...and now for something completely different.

[Spankenstyne]

So this has been a bit of a puzzler..

My big female Checkered gave birth May 18 & everything went great. After removing the babies to their new enclosure I gave her a few days to recover & then put her male back in with her. They stayed together for probably another month or so when I then randomly decided to move the male in with another lone male holdback from last year as they're closer in size and I wanted to see if it might help calm the lone male as he's a bit skittish still.

Anyways about 2.5 weeks ago when doing my nightly check I see something in the girl's enclosure. Looks like a big poop to clean up but upon opening the lid to do just that I see the big messy poop, but on top I see a fully formed but dead baby garter.
It was a bit flattened in spots from being run over by mamma but also looked like it was likely stillborn, there was a flat fold that seemed to separate the innards within to the point you could almost see through it in that spot. Otherwise it looked like any other baby.

So I thought maybe she was going to have two litters this year, but nothing has happened since.
A few things immediately come to mind & that is the remote possibility that she retained a baby that died & she just finally passed it, or that she was in fact pregnant again but perhaps being so soon after giving birth may have not had enough eggs ready to be fertilized and one sort of fluked into happening. I also have been keeping an extra close eye on her in case she does still give birth, but I don't think it's going to happen...

Has anyone else experienced something like this before? Seems really odd to push out another baby almost 3 months later & the fact it's just one is really strange.

[ConcinusMan]

I suppose one possibility is that your male mated with her after she had the first litter and that she had just one egg to be fertilized, which developed and came out stillborn.

In any case, I would consider skipping any further matings for her next season and sort of "reset" her biological clock before attempting to breed her again.

[indigoman]

My female checkered that gave birth may 7 just passed 3 jellies. she had one fully formed and 3 jellies with 10 healthy 5albino and 5 het. in may. She is housed with another female. Could she have gone into another breeding cycle.

[Spankenstyne]

Yeah I thought she had likely gone into another breeding cycle, it's just so odd that there was just a single baby with no jellies etc. I expected more since she had 11 babies earlier. She was likely getting next year off of breeding anyways so she'll have a nice long recovery.