Cooling AFT's

[acpart]

I'm in my 3rd season breeding AFT's. For the first 2 seasons I cooled my 1.2 who are together all year round (only 1 of the females generally lays), and have produced 4-5 babies with a 50% hatch rate. This season I didn't cool them, mostly because I had a sudden death in my coleonyx when I started to drop the temperatures and I got nervous about it. The laying female laid 5-6 clutches but nothing hatched. This season I also have a new pair which I also didn't cool during the winter because they were both juvies. This female is working on her 8th clutch, all of which except the first clutch and 1 egg of the sixth clutch are fertile (4 have hatched).

I read in an article about completely different herps that the author tried an experiment and didn't cool his reptiles. The females laid the usual number of eggs but the hatch rate was much lower, implying that failing to cool had a negative impact on the males' fertility.

Does anyone have any experience or information about this with AFT's? I really don't know if my failure with one of my pairs (both male and female are proven with each other) is due to not cooling them or just the luck of the draw.

Aliza

 

[gixxer3420]

I dont cool any of my fat tails and I always produce a good number of them every year. Not really sure whats going wrong on your end.

 

[snared99]

Cooling your animals is very important in some species, because it cause spermatogenesis in the males and cycles the females. This seems to be more of a issue with snakes then lizards/geckos. We are going into our 12 year with geckos and have only cooled them 2 times in that period. I noticed no difference other then it was harder on the females. So we have not cooled in many moons and the process we do still yeilds a good amount of offspring.

 

[acpart]

Good to know. It may have just been the luck of the draw with this particular pair this year.

Aliza

 

[T-ReXx]

When I bred fatties I never cooled them. There is always a natural temp drop in my herp room due to weather change of about 5 degrees and that always seemed to do the trick. As mentioned, with geckos cooling is not necessarily as important as in snakes(for example ovulation in ball pythons). I personally feel changes in barometric pressure and humidity have more of an affect on geckonid breeding cycles than actual temperature does in most species, but that's just my pet theory.

 

[Imperial Geckos]

I do not cool my fatties either. I usually see the first ovulations in October and I see a huge amount of ovulations when the first COLD front comes into South FLorida. However, I always have a few odd ones that ovulate off season. Right now, I just had my Whiteout ovulate, but she didnt let any males breed her. She would fight them off; disappointing, but she knows what shes doing. I also have Zero that usually ovulates around this time and I just had a female from a special project I am working on ovulate, and she is now gravid.

 

[Carinata]

I don't cool either. I see to have my best success introducing most of my pairs around Christmas. I got a nice number of hatchlings doing that last season.