I've had my leopard geckos for around four years now, and they've bred on and off for me during that time. Well, technically they breed every year, but sometimes the eggs aren't grabbed and incubated in time.
The females always lay their eggs in a sealed Tupperware box, which doubles as their humidity box for shedding. So it's fairly easy for me to snag up the eggs to put them in the incubator.
This past summer, though...we've had bad luck with eggs. Two clutches of corn snake eggs, around 10 gecko eggs, and almost 15 dragon eggs turned out bad. We had no babies this summer; last year at this time we had over 30!
So yes, it was a bad season.
But today I'm woken up with a call of "You need to see this." Mom's by the gecko cage, and I think to myself, well, no one's dead, she wouldn't tell me like THAT.....eeek, what if she's discovered those missing crickets have started breeding and I can't get rid of them?
So I open the humidity box. There's Pixie, my fattest female, and Scarpetta, my mom's female....and there's an inch long bright yellow and brown baby sitting behind the waterpot.
Somehow a single egg managed to escape me scraping out the box for cricket eggs....survived the parent geckos digging for more laying, survived escaped crickets and mealworms, the heat lamp going off at night, survived me spilling water all over the box ground.....
And she's alive and perfectly healthy.
Her name is Oops!
Welcome to the family, baby!