Leuc eggs

[elmoisfive]

Sorry this is my night for posts about frog reproduction. Our leucs laid their first eggs a little while back and they started out looking as follows.



I decided to leave the petri dish in the viv under the coco hut more out of curiousity than anything to see what would happen. Tonight they look like the following image - one looks like it is developing but several others look fairly odd. Just curious as to what might be happening here. TIA.

Bill

[cbreon]

Bill, you will find that as your frogs lay eggs that there will usually be a few that don't develop or die during some part of their developmental cycle. There are all kinds of reasons for this and people like Patrick Nabors at Saurian, Sean Stewart at hepetologic, and many others offer more information about egg issues. That being said, it looks like one of your eggs is developing as you can see a head and tail starting to form. You can also see that one of the eggs has become white or opaque this usually indicates that the eggs is no good, and I've always been told to remove such eggs immeadiately. You will probably want to store your petri dish in some kind of small container with a lid and keep the humidity up by lightly spraying the petri dish with water. When the tadpoles are wiggling freely you will want to put them into their own container filled with water and use some kind of tadpole powder. I usually use some high grade fish flake and ed's flymeat tadpole powder although there are several others that will work as well. hope this helps some, but I suggest reading up on some more thorough sites, cheers!

[elmoisfive]

Thanks for the response. I've had a chance to read through a few sites such as Patrick's and know that the best practice is to remove the dish. But I like to experiment at times so I thought I would see how things progressed in the viv. Based on past experiences with amphibians, I would normally associate whiteness of eggs with either infertile or going bad eggs.

I must admit I've been puzzled by what I've been seeing with our imitators. There the eggs started off as white then have progressed to white tadpoles developing and at that point I started to wonder if previous experience was the best guide. Heck I know that by submitting these kinds of posts I'm exposing my ignorance but I'd rather be called a stupid newbie who is trying to learn than stay in the dark 8)

Bill

[cbreon]

I have bred imitators as well and remember the eggs definitely being much lighter than a leucs eggs for example. There is a reason for this and I think it has something to do with the eggs and their ideal light exposure. I was told to keep imitator eggs in a darker place, or to try to keep them from being in direct light. Most froggers are happy to share thier experiences and knowledge. Especially because there is obviously a lot to know and a huge learning curve involverd with successful breeding and keeping of more difficult species. Congrats on your eggs!