Harem Breeding (Leopard Geckos)

[Josh P.]

Those of you using harem breeding with a setup of one male with a few females, how do you know exactly to what female belongs a laid egg? Imagine two females laid their eggs during the night, how are you sure who is the mother? How do you manage that in that kind of breeding?

Thanks.

 

[OnlineGeckos]

Breeders that do harem breeding in a large group don't know exactly which females the eggs belong to. If you like to know precisely which eggs belong to which females, you can't really house multiple females together. Like for me, I always list the father & mother of offsprings, so I don't harem breed in a large group.

 

[Josh P.]

Breeders that do harem breeding in a large group don't know exactly which females the eggs belong to. If you like to know precisely which eggs belong to which females, you can't really house multiple females together. Like for me, I always list the father & mother of offsprings, so I don't harem breed in a large group.

How about a group with a male and three females?

 

[KashMoneyExotics]

Most breeders that harem breed, the geckos that are house together are part of some project.

Example: say I have a mack snow eclipse male and the other three females are snow 100% het eclipse. You may not know exactly what gecko laid what eggs but the morphs will be the same anyway. Hope that helps

 

[acpart]

I keep groups of 1.2. Since I'm checking the geckos and the eggs carefully every day, it's unusual that I don't know who laid what. In the past 9 years I've had that backfire twice:
--a few years ago I found 2 leos in the lay box, each with 2 eggs. At least that time each gecko was standing above her eggs.
--last season I had a real mystery: there were 4 eggs in the lay box and the geckos had already exited. A week later, one of them laid 2 more eggs. To this day I don't know if one of the geckos laid 4 eggs and the other one laid two a week later or if someone had 2 clutches really close together. In this case I could figure out who most of the babies belonged to according to how they looked. There was one I wasn't sure of, but I'm pretty sure at this point who the mother was. As Kash said, if they're from similar genetics, it doesn't necessarily matter that much. In this case, one of the mothers is het eclipse and one isn't so I just listed each offspring as 50% het eclipse.

Aliza

 

[DrCarrotTail]

Aliza's experience sounds similar to mine. I kept a group of 1.3 together last year. 90% of the time I could tell who laid the eggs because they were hovering over them or they were the only gecko that was "empty" of eggs. Occasionally I found 2 sets of eggs and didn't know which gecko had laid which. One of the gals was not albino and the other two were so figuring out the mom after they hatched wasn't a huge issue since the ones from the non-albino gal were non-albino. But the other two girls were raptor and sunglow. Their babies were extremely hard to tell apart so I had to mark them as possible het raptors and explain to potential buyers that they could have come from either female.

So in short, 1.) if you keep a close eye on the girls and check them once or twice a day as well as keep good records you should know most of the time who the mom is. 2.) If your girls will have obviously different babies you'll know who the mom is. If you don't have either of these things going for you than you may not have a clue.