Clutch Mates—“Are we related?”

One of the fun things about having a leopard gecko farm is checking the ‘bator for hatchies. You never know what you are going to find. Actually, we have a good idea because we keep records and we watch hatch times and we have “due dates” marked on a calendar. But at any rate, you still never know “what” you are going to find. It’s almost like Christmas morning, or maybe Easter. In the case of some of our geckos it’s like Halloween—they are Halloween Masks you know.

So, geckos lay eggs in pairs and those eggs generally hatch within a few days of each other when they are incubated together. When you check the incubator you expect to find two hatchlings—“clutch mates”— and you expect that they will look pretty similar and most of the time that is a pretty accurate statement. These two HMR2 bold striped beauties are nearly identical…

But every now and again, when you play around with genetics and you have a lot of hets or mixed genes, you have two geckos hatch and they look very different. And you have to wonder, “What’s goin’ on in that gene pool?”

So here are two hatchlings—“clutch mates”—that might take you by surprise if you didn’t know the genetics involved…

They are both TUG Snow by HMR2 bold. One has the snow trait expressed very definitely in the white coloring throughout the body, while the other is yellow (check out the tongue on the yellow guy).

The next pair is a set of AFTs (African Fat Tail geckos), one with the stripe and the other, well, without.

So, no matter how many times you’ve experienced it, the thrill of the hatch never disappoints.

Until next time, happy hatching!