniformity of conditions. One egg or two may be located close to a wall that may experience some condensation - perhaps periodical and undetected (like at night) if a flux is allowed - which some keepers favor. Or just positioned where it happens to be a marginally greater in general humidity. And the eggs themselves can be inherently irregular in calcification or permeability. Which is not unnatural .

Ok Gentlemen continue with your cigars

The pics and your babies are gorgeous Justin

Justin,

Those are fantastic, man! They're gonna be killer.



Totally. I was just adding some additional thoughts and rationale. Out of X number of clutches I get each year, I typically see one or two eggs grow to a considerably larger size than the others in the clutch. Sometimes they hatch out just fine, but once in a while something's wrong and they don't. There are some great observations in this thread. It's interesting to see the perspective of breeders of other species, especially.



You have no idea! LOL

lol.

Nice. For a few years I switched to backwoods after i "quit smoking" haha.

I ended up smoking them just as much as the cigarettes and my lower incisors turned black.

I like the smell of the big cigars. If I smoked those I would look like one of those little unidentified vest wearing rodents in warner bros cartoon.

You look good though its a cool picture.

I moved the guys out of the incubator as they're out of the eggs, all but one. He's in the egg with the others. Once they shed I'll feed them and get them seperated. Then they'll go to their homes. One I think looks like it will be a patternless, and might be held back just because I freaking love those things.

These guys are all wildly different from one another, such a cool ssp of getula. I'll try to take better pics when a 2 year old is trying to see them... He then started pulling tubs out of racks, so I was limited on time.

Those are awesome! Those types of kings never disappoint.

Very pretty, Justin. Congratulations!

Gerry