Yesterday I discovered this lovely, tiny creature in one of my incubators:
This incubator is on the upper shelf and I have to stand on a stool to see inside. Yesterday when I opened the incubator I just saw an empty half egg shell as I peeked over the edge of the shelf, so felt around and found the baby. So this a.m. I got my stool and took a look to see if any more eggs had hatched. Oh, lordy, lordy! This is what I found:
All those brown specks all over the whole box and substrate, and covering that one egg are the chrysalis (?) of gnat maggots.
This clutch of leopard eggs was placed into the incubator on December 28th of last year. How lucky for yesterday's baby to have hatched! I took the box outside and gently tapped the rest of the eggs to break them, to make sure there weren't anymore live babies. There were three dead babies, starting to rot, and the rest of the eggs were not fertile.
I generally only have the gnat problem with YF and Manouria eggs. Sheesh!
This incubator is on the upper shelf and I have to stand on a stool to see inside. Yesterday when I opened the incubator I just saw an empty half egg shell as I peeked over the edge of the shelf, so felt around and found the baby. So this a.m. I got my stool and took a look to see if any more eggs had hatched. Oh, lordy, lordy! This is what I found:
All those brown specks all over the whole box and substrate, and covering that one egg are the chrysalis (?) of gnat maggots.
This clutch of leopard eggs was placed into the incubator on December 28th of last year. How lucky for yesterday's baby to have hatched! I took the box outside and gently tapped the rest of the eggs to break them, to make sure there weren't anymore live babies. There were three dead babies, starting to rot, and the rest of the eggs were not fertile.
I generally only have the gnat problem with YF and Manouria eggs. Sheesh!