Some pretty cool redfoot eggs this evening...

Not just any old redfoot eggs, these are the first from a female I hatched many years ago. Pretty cool to finally obtain some eggs from her after all the years of raising her. The clutch contained 9 eggs in total, which seems huge for a first time, but the eggs are very small. I suspect she may have retained a clutch and that could have contributed to the size, being that all of my girls began nesting a good three months ago.The size compounded with the fact it is her first clutch means they are probably very low fertility.



I will probably end up keeping back several offspring she produces, just to have third generation animals, eventually.

very nice good luck hoping for a hatch

Nice. Good luck with hatching many beautiful babies out of them!

That is really nice to be able to look back and say you know your torts lineage since you bred them! Well done!

Congrats, that's too cool to have grand babies. Hoping for a complete hatch.

allegraf said:

That is really nice to be able to look back and say you know your torts lineage since you bred them! Well done!

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Yeah, I like the idea of being able to see it come "full circle" in a sense. It also makes me think about just how long it takes to raise a generation of tortoises…..Unlike monkeys, birds, other exotics, there is a good 8-10 years invested into it for tortoises.

Cool beans Turtlepete. Don't be surprised though if all of those eggs are fertile. Or not fertile.
I've had mixed results with first time females with some producing 100% viable eggs right from the start, to some taking a year or two to get rolling along with good eggs.
Oddly, the longest I've ever kept one of my own neonates is 7 years and this was a Colombian male that I hatched in 1982. I just never kept my one hatchlings back...
But I know of a number of my hatchlings that are into their 25th (or more) year and are still going strong.

cdmay said:

Cool beans Turtlepete. Don't be surprised though if all of those eggs are fertile. Or not fertile.
I've had mixed results with first time females with some producing 100% viable eggs right from the start, to some taking a year or two to get rolling along with good eggs.
Oddly, the longest I've ever kept one of my own neonates is 7 years and this was a Colombian male that I hatched in 1982. I just never kept my one hatchlings back...
But I know of a number of my hatchlings that are into their 25th (or more) year and are still going strong.

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These are honestly the smallest eggs I've ever seen. I get small eggs from another one of my females who started producing a year/two ago, but these are even tinier. I'm guessing either very, very few or none of these are fertile. But, I'm still happy she is finally laying, and hopefully next season I will get some fertile eggs.
The only reason I actually kept this girl was because, at the time, she was the first tortoise I had hatched with more then 13 scutes, and when I was a kid I had this grand idea that it was some rarity. Haha. So, since she had 16 scutes I ended up keeping her, but then as the years went on I got more and more of them and realized it wasn't so special anymore.
Fertility and egg size definitely seems to go up with age. My oldest female lays massive eggs with very good fertility, but the younger ones are much smaller.