Show & Tell
May 11, 2017 pic of a brood of Sunglow Motley (aka: Sun Motley) corns taking their first breaths. Apparently two of them didn’t get the “message” to cut their eggs, but all the rest were pipping in synchrony. The heads coming through the vermiculite incubation medium are from eggs that were partially buried. The main reasons I like to keep clutches of eggs attached (VS. separating them from their Natural adhesive aggregation) is because 1) the sharing of resources is sometimes crucial to their incubation survival. Should some of the eggs on the bottom, top, or outer edges of the clutch were to be exposed to wind or other elements, they benefit from eggs in the center or bottom of the clutch that share gas transferrance and liquids via osmosis through their porous, semi-permeable shells. 2) the posture of the collective egg mass is not easily altered if they were to be jarred during incubation, and 3) egg-eating serpents that could easily gobble up all of the eggs separately could find it difficult (or impossible) to ingest them en mass. When eggs hatch in the wild, the smell of blood, albumin, and perhaps the death of one or more embryos can attract predators, so via sharing resources during incubation most of them emerge from their eggs somewhat in unison. Stragglers are often killed via predators like skunks, raccoons, cats, hogs, and even ants, so the sooner the hatchlings leave the hatch site the greater their odds of neonatal survival. Bonus pics
