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The Miracle Of Sperm Storage: Amphigonia retardata. How long the females can store sperm?

21/09/2019

For chameleon breeders, the question of confirmed father of the offsprings is very important in the breeding projects. The complication is, the females can store sperm from previous matings... So, if you mate same female with more different males, from the moment it mates with the second one, you will never be sure who is the father of the young...

The Panter and Yemen chameleon females have been proven to be able to store sperm for over a year! They do so in special pockets called (in Latin) "receptaculum seminis", in which favorable conditions are maintained to keep the spermatozoids alive for many months.

The probability of a female having stored some sperm after mating is almost 100per cent.

They can lay upto 4 clutches using the sperm from one mating.
Usually, the second clutch is fully fertile, the fertility rate tends to drop in the following clutches.

If another male is allowed to mate with a female which previously mated and laid eggs, you will have no clue who is the father of the babies. The only way to get the sureness is: not mate her with any other males, feed her well for her to set new eggs. If they are infertile, you can mate with another male.
If the eggs are ate least partly fertile, wait so many clutches until the last, which is infertile.
You will never know by 100% that all the babies are from the second boy but the probability is high after a clutch of infertile eggs and after more than 1 year after the last mating.

For Panther breeding projects using wild caught females, the probability they are gravid is very high. This is why experienced breeders usually wait till the females lay their eggs without mating, as the offsprings are purely belonging to one local form. You can not usually even guess which local form does the female belong to, as the females are hardly identifiable, but based on its male babies, when grown up, the ID is often possible to reconfirm the data from the exporter, which are often unreliable or even mixed by negligence or on purpose.

Author: Petr Nečas
My projects:   ARCHAIUS   │   CHAMELEONS.INFO