And she lays TWENTY-THREE eggs!

Yes, you heard me right. Our little female veiled chameleon laid TWENTY-THREE eggs!!!

About 11:30 am, she began digging a tunnel in a five-gallon planting pot filled with wet sand. She dug deep enough that eventually we couldn't see her. And it was down here, all alone in the dark and the damp, that she laid and then buried 23 eggs.

At 8:30 pm, nine hours after starting the tunnel, our brave and tired little mother finished smoothing out the dirt in the pot. She did such a good job that you couldn't tell anything, much less her precious eggs, were buried there.

Child #2 sprayed her with water because she looked a little dehydrated. You can see the water droplets on her skin. She then climbed up the branch, gobbled a couple of crickets and parked herself under the heat lamp. She lapped water from the dripper off and on.

Here are our incubation supplies. We removed the bucket with the eggs. There are a few plastic deli-like containers with air holes around the sides. We filled these containers with 3/4 inch of damp (because we sprayed it with bottled water) vermiculite (soil-like stuff).

Here's a cluster of half-buried eggs. I set a penny next to them to give you a sense of size. Child #2 removed two mixing bowls full of sand before Child #4 spotted the first egg. The chameleon dug down deep before she began laying.

Child's #2 is holding an egg. He lightly dotted each egg with a Sharpie before removing it from the sand. He wanted to place the egg in the exact same position in the vermiculite. Rotating/flipping a veiled chameleon egg can lead to the embryo drowning in the liquid inside the egg.

This is our $59 incubator. We've set the temperature at about 80 degrees fahrenheit. This temp should result in an incubation period of about 170 days (shorter than with a lower temp) and active hatchlings with a good appetite. For veiled chameleons, gender is GSD (genetic set determination, meaning gender was set at the time of conception) and not TSD (temperature-dependent sex determination where certain incubation temperatures produce females and certain temps product males). Crocodiles, for example, are TSD.

And now we wait, the eggs safe and warm and hydrated (we'll have to keep them moist for the next several months), to see if the eggs hatch. There's a chance these eggs weren't fertilized, but were a test-run for her. Yikes.

And what was the male chameleon doing during the female's whole ordeal? Sunning himself under the lamp and chasing down the odd cricket. No tidying up of the cage, no arranging for a week's worth of meals, no decorating the babies' room. :)

All in all, this veiled chameleon experience has been a fun one!

sources:
http://www.chameleonnews.com/?page=article&id=119
http://www.biol.vt.edu/faculty/andrews/And_JEZ08.pdf