Egg laying

From the end of July until the beginning of october, the egg laying will occure.

A couple of weeks before, the female will go into a preshed. The shedding starts on the belly, and the skin will curl up the sides can make it look like she gets wings. Then is time to remove all other animals in the terrarium. It varies a bit how fast the egg laying wil occure, but from looking at the females behavior, it should be easy to tell. She will get really restless and start to dig alot and spend more time in the humid hide, where she will make test digging to find a good spot for the eggs. When the egglaying starts, it can take a couple of days.

The eggs are relativly large compared to the animal, so it is very hard for the female. While she is laying the eggs, she will almost go in a trance, where it might be possible to remove the eggs as they harden up. My female exasperatum goes into the trance, but if i start to remove the eggs, she wakes up and will defend them, even though she is in the middle of her egglaying. I will try to remove them anyways.

This has more advantages. She will not be able to puncture an egg, while moving around, and she will not eat any eggs afterwards. This has been observed some times by a friend of mine. She will simply eat some of the eggs to get some energy. An avarege clutch is from 8 to 20 eggs

A female laying eggs