Tips on Breeding Leopard Geckos
(Eublepharis Macularius )

First off, you should read my Care Sheet that I wrote on leopard geckos, and get some background on breeding these little guys. A lot of my pointers are there, but not all of them.

• The first thing you need to do is to get your female ready for breeding, this meens giving her extra calcium and getting her tail real fat, because females tend to not eat when they are gravid, and they have to live of their fat reserves for about a week. First, start supplementing your geckos every feeding, instead of every other feeding. Then to make sure she's getting what she wants, put in a shallow dish of calcium powder in her cage so she can lick it whenever she wants. Now you have to give her a fat tail, do this by giving her a diet high in fat and protein. You can mix in meal worms with crickets, or you can give her a small pinkie mouse! But if you give her mouse, she probably won't eat for a week. Wax-worms can be substituded for the mealworms because they too are high in protein and fat, two things which are essential for fatting up anything.
  
  
• After you have a fat leopard gecko, now is the time to breed them, but this one has more planning to it. First, you should have cooled down your gecko's during the winter. And the temperature should be getting higher, and the days longer. Now is the time to introduce the male to the female. The best thing me and my friends found was that if you put the male in with the female, and there is no immediate response, leave him in for another 4-5 days. Then take him out, wait about a week to 2 weeks, then reintroduce them. I had Paco over with my two geckos for a week, with no action. Then I gave back Paco to the original owner (I was "borrowing" him). A week and a half later, I reintroduced one of my females to Paco, and bam, mating occured withen 5 minutes. And they repeated the process many times that night.
  
  
• Okay, now after mating, the female will become gravid with 2 eggs, younger and older females will usually lay 1. 3 eggs is extremely rare, and should not be expected. I found the best way to know if your gecko is gravid is not to look for the eggs ( I could never see them, even the day that my gecko laid the eggs!) is to look for change in behavior. The female will stop eating (this freaked me out, I even took her to the vet over this!), and start messing with her encolsure. When I meen mess with, I meen she will dig in her substrate, move stuff around, and never seem to sleep. Now is the time to put in a nest box like I mentioned in my Care Sheet. The eggs should be laid 10 to 20 days after conception.
  
  
• Now that the eggs are laid, now is the time to incubate them. Eggs that are infetile, will dent in, mold, and start to smelll weird. Fertile eggs will stay nice and white, not mold or get dents. But if fertile eggs start to grow mold, don't worry, there are two ways to get rid of this. First, make a solution of 90% water and 10% bleach, take the eggs and give them a quick dip in it. The mold should go away in a few hours. Then sprinkle just a dab of anti-athletes foot powder on and around the eggs. This should prevent it from coming back. If mold come's back again and again, and you get rid of it again and again, they are probably infertile. If dents start to appear, raise the humidity, good eggs will take in the moisture, and those dent will fill in. The eggs should hatch 6 to 10 weeks after being laid.
  
  
• Now there is tips on keeping the hatchlings, unfortunatly, the babies I have I have only had for a few days, so I have no tips, yet. Check back later, hopefully by then I will have tips. A couple of people that have breed them have told me a few, Tokay Keeper gave me one really good one. To get the humidity up (since they need higher humidity than adults) mist the inside of the hide-box, by this I meen picking it up and spraying the inside. And NEVER use sand for substrate, their tiny little digestive systems can't pass it, and they can become impacted and die, instead use newspaper or paper towel. I'll get some more soon.
• Want this printed for you to keep? Go to my Text Version to print it out (since this one won't.)
  
  
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