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greenhorn

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hi all,

earlier in the year i purchased my first pair of murray darling breeders i've been looking all over for information on what needs to be done in order to breed them sucsesfully but am not confident in what i have found so if anyone could give me some help and advice or give some recommended link i would be most thankfull.

T
 
Hi,

I have managed to breed my carpet/diamonds for several years now and the first year made a few mistakes. I would recommend the following

1) make sure you cool and separate them. If you can't separate them you must at least cool them over winter. Short basking time at full temp during say 12 till 2pm and them cool them to room temp or whatever is outside at night. Remember they did live outside in the wild so getting cold won’t hurt them as long as they can warm up during the day. The exception to this is if you live in Tassie for example and its freezing at night. They need to be about what they have in there natural environment.

2) Provide a nesting box or several boxes with different mediums for them to lay in. I find damp spagnum (spelling ?) moss worked best for me but everyone has a different opinion on what works best. try several and see which one she starts sitting in before she lays. If it’s a moist medium then keep it moist.

3) try to leave her alone as much as possible once she is nesting.

4) Try to guess when the eggs will be laid and remove them from her ASAP. The quicker you can get them after they have been laid then the easier it is to separate them. Mine always lay late on a friday night and I discover them when I am just home from the club. She will hiss and carry on when you try to get her away. If they are too firmly stuck together then don’t worry, they will incubate fine in a bunch. Don’t force them apart although you do need to be firm when you do it. Seperation is better if you can.

5) mark the eggs with a pencil so you can lay them in the incubation medium the correct way up. Don’t turn them over or it will end in tears.

6) Incubators can be as expensive or as cheap as you like. An old fridge converted is fine. There are 12 zillion sites on the web that will show you how to do this. Either that or buy something of the web. I have tried both and both were fine. Set it up and test it vigorously well before the eggs are due. Get a decent thermometer from a poultry supplier. Not the 2 dollar thing from Bunnings.

7) Incubation medium. I have used several systems and all worked fine. One year I though the vermiculite was not wet enough so added more water. This I do not recommend as mould is a real problem. Two options. Get a small ish tupperware container and some sort of plastic rack or ice cube maker that will fit inside and hold the eggs off the water, or sit them in a mixture of vermiculite and water. Equal portions by weight. not volume. its surprisingly little water. The idea is to keep them in an environment with very high humidity eg almost 100% but they can never get dripped on or sit in water. With either system drill 2mm holes in the four cnrs of the lid your tupperware containers. Air needs to circulate but not much. Once a week open the lid and give a quick fan. then reseal and leave it alone. I also separated my eggs into several small containers right at the start and rotated them through the incubator so they all got the same sort of temp range even if there was a cold spot. Also if one batch goes moldy they are separate from the rest. I also have one container with no eggs waiting for any that appear to be bad or moldy. That way I can separate any that look dodgy. This bit could have ten pages on its own but there are plenty of pages that talk about it at length.

8) Once they hatch keep them separate in there own little containers. Water and something to hide in. A toilet roll is fine.

One of the biggest mistakes I made initially was to read 40 different opinions and try to make everyone happy. Decide what you want to do and stick to it. There will be a little bit of trial and error but once you get the hang of it then you will be surprised how easy it is.

Private message me if you want to have a chat.
 
so today i put my male into the females enclosure. she was up on her perch while he just scoped out the new place, he seemed to like it and went straight up and crawled over her on the perch. she then released her tail and started tapping it against the wall exposing herself so to speak. does that sound like normal/good behaviour for breeding?
 
Sounds good. Try reading Simon Stone's articles (ask Doc Rock) on the SXR website. They are very helpful and he even has a special article on MDs.
 
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