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Posted by Dr. Phil on March 26, 2002 at 22:05:44:
In Reply to: Dean, you needn't be alarmed about the air circulation posted by Fredrick Albury on March 26, 2002 at 11:56:00:
The very first time I bred easterns I had obtained this precious piece of data a little prior: it's apparently a pretty steady 76F inside the gopher tortoise burrows, with little fluctuation year round. While I've never heard it confirmed that wild indigos do in fact lay in those burrows, the evidence that would lead one to come to that conclusion are many. The burrows are by far the deepest underground refuges in the pine/palmetto hammocks where the snakes live, hence the reason they spend most of their time in them. Why would such a large snake look for another type of smaller burrow or cavity to lay their eggs when they already live in the biggest ones, that also happen to have convenient side chambers? And surely they can't possibly lay somewhere on the surface, such as in fallen tree cavities or in rotting vegetation, where temps would be sure to reach levels well above what is known to be very deleterious to the developping embryos.
So it was with this deep conviction that I set my incubating eggs at a stable 76F from day one.....all the way to day 113(average 108)! At this temp I never lost a single egg OR hatched a single kinked-spine neonate over the three successive breeding seasons I got fertile eggs. In my humble opinion, incubating at temps closer to 80F is taking a truly unnecessary risk, as even a few accidental degrees over that mark for even a very short
time usually results in needless tragedies.
As for ventilation, in my experience, it is not a necessity as long as the eggs are kept much drier from the onset than the average colubrid egg. The first eggs I was fortunate to hatch would soak up water like sponges from the very first day, and I had quite a few mold up to various degrees. I used much less humid vermiculite on the next batches and the problem was solved. I reason that tortoise burrows are mostly dug in sandy soil that must not retain moisture well, so the eggs must be adapted somewhat to take advantage of the little moisture available at the time of laying, which happens not to be the wettest time of year in Florida/Georgia. Or maybe the calcified granulations on the eggshells serve sort of a "spacer" function in order to keep the eggs from becoming in direct contact with the substrate they are laid on, so they don't touch anything too wet that could invite fungal infection of the shell.
So setting up the eggs in standard moistened vermiculite seems to be way too moist for them. It's almost incredible how resistant freshly laid eggs are to dessication.
On the other hand, the eggs would theoretically tend to hatch during the rainy season in Florida, so I always tended to add a little water to the incubator towards the end of incubation, without ever witnessing molding at that part of the incubation process because of this practice.
Dr.Phil
Montreal
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