Tags
eggs, gravid, gravid iguana, green iguana, iguana, nesting, pregnant iguana, reptile, veterinary
When I mention that my iguana is already getting gravid this year, I usually get a funny look. Gravid = growing eggs inside of her…. A LOT of eggs. The next question is usually, “oh, you bred her this year?” which is usually followed by confusion when I say that she has never had a mate.
Healthy adult female iguanas become gravid every year, regardless of mating behavior or the absence thereof. Like chickens, their bodies produce the eggs in hopes that a male will fertilize them in time to be viable. Hence how you can have egg-laying hens even without a rooster.
Riddik is huge for age. At 2 years old, she laid her first clutch of 55 eggs on May 6, 2014. She laid 40 ish eggs over the first day and passed the rest a couple at a time over the next week or so.
When we took her to the vet for x rays after she appeared to be finished we weighed the eggs… They were a solid 2lbs!!! And Riddik was barely 4 lbs and looked terrible. She was just bones and flabby meat where strong muscles and healthy fat stores once were.
But this is totally normal. As the eggs grow inside the female iguana, her internal organs get squished by them. The space can’t accommodate a belly full of salad AND all those eggs that are plumping up over the 3 months or so before they’re ready to come out. So, as the eggs grow, appetite decreases until they aren’t eating at all. They live off their fat stores along their abdomen and tail and only drink water to hydrate themselves. As long as the eggs are inside, the iguana’s belly still looks plump and only the tail and legs seem to slowly deflate.
But in the end, once all of those eggs are out, she will drink tons of water and eat nonstop until she gets her weight back. That may be the happiest look you will ever see on her face- when you offer her a bowl of her favorite soft foods and she is finally able to eat them!
Last year, Riddik’s appetite started to decline in late January and she started at about 9lbs. This year, she is a little bigger at 11lbs and as of this week, the amount of food she wants to eat had decreased by almost half. She is also getting picky about which foods she wants or will leave in her plate. Last year I made smoothies for her in the blender. She wanted to drink but couldn’t eat so I just made her food into a drink for her.
Time to start dusting every single meal and treat with calcium again! In order to properly form the shells for her eggs, she will need the extra calcium in her diet to prevent her body from drawing it out of her bones, which could make them brittle or put her at risk for metabolic bone disease.
It’s also highly important to get her as much natural sunlight as I can. The UVB flood lamps I use indoors keep her warm and do a good job, but there is nothing like true natural sunlight. I think it also helps them to go outside and feel the season changing. Just my theory, but I think it helps keep them on the correct timeline.
I hope we have another successful year – no broken eggs to make her go into sepsis, no stuck eggs to cause dystocia (egg binding) and force her to have an emergency spay, and no dehydration issues. I’m taking bets now on egg-laying date and total number of eggs.