Natural incubation?

[ranmasatome]

just wondering if all eggs hatched are incubated..has anyone just let the mother do her job? like naturally? and if so how were the results? what are the pros or cons?

[JKUROSKI]

I haven't personally, but temperature are to be a relatively constant 89 degrees, and humidity has to be very high without getting the eggs wet. I have heard the hatch rates are lower with maternal incubation.

[vanderkm]

Our female jungle carpet is from a clutch that the mother incubated naturally. She was bred by Karel Bergman from Calgary and he has the details as an article on his web site at http://www.morelia.ca/. He is an experienced breeder and did intervene the last couple days ( I believe because he was going out of town and didn't want to leave the eggs unsupervised near hatching) but the female handled it without any problems, given good management. There was a large litter and the female we have is wonderful.

mary v.

[Jeff_Favelle]

Reasons for:

1) You can be lazy and not build an incubator.
2) Its fun to watch.
3) You don't have to pull an angry-*** mother snake away from the eggs she seems determined to guard.

Reasons against:

1) Low hatch rates.
2) Good luck breeding that female 2 years in a row.
3) There are a MILLION microclimates for females to nest and maternally incubate eggs in the wild. 3 guesses how many microclimates are in your cage! :-)
4) Females often bail on clutches (due probably to clues unknown to us) and then you have to build that incubator anyways.
5) Fertility and clutch size cannot be determined with a huge female sitting on the eggs.
6) Large clutches are not always laid in a nice big pile that the female can coil around. I just had a clutch of 18, and the female was only coild around 12 of them. The other 6 were fine and fertile but.... Therefore eggs will be left out. Therefore, you have to build that stupid incubator anyways.
7) Like #3, how are you going to provide a dry substrate with high humidity. In an incubator, its easy. In an adult JCP cage, its kinda hard.

Good luck.