I will share with you my decision. I also have a lot of experience with breeding and rearing lots of different animals. I have tons of experience with Aquariums and breeding fish including egg layers. Even with that an incubator is quite a bit different. You will just have to set one up and run it for a while to get a "Feel" for it but air is not as easy to control as water and such.
If all you have done is homework, it can leave you with a little bit of a warped since of what you actually need to accomplish. I have settled on a temp that is between 99.5 and 102 ass far as a full 24 hour swing but stays pretty steady between 99.5 and 100.2 degrees. I also chose a humidity in the high 40s to low 50s for the first 18 days and will bump it up to around 55 for lock down.
Your research will find numbers all over the place as far as humidity and I don't think it is all that important until the hatch anyway. no way you can hove one person get a successful hatch with 30% humidity and the next has 65% and it matters all that much in the first place.
As for Seramas specifically. I also chose Seramas for my fist hatching attempt. I bought eggs and teh first 14 eggs came in so damaged that the seller replaced them for free. Out of the first 14 eggs only 2 have made it to day 11. of the second 14 only 13 made it to the incubator and those 13 are now at day 6. I will candle them tomorrow but my gut tells me to expect slightly better numbers that batch 1. maybe 5 eggs will remain in batch 2 after tomorrow. The message in that story? Serama eggs are extremely fragile and do not mail well at all. they also have a horrid fertility rate and even the fertile ones are hard to get to develop completely. They also tend to die during hatch. The way I have it in my mind is that only healthy chicks can hatch successfully and Seramas have been breed far from their original form. these changes have taken there toll on the chicks ability to successfully hatch. I woudl strongly suggest looking for a pair or trio of adult known to be fertile birds and then incubate those eggs. But that is also the advice I would follow if I could. Do your best to get eggs that are close, picking them up woudl be best. Then pay very detailed attention to the incubation. At least that is what I am doing. feel free to contact me for updates as to how well that plan is working. So far it is 12 of 28 eggs have failed after 11 days. I expected at the very best to get 50% hatch. I woudl now consider a 25% hatch to be a big success.
SO are you crazy? probably, but it is so much fun.
',%20''); I have been totally besotted with seramas. Would I be completely insane to take this on as a new project? javascript:insert_text('
