Thursday, July 25, 2013

One of My Female Bearded Dragons Dropped 18 Eggs In Her First Clutch


The male is the one strutting his stuff next to one of the females. The
other female is hard at work laying eggs under the laying box. Note the
male's stub tail and the missing toes on the right hind foot.
I got two free female bearded dragons awhile back from one of my son's friends. Wasn't thinking all that much about breeding them although I had toyed with the thought of buying a male to join them. Then, a few weeks back, on July 1st, I got a free adult male. They were not in the tank together very long before he started mating with them.

She sure looks like she is down to serious business.

One of them dropped 18 eggs tonight. I put together a nice laying box for her, full of a mixture of potting soil, sphagnum moss (long cut) and black garden soil (consisting of composted weeds, grass, leaves and such).

Click on it to enlarge it and look closely,
you can see three of the eggs.
 She dug in it a few times, then decided she wanted to dig out the sand from under that box and lay under there. Go figure. Luckily the box did not slip down onto her or the eggs after she dug out enough sand to make a nice laying chamber.

All done laying, she is coming out from under. Once
out, she turned around and used her snout and front
legs to start pushing sand back under the box and over
the eggs. I took them out before she finished and put
them into an incubator for proper temps and humidity.
I am guessing, since she laid tonight, that the other one can not be more than a few days to a week from doing so herself. Time will tell. I did not palpate either one to feel if they were gravid but she, like the one that laid tonight, put on a some weight and heft so I imagine she is also going to drop soon.

I foresee there will be thousands of 1/8 and 1/4 crickets, chirping away in my basement, in my near future - about 70 days. Hopefully, I will sell or trade them all before I have to move up to 1/2 inch crickets or larger.

All the best,
Glenn B

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