Just to get you all up to speed:
I used to have 1.2 adult Mep, but my tortoise partner took them home to San Diego a couple years ago. This turned out to be a very good choice because right away the bigger female laid fertile eggs and now William (my partner) has quite a few Mep babies to sell. This left me with several baby Mep and 1.1 coming on adult Mee.
I bought the female Mee from our member M. Rajkumar in the Sacramento area several years ago. She was just coming on maturity at that time. She developed into a very nice specimen, and last year laid her first clutch of eggs. Trouble is, she put them on top of the ground, then started covering them up with the surrounding leaf litter, and in the process, she broke all the eggs (I didn't see this until after the fact).
This a.m. my egg sniffing dog alerted me to goings on in the Manouria rain forest. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
For the past couple weeks, Rajkumar (as I have named the female Mee) was working on, and built a nice nest under a shelter:
. . . but, as I said, this a.m. my egg sniffer alerted me to activity further on out in the rain forest. I went to inspect and found Raj on top of a bunch of eggs, and she was trying to scrape leaf litter over the pile:
The eggs are just to the right of the cast iron plant and if you look closely, you can just barely see a portion of an egg barely covered up.
I hurried up and gathered them all up, as they were laying on top of the hard ground with only a thin layer of leaves covering them so far:
There was a bit of yolk over the mess of eggs, so some had been broken already, and about three of them are bent and partially crushed, so are probably no good.
Now she's industriously working and scraping leaf litter to cover the now empty nest:
The male is older, but smaller than the female, and I haven't seen him show any interest in breeding, so I doubt these eggs are fertile, but I'm going to incubate them anyway.
This coming winter I'm planning to separate the Manouria shed and have the male on one side and the female on the other. Maybe absence will make his heart grow fonder for next year's breeding schedule.
I used to have 1.2 adult Mep, but my tortoise partner took them home to San Diego a couple years ago. This turned out to be a very good choice because right away the bigger female laid fertile eggs and now William (my partner) has quite a few Mep babies to sell. This left me with several baby Mep and 1.1 coming on adult Mee.
I bought the female Mee from our member M. Rajkumar in the Sacramento area several years ago. She was just coming on maturity at that time. She developed into a very nice specimen, and last year laid her first clutch of eggs. Trouble is, she put them on top of the ground, then started covering them up with the surrounding leaf litter, and in the process, she broke all the eggs (I didn't see this until after the fact).
This a.m. my egg sniffing dog alerted me to goings on in the Manouria rain forest. But I'm getting ahead of my story.
For the past couple weeks, Rajkumar (as I have named the female Mee) was working on, and built a nice nest under a shelter:
. . . but, as I said, this a.m. my egg sniffer alerted me to activity further on out in the rain forest. I went to inspect and found Raj on top of a bunch of eggs, and she was trying to scrape leaf litter over the pile:
The eggs are just to the right of the cast iron plant and if you look closely, you can just barely see a portion of an egg barely covered up.
I hurried up and gathered them all up, as they were laying on top of the hard ground with only a thin layer of leaves covering them so far:
There was a bit of yolk over the mess of eggs, so some had been broken already, and about three of them are bent and partially crushed, so are probably no good.
Now she's industriously working and scraping leaf litter to cover the now empty nest:
The male is older, but smaller than the female, and I haven't seen him show any interest in breeding, so I doubt these eggs are fertile, but I'm going to incubate them anyway.
This coming winter I'm planning to separate the Manouria shed and have the male on one side and the female on the other. Maybe absence will make his heart grow fonder for next year's breeding schedule.
