Breeding the Electric Blue Gecko (Lygodactylus williamsi)

hi guys welcome back to the channel i'm frank payne today we're going to be talking about the electric blue gecko again ligo dactylus william scy this time we're going to be focusing just on breeding this beautiful and endangered gecko last time we focused on the care of this species if you need to know about that please check out that video here on the channel i'll put a link in the description down below so today we are just focusing on breeding this animal which is a very important thing to do because they are an endangered species they are cites one which means that they are not coming into this country or leaving this country legally again so what we have here we really have to take care of so it's very important that most people that keep them breed them so i'm here to share with you my experience doing so i produce hundreds of these guys and i want to make sure that you can do the same thing thanks for joining me i'm frank payne biology teacher reptile breeder and former zookeeper i'm here to share with you my passion and experience working with these beautiful and fascinating animals welcome to living art [Music] oh hi welcome back uh yeah so anyway today we're talking about william say i was just having a little conversation with my friend here the beautiful blue beauty anole nola sequestras podior amazing species giving me the stink eye right now absolutely love them we'll have another we'll have a video on those in the future but today let's stay on track and be focusing on breeding the electric blue gecko ligo dacus williams sci now if you have a pair of these guys they pretty much do all the work right it's not complicated you get a male and a female you keep them together they do fine together generally speaking as a pair you put them together they breed they have eggs it seems very simple but getting them to breed and produce healthy offspring then raising those healthy offspring up to adulthood in the correct sex ratios is actually kind of tricky but i am going to walk you through every single step along the way like i mentioned to breed them you have to have a male and a female adult pair now sexing them is actually a little tricky i'm not going to spend time talking about that today because i did cover that in detail in the care video so again check that video out it seems like it should be straightforward males are blue females are green but it can actually be quite tricky especially when they are a little bit younger so please do check out that part of the video because it is important to make sure that you have a male and a female pair to start the most important aspect of breeding williams site is female health all right keeping your females healthy from the time before they even start breeding all the way through when they are laying eggs hard throughout the season that is by far the most important thing i found that when i see other people struggling with fertile eggs or with offspring not surviving or females not surviving or thriving it's because the females aren't getting what they need there's a couple of things that you need to make sure that that female has or doesn't have first she needs to have her food supplemented every time you give her live food whether it's fruit flies or bean beetles or crickets is they should be dusted with rapashi calcium plus or mineral supplement powder also in addition to that she needs to have a small dish of pure calcium powder in her enclosure at all times we cannot in our diet supply them with the amount of calcium that they need to produce their little hard shelled eggs and they can regulate it themselves so that's the good news you put that little cup of plain calcium in there she will go and lap that up and eat as much as she needs whenever she needs it the other thing for females is you need to make sure that they are in top physical form now that doesn't mean give them as much as they want to eat kind of the opposite if you give these guys as much as they want to eat they're going to become obese very quickly they're voracious eaters and if you give them their gecko diet their pangea complete gecko diet and you feed them fruit flies and crickets every single day they are going to get obese and that is going to lead to health problems a nice full but trim female does way way better in long term than a female that is quite large now how do you tell if you're feeding your williams sign enough well you can tell by looking at the condition of the animal if you start to see rolls on the tail and around the neck and around the belly like actually like kind of a little indents um you know around it kind of like bulging like the michelin man right that's no good you need to reduce your feeding also you don't want to see bones though either you don't want them to be skinny they can't be skinny for breeding either so you need to make sure that they are are flush and full but not filled to bursting okay so when should you put your williams side together well really you can raise them together from the very beginning and they'll be fine some people some breeders recommend that you don't put females together until they're a year old i don't think that's true i don't think that's correct i don't follow that my animals are adult size and breeding at four months old maybe five months if they're a slow grower right it's not a problem if you raise them together from the very beginning from babies up until when they're breeding it's not a problem again you need to make sure that they are healthy that they are getting the correct amount of food not too much and not and not too little i don't weigh these animals they're so small i don't catch them i don't handle them you know they're fast i don't weigh them it's going based on physical condition now your first pair that might be hard to see exactly when are they ready to go but as long as you are keeping your animals in good condition you're giving them the supplements and the food that they need you don't really have to worry about it if you have a male and a female together they're going to do the business once you as long as you give them excuse me without all the things that they need as i mentioned in the care video i try to cycle my animals i try to give them a little bit of natural variation in terms of photo period and temperature i do this because well it's natural they are not truly equatorial so there will be some variation again check out the care video if you want to see exactly what i do for manipulating the photo period in the heat but in general i try to reduce the light output the number of hours that the light's on in the heat a little bit during the winter months trying to slow them down now i found that sometimes they just breed throughout the winter anyway and they tend to slow down in the summer or they might stop breeding a little bit in the fall or the spring or whatever usually they kind of take care of themselves i don't separate the pears they stay together year round they tend to stop breeding or at least slow down breeding they almost never really stop breeding throughout the year they're so prolific when the conditions are right but they do tend to slow down for a few months and then pick back up again and so you do want to try you do want to try to manipulate their photo period a little bit try to get them to slow down if you can but it's not always possible and it's not something that i worry about too much so william side can be extremely prolific they can breed and produce eggs year round every two to four weeks like i mentioned sometimes they do slow down they'll take a little bit of a break but i've had animals lay eggs consistently every two weeks for months and months and months no matter what i do to try and slow them down so they can be very very prolific animals the problem with their eggs is that they are egg gluers and what that means that they and many other species of gecko will lay their eggs on a flat surface or inside of something and when the eggs come out they're fairly soft and sticky and the female will kind of hold them and roll them around a little bit and press them into the surface then after a little bit those eggs will dry and now they are glued onto that surface it's a great thing for a little arboreal gecko with tiny little barely tic-tac-sized eggs so that when the the branches of the tree and the leaves of the tree are blowing around they're not going to fall off so it's a very good adaptation in the wild but it can make our lives as keepers pretty difficult because once those things are glued in place you're almost almost never going to be able to remove them without damaging and destroying the eggs where this becomes problematic for us keepers is a couple of reasons one once they lay them in the enclosure they tend to be in little nooks and crannies if you keep them in the standard exoterra zoo med terrariums there's little gaps and ridges little bits in the plastic where they lay their eggs and you're not getting to them if you're lucky and they lay them on a flat surface like the side of the glass then what you can do is cover them up with like a little deli cup with a couple of air holes in it now why would you want to cover them up well because usually the parents will leave those eggs alone if they're unfertile oftentimes the animals will eat the eggs but that's no big deal usually fertile eggs they will leave alone but this is the weird and kind of crappy part is that they the adults even the parents will eat the offspring it doesn't happen all the time some people get away with it every now and again but it does happen consistently where once those little tiny babies hatch out sometimes mom and sometimes dad will eat those babies so we need to make sure that the babies aren't hatching in the enclosure putting that little cup over the egg will help to contain them in their hatch and then you can get out get at them but instead what i like to do is to give the williams sci an alternative laying site which i can then remove from the enclosure what i use are little green floral tubes you can buy them off amazon they're about three inches long about half inch in diameter i have them velcroed to the inside of my enclosures the females can crawl in there lay their eggs they like the tight little space right like i mentioned they like to lay in little nooks and crannies they like to go in that tight space and lay their eggs for my females they lay their eggs there 100 percent of the time maybe 99 there's always the odd clutch that gets laid outside but the vast majority of them get laid inside these little tubes the trick to make sure that your female williams laser eggs in the tubes is a couple of things one that there are no more attractive nesting sites for her if you have like a standard glass terrarium like an exoterra zoo med you have to fill and fill in those gaps with silicone or some other material so that she can't get in there and layer eggs and two those egg laying tubes must be in the enclosure before your female is breeding if she's already breeding and laying eggs and then you add the egg tubes she may not recognize them put them in the enclosure from the very beginning when you have her when you're raising her up even they'll use them as hides they'll go in and relax in there and then they'll lay in there all right so it's very important that a they don't have alternative sites and b that they are in there from the very beginning all right so you have your eggs hopefully in the floral tubes how do you incubate them so this is what i do very very simple i have a plastic container almost like a food store it is a food storage container with a lid i like to kind of have gaskets on around it to make a nice tight seal clips to hold it in place i've soldered little air holes throughout the entire side of the incubation container the bottom of the container i here i have perlite i've also used vermiculite i've used hatch right whatever you want something in the bottom that's a good substrate that's not too messy that does hold water pretty well so i've arranged my eggling tubes on the lid of the container i have everything labeled with the date with the parents numbers and all that so they're all in here now it's very important that you keep it fairly humid in here but not wet all right so it has to be good air holes has to be fairly humid but it can't be absolutely saturated here so i'll add a little bit of water every now and again make sure humidity is high i don't measure it sorry guys i can't give you an actual number and then i place it in a warm spot of my reptile room really interesting thing about williams site is the fact that they exhibit tsd temperature sex determination where the temperature that the eggs are incubated at will actually determine what gender the geckos end up being pretty common trait among geckos and other reptiles if you incubate the eggs with an average daily temperature in the low to mid 70s you're going to get mostly females if you incubate in the upper 70s to around 80 degrees as an average upper temperature you get a nice mixture anything above like 82 or so as a general temperature during the day you're going to get mostly males that is another one of the reasons why it's important to remove those eggs from the enclosure because usually where the female lays those eggs is a bit warmer and you're going to get mostly males i don't put them in a set incubator i don't set a temperature like i said i put them in a warmer spot of my reptile room i try to aim for a 50 50 mixture as long as i'm up in the higher 70s around 80 degrees or so i tend to get a very nice even mixture of the sexes i've tried to incubate for mostly females in the past because they tend to be more uncommon in the trade but i found that the incubation times were a lot longer and the health of the animals was not as good was not as vigorous when they hatched out kind of opposite of a lot of reptiles where usually it's better to have a lower incubation temperature and a longer incubation with these guys i found that middle of the road is actually best too low and for too long and they hatch out small and weak and they don't do as well even though they are mostly females right in the middle is what i try to aim for let there be a nighttime drop let it cool down it's no big deal it can get down to the high 60s mid 60s at night no problem at all as long as it warms up during the day the longer excuse me the warmer you keep them the faster the incubation will be the cooler you keep them the longer it will be upper 70s around 79 80 degrees then my eggs pretty much hatch right around three months pretty much exactly three months those eggs are hatching so you have the little babies the main challenge about them is that they are tiny they are extremely extremely small other than that you keep them exactly like the adults keep them in a smaller enclosure but give them the exact same care i've tried in the past to keep them in kind of makeshift deli cup type containers they did not do as well for me when i keep them in smaller versions of what the adults are kept in they they all survive like 99 survival rate so i came just like adults except in a much smaller enclosure you need to be careful you need to make sure that they can't get out because like i said that guys they are tiny they will get out of the tiniest little cracks and crevices they will get out of an exoterra they will get out of a zoo med glass terrarium you can keep them in those make sure you silicone and glue up and seal up all those cracks and crevices so they can't get out just like with the adults i prefer these pvc enclosures just on the small side for the little guys other than that keep them exactly the same same food same supplements same lighting all of it check out that care video again it's in the description check that out the only other main difference for the little guys is that you want to feed them every single day i alternate days one day i will feed them the gecko diet pagea complete the next day i will feed them melanogaster flightless fruit flies that's all they can eat pretty much besides maybe pinhead crickets as well in the beginning after that as they get bigger you can feed them heidi fruit flies and bean beetles as well with this feeding regimen and keeping them just like the adults they'll double in size within a week or two they'll be half grown within two months and they'll be adult size and breeding in four to five months alright guys thanks for sticking with me i hope you learned a little bit about breeding this beautiful electric blue gecko my favorite gecko species it needs more breeders out there so hopefully this will help some of you to do so in the future as always please do like and subscribe to this channel check out my facebook page and instagram of the same name living art by frank payne website of the same name living art by frankpaine.com check that stuff out i post everything that i breed for sale on that website including the electric blue gecko i have all sorts of care articles on there links to my channel podcasts i've been on all that stuff so check out the website and the facebook page as well but please do make sure you hit that like and subscribe button on this one right here next time when i come back and be looking at my favorite species of chameleon the beautiful and small carpet chameleon first for latter alice from madagascar you guys are really gonna like that one absolutely beautiful small and fairly uncommon still in the trade chameleon so again thanks guys see you next time this is the future of living art this is my daughter logan she wants to tell you a little bit about it as well what do you want to say babe um i like whistles you like lizards they're the best aren't they yeah yeah that's what i want to tell them okay you tell them anything else um yeah yeah what is it they live in nature they live in what nature they live in nature there you go you heard it here first folks they live in nature

Channel: Living Art by Frank Payne

Views: 10,892

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Id: hEiRDu9cdKU

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020