Tihshho
Established Member
Let's just start out with a day 1 pic:
No matter how much planning you can do, you can never be prepared for a clutch of babies. Specifically when selecting my female Xanth I chose a smaller one (5" nose to vent) in hopes of if she was pregnant the clutch size would be small. Since I picked her up two months ago she's gone through a few changes when it came to her housing.
1 - She was housed in alone
2 - Went from a 16x16x30 to 18x18x36
3 - UVB had been swapped from a CFL bulb to T5
4 - She was probably starting to get more nutrient food than where she was from
Since day 1 of having her I knew what I was getting myself into and had to prepare for the possibility of babies so I needed to make sure two things were fixed, first being that Mama Jax had everything she needed to be happy and healthy. So I went through with the help of everyone here and made sure that my husbandry was up to par. As I said above that started out with getting her out of her kit enclosure into a DIY screened enclosure and to get her on the right lighting. After that it was as simple as making sure her food and intake of minerals were right.
From there I set off to dig deeper into the whole "what to do when babies arrive" and started to tinker with different rearing enclosures. I built a few small DIY screened enclosures, but per what I read it seemed that these baby chams do best with being reared in glass enclosures. What's the next best thing to glass? Well, plastic! Being that I breed ball pythons, I'm a bin guy, so if bin's can be used they will darn well be used. I tinkered with cutting some bins to affix screen to one side and a top to provide adequate cross flow, but I couldn't get the humidity and the temps right per what I was playing with. Initially, I planned on housing the chams in a bin with an LED strip light for heat/daylight and a T5 UVB strip across all the bins for calcium management. Being that I was still testing, I didn't have everything laid out 100% so there was room for change.
Now let's talk about today, December 6th, 2019. Being that it's a Friday it's a day off for me, stumbled around in the morning and decided to start my day off with refreshing myself with some Chameleon Breeder Podcast! Started with the "yay, yikes" episode just to make sure I had everything that was my mental checklist in place expecting that I would see baby dragons running around in the beginning of the new year. Figured since the gestation was unknown and I had been checking every morning for babies that today wouldn't be the day to go downstairs to just get my hope knocked again. Started to get half way through the podcast and something in my mind was itching that I needed to go down to the basement and check on the cham's. Not sure why or what, but I needed to do it. I meander my way down and open the door to their room and from across the room it was clear...
I should have guessed this yesterday as her body went into full shed. You live and you learn, but now I'm going to plan on body shed being the pre-'lay' shed.
Ok, so now at this point I had been tinkering with bins, I even had a row on a rack sitting with a base layer of damp sphagnum and a top layer of ABG with some bamboo setup for perching and a few sprigs of pothos and hibiscus. Then panic ensued, first thing that came to mind was impaction... So I ended up pulling another empty bin and getting my sprigs of hibiscus potted in some sandy soil from the mother plant and then covered the top of the pot with filter floss as to keep the babies out to not eat the substrate and to not drown in any collected water. Ended up moving over some leaf litter and some of the bamboo climbing posts and then started on the phase of collecting babies.
One.. Two... Three... Ten... Eleven... Twenty... Twenty-six... Thirty! This 5" mama kicked out 30 babies! Whoa! Has me thinking more about what would have happened if I selected a bigger one. Now with the babies moved out of tired Mama's enclosure they are at this phase:
Now to figure out the actual plan since my initial set were blown out the water. Figured I could keep these guys under LED lighting for 24 hours just to keep an eye on them and let them settle. Meanwhile work on getting some other bins in order to split up the 30 into more manageable groups of say 5 or 10. Would UVB 5.0 be ok with these guys? How about dripping vs. misting when it comes to water?
No matter how much planning you can do, you can never be prepared for a clutch of babies. Specifically when selecting my female Xanth I chose a smaller one (5" nose to vent) in hopes of if she was pregnant the clutch size would be small. Since I picked her up two months ago she's gone through a few changes when it came to her housing.
1 - She was housed in alone
2 - Went from a 16x16x30 to 18x18x36
3 - UVB had been swapped from a CFL bulb to T5
4 - She was probably starting to get more nutrient food than where she was from
Since day 1 of having her I knew what I was getting myself into and had to prepare for the possibility of babies so I needed to make sure two things were fixed, first being that Mama Jax had everything she needed to be happy and healthy. So I went through with the help of everyone here and made sure that my husbandry was up to par. As I said above that started out with getting her out of her kit enclosure into a DIY screened enclosure and to get her on the right lighting. After that it was as simple as making sure her food and intake of minerals were right.
From there I set off to dig deeper into the whole "what to do when babies arrive" and started to tinker with different rearing enclosures. I built a few small DIY screened enclosures, but per what I read it seemed that these baby chams do best with being reared in glass enclosures. What's the next best thing to glass? Well, plastic! Being that I breed ball pythons, I'm a bin guy, so if bin's can be used they will darn well be used. I tinkered with cutting some bins to affix screen to one side and a top to provide adequate cross flow, but I couldn't get the humidity and the temps right per what I was playing with. Initially, I planned on housing the chams in a bin with an LED strip light for heat/daylight and a T5 UVB strip across all the bins for calcium management. Being that I was still testing, I didn't have everything laid out 100% so there was room for change.
Now let's talk about today, December 6th, 2019. Being that it's a Friday it's a day off for me, stumbled around in the morning and decided to start my day off with refreshing myself with some Chameleon Breeder Podcast! Started with the "yay, yikes" episode just to make sure I had everything that was my mental checklist in place expecting that I would see baby dragons running around in the beginning of the new year. Figured since the gestation was unknown and I had been checking every morning for babies that today wouldn't be the day to go downstairs to just get my hope knocked again. Started to get half way through the podcast and something in my mind was itching that I needed to go down to the basement and check on the cham's. Not sure why or what, but I needed to do it. I meander my way down and open the door to their room and from across the room it was clear...
I should have guessed this yesterday as her body went into full shed. You live and you learn, but now I'm going to plan on body shed being the pre-'lay' shed.
Ok, so now at this point I had been tinkering with bins, I even had a row on a rack sitting with a base layer of damp sphagnum and a top layer of ABG with some bamboo setup for perching and a few sprigs of pothos and hibiscus. Then panic ensued, first thing that came to mind was impaction... So I ended up pulling another empty bin and getting my sprigs of hibiscus potted in some sandy soil from the mother plant and then covered the top of the pot with filter floss as to keep the babies out to not eat the substrate and to not drown in any collected water. Ended up moving over some leaf litter and some of the bamboo climbing posts and then started on the phase of collecting babies.
One.. Two... Three... Ten... Eleven... Twenty... Twenty-six... Thirty! This 5" mama kicked out 30 babies! Whoa! Has me thinking more about what would have happened if I selected a bigger one. Now with the babies moved out of tired Mama's enclosure they are at this phase:
Now to figure out the actual plan since my initial set were blown out the water. Figured I could keep these guys under LED lighting for 24 hours just to keep an eye on them and let them settle. Meanwhile work on getting some other bins in order to split up the 30 into more manageable groups of say 5 or 10. Would UVB 5.0 be ok with these guys? How about dripping vs. misting when it comes to water?
