Breeding Leopard Geckos Made Easy
Getting Started
Of the many types of geckos available, the Leopard Gecko is pretty easy to breed. They are beautiful creatures with unique patterns on their skin and these patterns can be changed via the breeding process. Proper breeding can produce even more unique and colorful specimens.
Some things to keep in mind
In order to breed your leopard geckos, you will first need to get your hands on both a male and a female that are sexually mature. Many beginners have trouble telling the difference between the boys and the girls but it’s really not that hard if you know what you’re looking for. The first thing you want to do is turn your geckos over and look at the underside are between the hind legs and the tail. Male geckos will have two visible bulges just behind the vent under their tail. These are called the hemipenal bulges. Unless the female is very fat, the females won’t have any that looks like a hemipenal bulge, but be very careful when trying to determine the sex of a really fat gecko because you may mistake some fat below the tale for hemipenal bulges and think you have a male when you’ve actually got a female! Males also have a series of “V” shaped pores, called the Femoral pores, just below the anus. The female may also have visible Femoral pores but they won’t be nearly as pronounced as on the male.
Determining the Sex of Your Geckos
OK, so once you’ve figured out that sex of your geckos and you are sure you have two healthy, full grown adults, you are ready to start the breeding process. Be sure that your male gecko is a minimum of 8 months old and healthy. The female should be at least a year old and she should be a little bigger than the male. Now all you really need to do is put them together in a cage and let nature take it’s course. They might get right down to business, or they could take a couple of days to mate. After you’ve put them together in their cage, you will notice that the male begins to get aggressive with the female and will start eventually bite the female repeatedly. This might look like a bad thing but actually, it’s just the male gecko’s way of determining if the female is ready to mate. If she is not interested in mating, she will bite him back. The male might also do a little dance for the female by shaking the tip of his tale back and forth, sometimes quite rapidly and noisily. The courtship may go on for a while but try not to let it go on for more than a couple of days. If they haven’t mated after 2-4 days, separate them for another few days then, after they’ve had a chance to recuperate, try again.
After Your Geckos have Mated
Once the couple of completed the mating process, you will need to provide your female with a place for her to lay her eggs. The environment should be moist but not wet. Many people make a humid hide with some damp bed-a-beast or your favorite lizard bedding material. A humid hide is a an enclosed container filled with wet moss or bedding where your gecko can go when they need some more humidity like when they are shedding or giving birth. Once you’ve got your humid hide set up, the female should lay her eggs in it within approximately 4 weeks of the mating. When the gecko lays it’s eggs, we call that a clutch of eggs. Generally speaking, a clutch consists of one or two white oval shaped eggs. Some leopard geckos will lay as many as eight clutches a year with approximately 2 to 4 weeks between clutches.
After the female has laid her eggs, you should carefully remove them from the humid hide and place them in an incubator. Now here is something that most beginners don’t know. The sex of the eggs will be determined by the temperature of the incubator. If you incubate the eggs at around 80 degrees, you will end up with all female geckos. If you increase the temperature of the incubator to 90 degrees, you will end up with all males. If you want to get a mix of males and females, keep your incubator set to around 85 degrees.
