When is gecko breeding season

It depends on the traits you are looking for. Regardless of whether you are breeding for pattern, color, or structure, your breeders should be healthy, with no signs of calcium deficiencies or other medical complications. If your gecko has had health issues in the past, consult a reptile veterinarian to see if breeding is appropriate.

Females use a lot more internal resources to produce eggs, but males also should be of good genetic stock, free of defects such as misshapen eyes and deformed feet. So breeding sick or inferior animals. Each has its own merits. It is unlikely any captive stock will be used to repopulate the islands of New Caledonia, where the species is endangered, so trying to preserve wild-type bloodlines for this purpose is probably not going to come to fruition.

While the cost of housing and food is not necessarily expensive, all it takes is one trip to the vet to eat away at your profit margin. I know a little bit more about what to expect, but I definitely now know the signs of when to goto the vet.

Like you mentioned, the actual supplies are very cheap, or can be very cheap depending on the type of housing, like plastic bins instead of display tanks. However, there are some unexpected costs, like vet care. Home treatment is an option if you have lots of experience with reptiles and especially the ones you want to breed, but many issues absolutely need to be treated by a vet. It is best to think of crested geckos as year-round breeders. They tend to mate and lay eggs when they are the most active, usually the warmer months during Spring, Summer and Fall.

Normally the breeding season starts in February or March and ends in October, giving them at least months off every year. Whatever your breeding schedule, it is very important to make sure the females take a break for a few months between seasons to regain calcium and fat reserves. While most females will stop laying on their own, you may need to remove males or co-habitating females to ensure they get all the rest and food they need to recover.

Additionally, you may want to give females a year off after several seasons of routine egg laying. Read more on patterns, colors and traits in our Morphs guide.

To make high-pattern, high-contrast and exaggerated traits in crested geckos, you need to start with geckos that display the trait you want. Breed only ones displaying the trait as much as possible while avoiding inbreeding.

Luckily, even great males are easier and cheaper to come by. For example, if you want to breed full pinstripes, you would want to breed two full pinstripes together to produce predominantly pinstriped offspring. If you only have one full pinstripe, find a high percentage pinstriped mate. You may have significantly less full pinstripes, a lot of it depends on the genes each gecko is carrying.

If the high percentage pinner is from a full pinstripe lineage, your chances may be better. However, many breeders find this challenge satisfying in the end. Set your goals accordingly! We highly discourage inbreeding for commonly present traits such as super dalmatian, full pinstripe and extreme harlequin.

Only individuals were brought back from the wild, and this is the gene pool our captive population has to make due with. There are many factors that go into making money from breeding and selling crested geckos.

There are two main strategies, buying breeder quality to create high-end babies or buying low-end to create a LOT of babies. The first strategy takes more money to start, the second takes more time. The biggest start up cost is buying the initial breeders. This distinction is really determined by the marketplace.

You may have to wholesale your stock to a local pet shop not a chain store, they have exclusive contracts with mass-producers just to have room to breed again next year. Another cheaper option is to buy unsexed animals and hope you end up with a good breeding group. This would be my recommendation to someone just getting into cresties.

You run the risk of getting mostly males there seems to be a skew towards males hatching out and pairings that might not be ideal. And you have to wait years to breed them. The more animals you have on hand, the more time you have to spend on care. It becomes less of a hobby and more like a job if you get overwhelmed.

If you think of the time you invest in your stock as time that you could spend making money in a different way, you really do lose money. Most people breeding crested geckos stop after years. Either they lose interest in reptile breeding or they move on to a different species.

There are successful breeders who focus on crested geckos. They produce high end animals and have the reputation to make good money even without a large breeding facility and only producing around babies a season.

Many people think they can pick this up as a side-business but the reality of the big picture makes it unlikely. Not impossible, though! If you have lots of time to spend and you enjoy it, it may turn a nice profit. Every time my female comes close to my male, the male runs away. How long do you think it will take them to mate or if it will not happen at all? Thank you, Daniel. Sometimes a female will reject a male, such as a male that is too small.

Are they different in size? It could take a couple of weeks. If there is any fighting, separate them and try again in the spring. Provide an egg-laying box at least 6 to 7 inches in diameter and 4 inches tall. For cages housing three to five females, a plastic shoebox is ideal. All will lay their eggs in that same spot. Make a 2-inch-diameter hole in the box lid, so the geckos can get in and out of the box.

Fill the egg-laying box with peat moss, vermiculite or Bed-A-Beast litter, which must be kept moist — it should feel like fresh earth — but not too wet. Poor nutrition, not male sterility, is the leading cause of infertile eggs. The most common containers used for leopard gecko egg incubation are plastic deli cups or shoeboxes filled with 1 to 2 inches of vermiculite or perlite. Achieve proper moisture by mixing equal parts of incubation medium to water by weight, not volume.

Slightly bury leopard gecko eggs, and space them at least a half-inch apart. Cover the egg box with a tight lid, and add five to 10 pushpin-sized air holes to the top. If you see dents occurring in leopard gecko eggs during incubation, then your medium is too dry.

If that happens, spray the inner sides of the egg container — not the eggs directly — four or fives times. If eggs are incubated at 80 degrees, then percent of the hatchlings will be female. At temperatures around 87 degrees you basically get an equal number of male and female leopard geckos. At 90 degrees 98 percent of the hatchlings will be male. Temperature conditions below 74 degrees can be lethal. If you need to control egg temperature, a number of simple incubators are available.

Never place leopard gecko eggs in an incubator without substrate or moisture. They turn into raisins if you do. Eggs incubate 35 to 89 days depending upon the incubation temperature. Until hatchling leopard geckos reach a length of 7 inches, they are best raised alone in a simple shoebox setup measuring 12 inches long, 6 inches wide and 4 inches tall. This cage is ideal because it offers close proximity to water, food, heat and shelter. A continuous temperature of 90 degrees under the hide box is optimum for juveniles.

Paper towels can serve as the floor covering. Hatchling leopard geckos shed their skin and begin eating after the first three days of their lives. You will be giving them an opportunity to mature at their own pace.

To get yourself ready to breed, you need to have the incubator ready, hatchling housing setup with belly heat, and prepare to feed off lots of live insect feeders. We have a full article posted explaining why we feel Natures Spirit is the best reptile incubator of We recommend you to read this article as we went into details about our incubation setup. You will need to prepare hatchling housing.

Each fertile female could lay anywhere between 1 — 16 eggs. We had a female last season lay 15 eggs. That is a lot of hatchlings you need to house per female breeder. We recommend the shoebox rack system with flexwatt belly heat. In our experience it is always better to house the hatchlings alone.

You will also find bite marks and injuries such as regenerated tails when breeders mix hatchlings together. Lastly prepare yourself lots of insect feeders. Follow our feeder nutrition guide to find out the best insects to feed your leopard geckos with. We usually start them off with small mealworms. So you can multiply that with however many hatchlings you have, you can see why you need to prepare lots of live insect feeders. We recommend introducing other feeders such as dubia roaches along the way.

You want to train your geckos to not be picky eaters. Plus variety is key to better nutrition. With superworms, you only need to feed one per day, as opposed to 10 mealworms a day. We get most of our feeder supplies from Rainbowmealworms. Just click on the link, and look for a popup on bottom left corner of their site.

Nobody out there can guarantee you a gecko is a fertile breeder. To avoid disappointment, you should always plan your breeding groups accordingly. You should plan to have a male and females in a breeding group for small to mid scale breeders. It never hurts to have a backup male breeder, because some males are not good at copulating.

Imagine having a breeding group ready to go, but have the male not perform. Same goes for females. Or they could lay eggs, but they are infertile eggs. You might also have a female that ends up being egg-bound, these things happen more often than you know. So you want to give yourself room for error, always have at least 3 females in a breeding group.

For male, genetics matter. A male can breed with multiple females, so you want the male to have good amount of genes to give you more flexibility in a breeding project.