It has been 3 years since we introduced Ares to the world, remember this post. Since then we’ve had some challenges finding suitable females to go with Ares. People have been asking us to update on his progress so here it is.
We’ve tried no less than 6 super giant females with Ares, all but 1 have rejected him due to his size. I mean he is 12 inches long, 170g, the largest female we have in our collection is around 120g. So there are sizable differences between Ares and potential female breeders.
Every time we’ve tried, the females seem spooked by his size, and just started running, biting, tail waving, etc.. These are not normal behaviors by ovulating female leopard geckos. So the only explanation we have is that they are simply spooked by his size.
Aside from that, there are the real life challenges. In the past few years, we’ve had to move once, I’ve had job position changes which was a good thing but it also demanded more time from me. As a result we downsized our breeder collection, sold off many breeders, and ended many projects. We’ve had to let go some of our personal favorites, which depressed us. I believe we ended up with roughly 25’ish breeders and only 3 or so projects. We even put the Ares project on hold.
Fast forward to today. This year has been good to us, work is going well, my schedule has stabilized. I took a fresh look at our geckos, and looked back at what we did in the past. When you have one of world’s largest super giant geckos, you don’t just give up. We had produced some of the best looking leopard geckos & african fat-tailed geckos around, remember our bandit projects? They were amazing.
So we are now refocused, energized, and we’re ready to get breeding again. We’ve already spent good amount of money on a large group of super giant females from a reputable breeder, at least one or more have got to work with Ares right? We’ve also fine tuned our projects, there was a time when we were working on 10-15 projects at a time, which was too much. And we were not focused enough on particular projects, so some projects didn’t work out as well as we had hoped, and we ended up with excess amount of breeders.
What I’m trying to say is expect to see some good looking and healthy geckos from us this year and the next. We’ll also start making more updates to our blog and youtube channel, so stay tuned! By the way, a fresh new pic taken this week of Ares, he is still 170g after 3 years. He’s a majestic gecko, we’re determined to find suitable females for him this year.
That’s all for now, thanks for reading, and happy Spring!