As a reminder, the free bowls with constantly filled foods for Petable Turtles de-rez on Tuesday. These bowls, of both normal and hatchless foods were sent out as a thankyou over the last week after issues with the latest upgrade to the turtles. Savy turtle owners are now using the constant food supply of hatchless food in breeding turtle-fests. We decided to, also.Thus allowing an unscientific study of the breeding habits of Petable Turtles.
So for today, and tomorrow, we unboxed all our turtles, and have just taken the females over to be in a pen right beside the male turtles. Before this, to stop unwanted breeding we had them set 15 metres apart. Now, because we have an egg trader, which allows us to trade in unwanted eggs, and access to the hatchless food for another couple of days, we thought we might as well give all the turtles free-reign to ‘play’ around with only positive consequences.
But.
I just moved the females over in the middle of their night, and unboxed them in the pen next door to the males. While both turtle groups remain soundly sleeping (you can see that with the Zzzzzs above their head), and I unboxed the females all over this free pen, I was stunned to witness something just now – all the females floated over in mid-air to sit as close as possible against the pen fence on our north-east side. What’s on the other side? The males, of course. Not that they appear at all to have noticed the precense of the females – as they are still sound asleep.
Now that they’re waking up, I’ve pulled the females through the wall and they are all inter-mingling quite well, first, second, third and some fourth generations alike. After witnessing the obvious wantoness of the females, I’m now watching the older males make a reasonably quick beeline to the females for a little rompy bumpy. Annoyingly the older Generation One males seem to want to target the Gen 1 females, rather than the lovely glowy orange babes hanging around the peripheral. And, it’s not gone past my line of study that the males don’t appear too selective towards gender either. The image below shows one of the mating acts supposedly taking place in the very back of the pen. There, three turtles are in a small group – a blue, a green and a jade. Although there will be no progeny from that little tete-e-tete, given that all three are male.
My neice has pointed out that I’m far too obsessed with watching the mating rituals of turtles, so I must sign off now (two pregnant in one minute, that’s good going).
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