At last year's TTPG conference one of the speakers talked about better hatch rates coupled with bigger and healthier babies when he incubated his aquatic turtle eggs on some sort of acidic substrate instead of something inert like vermiculite. He used peat moss and explained that the acids in the decomposing moss dissolved the calcium in the egg shell making it more bio-avaialble to the baby, allowing more oxygen into the egg during the end stages of incubation, and making it easier to hatch since the egg shell walls were thinner.
@Markw84 and I both had the same ideas about it, and we wondered if the same thing would apply to tortoise eggs. Mark brought this up in another thread a few days ago and it reminded me that I wanted to try it. In addition to Mark, I think this experiment will be of interest to @Sterant @HermanniChris @kingsley and @Will too.
My 60 pound female sulcata, Daisy, lays pretty large clutches. Frequently more than 30 and her record last year was 42 in one clutch. She's also a favorite of my male, Tuck, and she has high fertility and high hatch rates. This clutch was laid on 3/18/18 and consisted of 32 eggs. 4 eggs were dimpled, all others were perfect. Good shell formation and consistent large size. As I dug the eggs up, I put them in order in the large egg flat. Once the egg boxes were set up, I put every other egg in each box so that there would be a relatively even distribution of eggs from the top, middle, and bottom of the nest in each egg box. 16 eggs per box. One box will be incubated in my usual style on fine vermiculite with a 1 : 1 water to vermiculite ratio by weight. Eggs are sunk about 2/3 to 3/4 into the vermiculite. The other box has about half the normal amount of vermiculite to maintain the normal moisture ratio and the other half is lightly dampened "organic" peat moss with no additives of any kind. The eggs in this box are in contact with the peat only and not touching the vermiculite on bottom.
The eggs will be placed on top of each other on the same shelf in my large circulating air incubator.
The eggs are already showing significant chalking, and we will have answers around mid June.
Comments and questions are welcome.
@Markw84 and I both had the same ideas about it, and we wondered if the same thing would apply to tortoise eggs. Mark brought this up in another thread a few days ago and it reminded me that I wanted to try it. In addition to Mark, I think this experiment will be of interest to @Sterant @HermanniChris @kingsley and @Will too.
My 60 pound female sulcata, Daisy, lays pretty large clutches. Frequently more than 30 and her record last year was 42 in one clutch. She's also a favorite of my male, Tuck, and she has high fertility and high hatch rates. This clutch was laid on 3/18/18 and consisted of 32 eggs. 4 eggs were dimpled, all others were perfect. Good shell formation and consistent large size. As I dug the eggs up, I put them in order in the large egg flat. Once the egg boxes were set up, I put every other egg in each box so that there would be a relatively even distribution of eggs from the top, middle, and bottom of the nest in each egg box. 16 eggs per box. One box will be incubated in my usual style on fine vermiculite with a 1 : 1 water to vermiculite ratio by weight. Eggs are sunk about 2/3 to 3/4 into the vermiculite. The other box has about half the normal amount of vermiculite to maintain the normal moisture ratio and the other half is lightly dampened "organic" peat moss with no additives of any kind. The eggs in this box are in contact with the peat only and not touching the vermiculite on bottom.
The eggs will be placed on top of each other on the same shelf in my large circulating air incubator.
The eggs are already showing significant chalking, and we will have answers around mid June.
Comments and questions are welcome.
