Overview

In This section i will be going through some of my thoughts on this topic as well as my experience with breeding exotics reptiles. It will give a general overview of what to research and expect before commiting to breeding.

My current projects

At current i have 3 active breeding projects on the go this year. These are Long tail lizards, Berber skinks and Leopard geckos, at current ive been sucessful in getting eggs from the Leopard geckos.

The first project of the Three where the Berber skinks, i had done a lot of research on these species and had found that in the hobby they are quite rare but at the same time the small number of people i had encountered had absolutly nothing bad to say about them so i though i would love to work with this species, i managed to get one Captive bred female and 2 other wild caught specimins, i keep all three together and all get along with each other i haev seen them breed but im not sure i have got the correct enviroment for egg laying as of yet, this is something i am activly researching and working towards, hopefully i will get some sucess soon.

Next is my long tail lizards colony, i have 5 indeviduals that live together in a arboreal vivarium i made from scratch with psudo bioactive enviroment. I am again still working towards these breeding, i have seen mating behaviours and hand signal behaviours but as of yet no eggs.

These two species are not very common in the hobby so my thought was to get into this niche so i can bring something to the table in the hobby, they are 2 of my favorite species of lizards i own. Both full of character.

This leads me on to my final project, the Leopard geckos, i have one female gecko that has been activly laying eggs and i have a few in an incubator that should hatch sometime in August 2024 hopefully.

Should you breed exotics

This is the big question i guess, are you ready to take on the responsibility of caring for more on top of what you already own, do you have a plan on what you want to do with the offspring in the short term and the long term? Are you giving something back to the hobby and not doing it for monitary gain? These are the questions i would ask before jumping in, these are certainly what i considered beforehand.

Equipment requirements

The first thing to research is an incubator, buy or make one of these before you jump in, the amount of people i have seen carelessly breed there reptiles on social media and have eggs with no overall plan is crazy. Here is a couple of incubators i personally use below both are very good in there own ways.

Exo Terra Precision Incubator

This is the first incubator i bought, i have just begun to use it this year, its has a water resevoir at the bottom and a humidity disk that creates mist when the humidity falls below the set limit, there is a heating coil in the top that keeps the whole incubator at a stable temprature and you can buy  extra trays to put in the incubator see iamge below, but any plastic tub will do if you want to go down teh diy route of platsic trays to put the eggs on a medium. The price is very good £125 new at the moment, i bought it for £150 at the time.

Zoo Med RC-30 Repti Bator

This was the second incubator i have , i havent currenly got this one in use i bought it second hand off Ebay as it was about a quater of the price of buying it new and i love a good deal. It is similar to the exoterra one above it just doesnt have the fogging unit so you have to keep more of an eye on the humidity in the enviroment but if you can grab one second hand i would suggest it. Brand new there around £200 which i think is a little steep considering the exoterra is nearly £75 less and has more features.

Incubations mediums

There are a few routes you can go down when choosing a medium to incubate eggs at for reptiles, i personally use vermiculite which is a type of rock that has been mined and then heated which causes it to expand and makes many air layers inbetween itself which is excellent at storing water which allows for humidity to be kept high.

There are twotypes of vermiculite one is course which are bigger chunks which as far as i can tell allow the water to flow better throughout the medium using the air gaps to propergate which allows for more even dispertion in the substrate when mixed and when adding additional water into the medium.

The fine vermiculite i have not used personally but from what i can see once mixed the humidity is raised less but last for a longer time period so there is less need to add additional water during incubtion which allows for less temprature fluctuations when

There are rumours that vermiculite contains asbestos which from my own research i found to be a half truth, there was a batch of vermiculite back in the 1990s that contained asbestos when it was mined but the mine that it was from has long since been shut down. Not to say there couldnt be asbestos that formed in conjunction in other mines but from modern safetly standards of products i can see it being very unlikly.

On the other hand there is pearlite which is another rock mineral but it doesnt soak water up like vermiculite but still has properties that allow water to be stored within, this is from what i can tell a less common medium for reptile eggs in the hobby but can be used still with good results. You cant really go wrong with either as far as i can tell.

d.i.y mETHODS

In 2024 there are a bunch of premade solutions to incubation as seen above but on a budget you can still get some fantastic results from using your own home made incubators, here is a list of things you would need to start and some additional for a more advanced and accutate setup.

1. Plastic tubs with platic inlay
2. Polystyrene boxes or cooler box
3. pulse proportional termostat
4. heat mat or heat cable
5. USB fogger
6. humidity stat
7. Temp and humidity monitor

For the most basic setup you only really need the first four items in the above list, this is the cheaper solution but you would have less control of the enviroment, below i will go  through where to get each item and how to setup each.

Rack systems

So once you have eggs incubating you will need to start thinking about what to do next in regards to where the offspring of your reptile is going to live, are you going to keep them as a pet or sell them to a pet store or sell yourself?

If you are going to keep them as a pet then its important to set them up in a similar setup to the parents, if you are short term keeping them and getting them to a stage where they are stable and healthy then the most efficent method is to create a racking system.

There are both solutions to buy premade setup rack systems and to make your own, the premade ones are expensive in alot of cases and you get far better value for money from making your own. I will explain what is needed to make your own and go over a few examples of premade solutions aswell.

Premade solutions

These are some of the solutions you can choose but i would advise making your own to get started and build up from there,some ofthese examples above are £1000+ which i think is a steep price to pay for beggining, there are other indipendent companies around the uk who make these aswell but alot do not give prices until you enquire. You can also go down the 2nd hand route that is alot cheaper, preloved and facebook marketplace are good places to start.

D.I.Y. Racks

So where do you start, what do you need? Well below i will go over all of this, here is a list of things you will require

Tools

1. Scissors/knife
2. Drill
3. Dremel
4. soldering iron
5. solder

Equipment

1. x 7 Thermohydometer (Dependant on number of draws)
2. heatmat x2
3. Pulse proportional thermostat or matstat
4. Plastic containers
5. light strip
6. Plastic pots
7. Paper towels
8. Selotape
9. Cable ties

Tool links

Equipment links

How to put together a rack

Further improvements for the future.

So most racking systems frowned upon in pockets of the hobby, and there are some solid arguments against them, they dont offer some of the needs of some reptiles, for example with leopard geckos the more recent studies come out in the past few years that UVB lighting has a positive impact on there health, so the question is then posed if there in a rack setup can this be offered? probabaly not.Also the small size of the rack tub compared to an actual enclosure and heat from a heat mat, can it heat there whole body up, again no not really as heat mats only really give off IR-B which doesnt penerate much past the animals first cm of skin. So by improving this part of the first stages of there live can we increase there lifespan in the longrun overall? Maybe.

Personally i can see that there is still a need for these in the industry until a better method is found as there is no way at current a breeder can do this on large scale without using a racking system. I currently have one rack with 7 trays in, im not doing this on large scale and i have already got a plan to make there husbandry better in the first months of there existance in my case with leopard geckos. 

Below you can see a stackable 3ft enclosure with 4 units, my plan is to offer 2ft uvb in each with hotspots on each far side, and put a devider inbetween each to allow for 8 inhabitants, this allows me to keep my small project going and offer a better start to there lives keeping them the same as we do as when they are a pet.