Paul and I had another crazy idea for an experiment... go figure.
Tortoise eggs don't "set" for something like 48 hours after laying to the point that you can no longer move them. Maybe if they were sent next day air the morning following laying, they could survive and be incubated. This seemed a much easier way to "transport" babies, in vitro. We consulted a few "eggsperts" who all seemed to think it should work, so decided to go ahead with it.
What do you know, Pauls torts caught on to us. No way were they going to let him ship their babies 2600 miles. They each repeatedly laid on the weekend when the eggs couldn't be shipped quickly enough.
Finally after 3 weekend layings in a row, this female cooperated.
She popped these out monday night at about 10:30pm Hawaii time.
And about 1 pm, wedneday this box showed up at my door.
Paul had individually packed each of 5 premium "selected" eggs in its own deli cup packed full of vermiculite. I carefully dug down in each cup and found the eggs had all but one tilted a little off the "x straight up" but not too bad.
carefully lifted them out, popped them in the shoebox and into the incubator.
Hopefully Paul will add some pics of the expecting fathers soon. We're going to follow the developement of the entire clutch, half in hawaii, half in washington. Hopefully in about 100 days we'll have some lovely leopards hatch, 2600 miles from where they were laid.
Tortoise eggs don't "set" for something like 48 hours after laying to the point that you can no longer move them. Maybe if they were sent next day air the morning following laying, they could survive and be incubated. This seemed a much easier way to "transport" babies, in vitro. We consulted a few "eggsperts" who all seemed to think it should work, so decided to go ahead with it.
What do you know, Pauls torts caught on to us. No way were they going to let him ship their babies 2600 miles. They each repeatedly laid on the weekend when the eggs couldn't be shipped quickly enough.
Finally after 3 weekend layings in a row, this female cooperated.
She popped these out monday night at about 10:30pm Hawaii time.
And about 1 pm, wedneday this box showed up at my door.
Paul had individually packed each of 5 premium "selected" eggs in its own deli cup packed full of vermiculite. I carefully dug down in each cup and found the eggs had all but one tilted a little off the "x straight up" but not too bad.
carefully lifted them out, popped them in the shoebox and into the incubator.
Hopefully Paul will add some pics of the expecting fathers soon. We're going to follow the developement of the entire clutch, half in hawaii, half in washington. Hopefully in about 100 days we'll have some lovely leopards hatch, 2600 miles from where they were laid.