Tonight while cleaning out one of my Vietnamese black-breasted leaf turtle, Geoemyda spengleri, enclosures I noticed something bright white peeking out of the sand. I reached in and noticed a rather normal looking....well normal looking for a leaf turtle, these eggs are huge in comparison to the female's body size!!!...egg and removed it from the sand. I dug around the sand a bit more and discoverd a second egg in miniature size! This egg looked exactly like the first except it was really, really tiny. Too small to ever be fertile or hatch out i'm sure. So after cleaning off this second egg I found a third egg! Normally this particular female lays only one egg per cluth, so this was shocking, but the two extra eggs looked like eggs that never completed their development. This last egg was the smallest of the all. Both of the small dwarf eggs could fit on top of a penny. I have never seen mini-eggs in spengleri but I have seen a smaller dwarf egg connected to a large/normal egg (like a parasitic twin) from a reeves turtle. Should I even incubate these smaller dwarf eggs? I'm sure they won't be fertile but I might just do it anyways.
More soon!
www.turtletracker.com
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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