A 'slug' next to a healthy, freshly laid egg. The scale bars in millimeters.
Anyone who’s raised anoles has likely run across the occasional slug. I’m not talking about shell-less gastropod mollusks, but rather about the flaccid yellow eggs that anoles lay from time to time. Slugs are uncalcified and generally considered infertile. Because slugs never develop viable embryos and tend to quickly rot when incubated most lizard keepers simply discard them. Is there anything to be learned from slugs? In our colony, we tend to recover the most slugs early and late in the breeding season, but we’re not sure why this is the case. Is it possible that the male and female are a bit out of sync, or that the female is priming her reproductive tract for the real deal? We’re also recovering more slugs in our hybrid crosses than in pure crosses, but we’ll have more on that later. Are any reproductive physiologists out there more familiar with the mechanisms responsible for production of slugs?
- JMIH 2014: Early Records of Fossil Anolis from the Oligocene and Miocene of Florida, USA - August 13, 2014
- JMIH 2014: Relative Contribution of Genetic and Ecological Factors to Morphological Differentiation in Island Populations of Anolis sagrei - August 7, 2014
- JMIH 2014: The Ultrastructure of Spermatid Development within the Anole, Anolis sagrei - August 5, 2014
marthamunoz
I got these, too! My A. cybotes females started laying them towards the end of the season. I had them housed in isolation, so I just assumed that they had run out of stored sperm. Nothing about their conditions had changed (light cycle, food regime, etc), so I don’t think they were being drastically winterized. I left them in there for a day or two, thinking they might want to eat them, but they didn’t. Apparently my females only liked to eat their own fertilized eggs (https://www.anoleannals.org/2011/09/25/odd-behavior-in-captive-anoles-notes-from-an-anolis-cybotes-breeding-project/), the evil buggers.
Armando Pou
I’m not sure what causes this, but all my captive colonies produce these “slugs” particularly early in the season. Initially I thought that it was caused by some sort of calcium deficiency or other dietary issue, but I’ve pretty much eliminated that as the probable cause over the last couple of years by providing a more varied diet consisting in part of wild caught insects (in addition to captive bred crickets & roaches), mashed tropical fruits, nectars, and by dusting the adult’s live food with calcium at every feeding starting in March (younger animals are always provided with the calcium). Additionally, early in the morning I have on a couple of occasions found these slugs on the trunks of certain trees which are heavily populated with distichus.
cait
when does the season start and end
?????????????????????????? because my lizard just had one but i don know when it is
PS. i am positive they mated
Michelle Bocklage (@MichelleBocklag)
Is it OK if captive anole females do not produce slugs? Mine had two last year during the summer, but this year, nothing so far. I’m just worried about the possibility of her being egg bound. Thank you!