For the past month or so, a female goliath of mine has been laying eggs. I keep her in straight flake soil, so the eggs are easy to spot. She’s laid probably close to twenty and so far only two have grown at all. The rest die without inflating even the tiniest bit, typically within a few days. They don’t seem to be developing at all. The soil should be fine, temps and humidity are okay, but that shouldn’t matter much when the eggs are good right? The only thing I can think of is that she’s laying unfertilized eggs, but if that were the case, how would some of them have grown and hatched? She was plenty mature when she mated, and the male was active and everything. I don’t understand what could be going wrong. Any insight that I could be missing would be extremely helpful, it’s driving me nuts trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong, if it is even something I’m doing
Goliathus eggs
- Thread starter QuissettHouse
- Start date
If the male is old or the mating didn't last long it's not rare for many eggs to be infertile and some hatch. I'd put her back in with the male and prevent egg laying (nowhere to lay) for a short time. You might have a lot of nematodes in the soil which chew on eggs but they would die closer to or just after hatching.
The male is has been active for around a month and some change. Not old at all. I left them together for a few days to kick things off, they mated for a solid half hour each time. And every time I’ve searched through the egg laying box the female was in, I’ve put her in with the male and observed them mating for quite some time. I thought it was something in the soil too, but I’ve tried different batches, one of which was totally frozen for almost a week, which saw no difference. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most likely culprit is that the female was active for quite some time before she mated with this male, and that it’s just a bunch of bad eggs that didn’t get fertilized soon enough so I just have to work through them. Does that make sense to anyone else?