Series of Female Tokay died after breeding

[bumi dragon]

Hi guys, i have a huge puzzle here that i cant sort it out for sometime.
I am a tokay fans and always love to see the tokay morphs.
Therefore, i bought some morphs (all males) and pair them with all normal females.
I spend alot on female tokays due to their dead toll rate after breeding and i cant see the reason why cause temperature, diet nutrition and space/ hides i provide seems to be sufficient and i doubt that it was cause by sickness. If thats the case, males would have been affected too.
Females r all WC specimens.

I asked some senior keepers in tokay club (in FB) and they told me that it could b due to lung expansion cause by high food nutritrient (something like that). so, what do u guys think?

i need help to safe the remain female tokays cause its not about investment, but the morphs specimens r all wild caught and i wouldnt want them to be wasted, there are more things we can learn from there about their genetics.

so....here we go. S.O.S.

regards,
Max.

 

[Aimless]

I wouldn't assume illness in your females would also make your males sick, necessarily? female reptiles go through so much more during breeding than males, and it's incredibly stressful.

I would try with some CBB girls and see what happens.

when you get your females, do you get them fecal exams, treat them for parasitic infection, keep them through an adequate quarantine time, and feed them up so they can withstand the caloric drain from breeding?

 

[billewicz]

Hello,

OK, so I've posted this a few times already but I'll save you the searching around the forum.

Trying to obtain good breeding weight in a wild caught female is a misnomer. Regardless of what weight they come in at, our super-dupper American fortified, gut loaded diet will add weight to these animals. Obviously if they came in super skinny, building up some good muscle tissue is healthy and desirable.

Here's the issue. These girls come in as adults weighing 35 to 40 grams at best. Since they are adults their kidneys have stopped growing and are just big enough to service the 35 gram animal.

Then they come here, go through import hell and probably meds to overcome the parasite load that bloomed while in transit. Now we start feeding them very well. The bigger they get, the 'healthier' they look to us.

But their kidneys do not start growing again. They stay the same size. Tack on 20 or 30 grams to their total weight, the harder their kidneys will have to work. Healthy is good. Bigger is not really better. So don't confuse size with health.

I look for big calcium deposits inside the females mouths as a good breeding indicator. Regardless, I try to limit the number of eggs to 6 or 8, no more. I pull the males after the second set of eggs the first year. Most imports will do OK with this. I've limited even more if I'm worried about a particular female.

What happens to these girls is the overtaxed kidneys cannot keep up with egg production for too long. They can no longer convert calcium into the egg shell so they stay soft. The eggs must calcify, or harden in order for her to push them down her duct. If the eggs are soft, they will not pass and will 'bind'. This is fatal 100% of the time without a vet's interdiction.

The internal problem is flat out kidney failure. Nature has hard-wired these gals to put everything into egg production, even if it kills them. This is the underlying cause of death in every necropsy report I've gotten back on egg bound females.

Good luck and all the best,

Michael's Tokay Hoard @ www.billewicz.com

 

[bumi dragon]

Hi aimless, i see ur point, n agree that it is not sickness.

 

[bumi dragon]

Hi bill, thanks for the feedback, it is very helpful. So now i will feed less on all of them cause what u said is true, skin and muscle can grow, but not the vital organ after they reach the end of their growth period. I will remember what u said about this, size doesnt determine their health. I do check on their calcium deposit s well, there's no problem with that. N at first i thought, its cause of the male size, cause some reach more than 150 gm. I think both males n females i will reduced the food intake. Will do more research from here. Thanks again for telling me where to do start to look for solution.

 

[billewicz]

I think both males n females i will reduced the food intake.

OK, so reducing or regulating an adult male's intake is reasonable if he is healthy. Since the females put most of their nutrition into egg production, they do not seem to grow as fast as males.

Like most people, we tent to reduce the solution to one thing. It's not that simple. I'm not comfortable with just reducing food intake to females. They need the high quality gut loaded and dusted insects to keep their reserves up. The focus should be on getting all the vitamins/minerals/nutrition in without excessive weight gain, not just reducing food intake.

If you keep the pairs together during the breeding season, the males tend to out-eat the females unless you are hand feeding with tongs. Even then the disturbance to the pair may hamper egg production, so you're in a pickle while they are together.

This is why I prefer pulling the male after the first 2-3 sets of eggs and let the wild caught female 'rest' and recoup her stores for the rest of the year while she lays any additional sets of eggs and 'broods' her young.

I hope you can see the difference. Good luck and all the best,

Michael