More blue tongue news!

Angel has been doing a great job visiting with the girls this season. Today he confirmed that Zoe is a girl, bringing our count to 2 males, 4 females, and 2 unknown. Over the past 6 weeks Angel has mated with Charlie 5 times, Buffy 3 times, and now Zoe once. We will be pairing him with Sasha this next week. Yay! Hoping for babies in the spring.

Spring ERAS expo!

Our tables are booked! This will be our 4th Edmonton expo, we are excited to see old friends and make new ones. Maybe we will see you there

The blue tongue skinks are mating!

We have been waiting quite awhile for a male to figure this out. Meatlug had been our only confirmed male and we relied on him to be the backbone of our breeding program. He tried to mate with our possible females (none are confirmed), but never got close to a lock. He passed away Dec. 24, 2016 and we didn't know where we were going from there with 7 adults all of unconfirmed sex. 

Last week Angel surprised us with multiple sperm plugs, we wasted no time pairing him and he wasted no time locking up with both Charlie (in the top photo) and with Buffy! We were hopeful that these 2 were females through behaviour testing with Meatlug and with a male at Mel's Exotics and now are sure. 

We are excited to see this breeding plan move forward! We will keep you posted on progress and possible pregnancies.

Blaesodactylus Boivini!

This is a super exciting milestone! We did a lot of inquiring of the top reptile breeders and importers in Canada when trying to find some B. Boivini to purchase. Over a number of months they all agreed that there were none to be had in Canada. We also repeatedly heard that while some breeders kept them 5-7 years ago, no one knew of any successfully breeding them. 

We were determined to try, imported 1.4 from the US in spring 2016 and here we are... 2 eggs! They have been laid in a hide with a narrow opening and are hard to get at, so we will leave them alone and attempt to hatch them in the terrarium with their parents. While these geckos don't parent their young (hatchlings are completely self sufficient), they do not eat them either, so babies will be completely safe with the parents. These aren't a commonly bred gecko in North America, so information can be hard to find, but we are likely looking at a 4-6 month incubation period for the eggs ... it's going to be a long wait :-).

We currently keep our breeding trio of 1.2 together in a large 23"x23"x48" high screen terrarium, and our 2 sub adult females in an 18"x30"x30" high screen terrarium. These guys come from a semi arid, forested part of Madagascar and reside away from the tropical areas, so we have elected to keep them in a drier and more airy enclosure than our crested geckos. They seem to be thriving. Our 2 sub adults are sporting some really big calcium sacs and will be ready to breed whenever we decide to put the male in with them. 

So, they have bred, now to successfully incubate and hatch these geckos and join a very exclusive club of B. Boivini breeders in Canada! Woohoo!

Saying good-bye to Meatug :-(

It's taken me a bit of time to come to terms with this loss and actually believe that it happened, so sorry for the delay in letting you know. 

Sometime on Chrismas Eve morning Meatlug passed away. There were no signs of illness and we have no idea how old he was. He came to us with a history of poor husbandry and we are just glad we could give him 2 good years. He was our second blue tongue skink, a gentle guy who loved spending time outside his tank. We are going to miss him so much!

Meatlug was our only confirmed adult male, a key part of our breeding endeavors here and the guy we paired with each BTS to see what we could glean from behaviour sexing. So, we are feeling quite a bit of a gap in our blue tongue skink breeding program right now and will be taking a few steps backwards as we pair them up without having confirmation of sex. 

Changes

Due to unforseen circumstances, we currently do not have the time required to follow through with individual sales. Family concerns are going to be taking me away from home for significant amounts of time over the next few months, so we have decided that for 2016 we need to focus on selling our reptiles only at Reptile Expos.

We aren't going anywhere and we have a fantastic breeding season lined up, but we just need to focus on family, our animals, and the reptile expos for the next few months.

Thanks for understanding!

Blue tongue skinks!

We are excited to let you know that although we didn't update this website much in 2015, things were still happening at The Crested Castle!

We had a great year with our crested geckos, producing some absolutely gorgeous babies. We will continue with some of our previous pairs and are switching things up with some new comers to our crested family. Our 2016 breeding pairs will be updated in a post within the next few weeks.

The biggest news is that we have spent 2015 working on expanding our blue tongue skink family. They are an incredible reptile that we adore and we have decided to begin the adventure of breeding them! We especially like the merauke blue tongues and will be working with this species. Merauke's are notoriously hard to breed and birth in captivity, with only a handful (or less) being both bred and born in Canada. We are up to the challenge.



So far we have one confirmed male (Meatlug, in the photo above), one suspected male (Stormy, on the right) and a highly suspected female (Sasha, photo below). We are currently teaming up with Mel's Exotics in Winnipeg to determine if a merauke in Winnipeg is indeed a female, as advertised. If Mel determines that Charlie is a female (or even if she can't confirm any gender), then Charlie will be coming here to round out our blue tongue family at 4 beautiful meraukes.

We have witnessed some interest between Meatlug and Sasha this week, but no full mating yet at this point. If all goes as hoped, we could be announcing blue tongue babies in early summer. It's our dream, but we also know that it could take a few years to get all the breeding kinks workout out with this species. We will definitely keep this page updated with our merauke breeding adventure!