Tamechi & Devaki, duplicate leachies

[the_sneetch]

Many of you know that we were fortunate enough last year to hatch out a leachie from a female that was never put with a male. While I have no genetic testing available to me to prove that this is the case, I can only provide my story and you can choose to believe it or not. We purchased Tamechi who is an island cross when she was about 5 grams in '09. We raised her up. We bought her has a pet because at that time, we had no intentions of breeding leachies, just wanted one as a pet.

She started laying dud eggs late in '11, so as customary we incubated them just like we do every other egg until they went bad or molded. In January of '12, one egg looked good. And it never went bad. And in May, we hatched out a leachie! Tamechi has never been, nor will she ever be placed with a male. We do own one male leachie who was pair bonded with another female at the time this happened. I would have had no reason to put that male with Tamechi, and so I didn't. But he was in my possession at the time. They were never even housed on the same side of the room as each other, and never out of their enclosures at the same time.

Anyway, on to the pics!

Devaki - 56 grams and just shy of a year old. She loves to eat and looks like Tamechi at this age.

Tamechi & Devaki together

We plan to keep Devaki and see if she does the same thing. I have sold my pair of isle e leachies, meaning in two weeks, I won't own any males. Tamechi continues to lay dud eggs regularly, all of which have eventually gone bad.

Here are some of the old threads on the subject if you are curious of the history of this story.

Just in case anything crazy happens... - Gecko Resource Forums

Something CRAZY happened! - Gecko Resource Forums

 

[Aimless]

awesome! I'm glad she continues to thrive.

 

[Hilde]

I'm more than willing to believe.

I've have a female leachie since she was about 6 months old, now pushing 12 years. She's the only leachie I've had, never owned a male. Every once in a while I'll find an egg in her main hide, a couple of times there have been 2 of them. There's no way of knowing how old they are when I find them, though some seemed reasonably new, say a week or so. Some were already wrinkled or caved-in, but over the years there were 3 that lasted a few months. Nothing hatched, even though they looked good. I never made an attempt to incubate them, just left them where they were until I finally decided to pitch them.
After reading about leachies possibly being parthenogenic, I decided to incubate any eggs that still look reasonable when I find them. So far there have been eggs, but nothing that looked vaguely fertile. I opened a few of them but they didn't seem to have anything inside, though I swear one of them did have the tiniest pinkish spot inside.

We can always hope others with single female leachies will try incubating the eggs. It certainly makes sense to me that they can be parthenogenic.

 

[Elizabeth Freer]

Very cool photos, Krystal . You are good at that!!!