For a leopard gecko breeder, there are a few things that affect your season’s success. One of which is finding good breeder geckos, something we covered in a previous Gecko Breeder Chronicle article. The other however, is having good incubators. As a breeder, your eggs are everything. Without the eggs hatching, you have no season, and you can’t advance your projects.
Importance of Incubators – Unexpected Failures
During our first year of breeding, we had an incubator that died overnight. There were 12 eggs in that incubator, and all 12 turned out bad. It was not surprising to us that the eggs went bad after the incident, we expected it. Although it was disheartening, because the eggs looked firm and fertile before. They were from several projects we were working on that year, many of which included our Super Giant and Radar projects. That incubator was incubating for males, so we had a season with no male holdbacks to further our projects.
The one that went bad was a mini fridge style incubator, we had 2 working at the time, one for male the other female. After that incident, we went out and purchased a Natures Spirit incubator, as well as a backup for the ReptiPro 6000 we had. This way if one breaks down again, we would have a backup we could fire up right away. In fact this season we are contemplating on getting another Nature Spirit’s incubator because it keeps the temperature very steady, and it’s quiet.
Reptile Incubators – Don’t be cheap
If there’s an advice I would give to new breeders, it’s that don’t be cheap when it comes to incubators. I understand this may not be something you wish to spend your money on initially, because if you are like how I was in the beginning, you want to save money to buy more geckos rather than spend good money on an incubator. But the reason we’re writing these blogs is to show you, through our own experiences, what could happen to you. There was literally nobody talking about this when we started breeding, so we are hoping these Gecko Breeder Chronicles will prove to be helpful to new breeders in the future. Trust me, it’s not fun having an incubator die and lose a season’s worth of eggs smack in middle of a breeding season.
Having good, well working, reliable, steady temperature incubators could be key to your success. Remember you do need a good proportional thermostat to work with your Natures Spirit. We recommend Spyder Robotics Herpstat digital thermostat. If you want to know the difference between proportional and non-proportional thermostats, read our article on proportional thermostats here.