How to Breed Tangerine Geckos
- 1). Select a healthy male tangerine gecko and two or three healthy females, and house them together in a spacious breeding cage--20 gallons is a good size--furnished with the proper heating, substrates and places to climb and hide. Geckos live and breed happily when one male has a little harem of females. Never put two males together; they will battle, possibly to the death.
- 2). Provide your female tangerine geckos with extra calcium in February--the beginning of the breeding season--to ensure successful egg-laying. Offer supplements in food bowl, or dust it over live crickets. Avoid calcium to which D-3 has been added; too much can be toxic.
- 3). Watch for signs of mating behavior, which occurs from February through August. The male will vibrate his tail and sneak around after one of the females, nipping at the base of her tail and moving up bit by bit in order to get a hold on her neck. If she is receptive, he will coil his tail under her and begin to mate. If she is not in the mood, "no means no" for tangerine geckoes, at least for that attempt; the male may try again later with better results.
- 4). Check the female in a few days for signs of developing eggs, which you can see through her skin. Hold her on her back in the palm of your hand, and very gently bend her backwards a little. The two eggs--geckos normally lay eggs in pairs-- will be visible as roundish white masses, less than an inch long. As the eggs grow, they become more visible.
- 5). Cut a hole in the side of a 16-oz. deli cup, large enough to allow the female to enter, and fill the cup halfway with lightly moistened vermiculite to provide a laying site.
- 6). Watch for signs the female is ready to lay the eggs. She will usually refuse food and begin digging around in the vermiculite, or laying medium. To lay the pair of eggs, she burrows down into the laying medium; afterward, she will pull some vermiculite over the eggs. When she re-appears, she will look markedly slimmer.
- 7). Feed her liberally with calcium-dusted crickets to help her recover from the strenuous task of laying eggs. If she appears overly thin or stressed, remove her from the male for a time.
- 8). Put an inch or two of vermiculite in the bottom of another 16-oz. deli cup; the vermiculite should be moistened with water enough so that it forms a ball when you roll it, but it should never be soggy or soaked.
- 9). Remove the two eggs, keeping them in the position they were laid in, and mark each one gently with a felt marker on top. Never turn a gecko egg upside down; you risk killing the embryo. Place the eggs in the incubator cup, halfway buried, top side up, and place the lid over the cup. To avoid letting out humidity, don't put air holes in the lid.
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Place the cup in an incubator tank in which the temperature is maintained at 77 to 92 degrees F. If you don't have an incubator cage, it's fine to put the cup in a corner of the breeding cage, as long as temperatures are maintained. Secure the cup so the adult geckos don't knock it over. A constant temperature of 81 degrees F will cause female geckos to develop. For males, provide temperatures of 87 to 88 degrees F. The eggs will take six to eight weeks to hatch. - 11
Remove the lid once a week and blow a puff of air into the cup. This will provide sufficient oxygen for the developing eggs. - 12
Put each hatchling in a shoebox with paper towel on the bottom. Don't feed them until they have shed their first skins, which usually occurs after three or four days. At that time, you can offer them tiny crickets.
