Incubating at Room Temperature

[WingedWolf]

leos and corns

If corns are 50/50 at 80, I wouldn't try them any hotter than 85.

I might try incubating some in a few years, to see if the idea has any validity. This year, we only have 1 clutch.

My friend will keep half in his incubator, and I'll have half in mine (insurance in case one of the incubators fails). Not going to experiment on them...besides, I want female leos.

At 88, all the hatchling leos should be male, not just most of them. Occasionally a "hot female" is born, but they tend to have some behavioral problems (act more like males than females). Some people risk 90, but if it goes over that, but temps too high produce malformities. I'd expect to see the same thing in corn snakes.

It's a fine line, sure...80 to 82 should give you all females...

Even more fun--after about 3 or 4 weeks in the incubator, you can raise the temperatures to 88, and your females will be born lighter colors in their skins (less black and brown)--the gender is fixed in the first few weeks.

Now that's something to try with corns, too....will corns incubated at higher temperatures be more brightly colored?

 

[CornCrazy]

This could get fun...

I hope to have more controlled environments next season, so I may do some "real" experiments then. This year, I simply do not have room to put all of my eggs in incubators.

 

[WingedWolf]

To complicate things....

There's been talk about how some corn snake morphs show sexually dimorphic color intensities--charcoal females, for example, are MUCH darker than charcoal males, to the point where you don't even really need to probe them.

 

[Kat]

Too bad none of us here has access to a genetics facility. All one would have to do would be to take a sizable sample of adult corn genes (a blood sample from each would do), and determine whether the WZ and WW genes matched up with female/male respectively, or whether they had no bearing on gender.

I can't say I've ever observed a huge disparity in numbers in my own clutches... they tend to come out 50/50, or perhaps a slight skew towards males, regardless of the incubation temperatures. At this point, I'm very skeptical of the idea of temperature-sexed cornsnakes... Until someone comes up with a specific temperature where one can reliably get a high percentage of one sex to hatch out, and where it's reproducable by others, (or until someone does gene sequencing to disprove the WZ-female/WW-male link), I won't be playing temp games with my eggs.

-Kat