[acpart]

I was lucky enough to hatch 5 C.v. this season (I posted pictures of the first one and the parents on another thread). Only the first one was born with the white coloring of the father, but they are all lightening up considerably. Unfortunately for me, the whitest one is turning out to be male. Does temp sexing hold true for this species?



Aliza

[perenquen]

nice babies
... I have so far 9 from 2 females this season, but some eggs are still in incubator. what is the age of your male(s)? I would like to know at what age /size is it able to tell the male. my babies all look "female", some are already about 10 cm long and cca 2-3 months old...

as far as I know, this species should be "GSD"

[acpart]

The ones I can visually sex as males were born July 29 and 30. I can't get them into position to see pre-anal pores, but the little spurs on either side of the hemipenes are easily visible, even in the picture I posted above (take a look at the whitest one and the one second from the left). I find these little guys to be very precocious. Last time I bred them in '09, one of the males was already trying to mate at 2 months.

Aliza

[perenquen]

thanks
yes, I see the 2 males in the picture... and how big are they (approximately) ? I think the appearrence of sex differences may be more dependent on size than to age (?)

[acpart]

Definitely a case of size vs. age. The biggest ones are about 3" long (sorry, you'll have to convert that to cm). Interestingly, the smallest one in the picture was born second. The 2 big ones are clutchmates, but for some reason, the smallest one, from the next clutch laid about 2 weeks after the previous one, hatched the day after the first one. It's eating and growing well but still smaller than even the two that hatched weeks after it.

Aliza

[perenquen]

thank you, Aliza. 3" is cca 7-8 cm, almost all of my babies are bigger than that... seems then that they are females. only the smallest/youngest one is below that size, but maybe it is a female too.
I don´t know what should be the reason for my "all female" variegatus offspring.
The truth is, that many eggs got bad... the incubation temperature was fluctuating between 24 - 32 °C (these are extremes, most of the time it was about 26 - 30°C). I had total number of 21 eggs being laid by my 2 females: 5 are still in incubator, 9 hatched and the rest (7) perished, some having full developed but dead babies inside. This gives me ideas: 1) male gender is more sensitive to extreme temperatures (either low or high) or to big temperature amplitude during ontogenesis, or 2) some lethal genetic predisposition linked with male gender (male chromosome/s/ ?) in my parent animals ?

next season I will try to keep constant temperature in incubator to see what will happen; this year I experimented with fluctuating temperatures (following some informations on incubation from literature)

[acpart]

It's very hard to know if there is an exterior contributing factor to the gender hatch rate. On the other hand, statistics can yield unusual actual results. For example, I have a pair of amel x het amel fat tail geckos and a pair of albino x het albino leopard geckos. Statistically each pair has a 50% chance of producing and albino/amel baby. The fatties have produced 2/9 amels and the leopards have produced 8/8 albinos! So the eggs going bad may have nothing to do with your coleonyx gender. I wish I'd produced more females and especially that the white one was female. Oh well, there's always next year.

Aliza

[alecfeldman]

I've hatched out more than a 100 coleonyx over the years ... several species. Temp sexing is almost 100% ... In my experience I found that 78 produces all female, 80 produces mixed, 82 produces all males ... high temps are mixed, but female heavy. The white one is very nice. I have some lighter colored animals as well. I hatched an all white patternless in 92 ... but could not retain the color in further breeding. Nice work.

[perenquen]

since I posted the last comment in this thread, I had another 3 babies C.variegatus hatched, and it seems that at least 2 of them are males . I have changed the conditions in my incubator, so now the temperature does not fluctuate too much, in fact, it remains almost stable at 28 - 29 °C and those 3 babies hatched at these "stable temp. conditions". I have another 4 eggs in incubator, so later I will post results...

[acpart]

My final gender tally, incubating at 82-83, was 3 female and 2 male.

Aliza