help with ultrasounding hatchlings.

albinoblue · New Member Joined: Oct 30, 2006 Posts: 2

Could someone tell me what I am looking for when ultrasounding hatchlings. Is it calcified spurs on the males hemipenes? Any help would sure be appreciated as I do have access to a machine and would like to offer sexed pairs (no eggs yet but on the way) of albinos, snows and hets
Thanks !!!

alex · Valued Member Joined: Aug 03, 2005 Posts: 106

Why ultrasound? It's hard to distinguish really fine soft tissue densities in small animal, especially if you don't have really good ultrasound training because neonatal tegus are really, really small and have really small hemipenes and it might be difficult to distinguish tiny hemipenes from other structures in the area (tiny hemiclitori in females and the paracloacal glands in both sexes).

It's never been particularly useful for me to try to get that fine of detail on small animals... things like ovaries and ovulating follicles and heart wall defects and recognisable tumours are still bigger than what you're going for. Plus, you have to make sure your machine has the appropriate probe for use on a shallow tissue depth, which tends to be more common in the really expensive briefcase-sized portable ultrasounds (at least where I am).

Personally, I'd go with probing or saline injection... I have never had a problem gently sexing lizards with an appropriately sized probe and it's often easier than with snakes, I think. Maybe lizards are just easier to restrain.

Since you have adults, why not ultrasound them first and get an idea of what it should look like in an adult of known gender.[/i]

albinoblue · New Member Joined: Oct 30, 2006 Posts: 2

I had read in a post earlyer that the best way to sex hatchlings was probing or ultrasound, so never hearing about sexing hatchlings that way it made me very curious. what is the saline way, never herd of that ether.do tegus probe the same as snakes? thanks

alex · Valued Member Joined: Aug 03, 2005 Posts: 106

The probing is the same technique in lizards or snakes... I'm not sure how deeply tegus probe (I've done a fair number of iguanas and stuff for clients... iguanas probe quite deeply, it's very convenient)
So, if you had a whole clutch and did it gently, you could sort them into deep and shallow probers and probably sex them relatively easily... you might have to go back and do the first few over as you get used to how males probe vs females. It's how I do species I've never worked with before & I seem to be pretty accurate (i.e. all my young tentacled snakes I probed as male are chasing around much larger ones I probed as female doing tail wiggles, and I couldn't find any scale row counts on them)

You can, if you know where you're doing it, inject sterile saline into the tissues in the tail base evert the hemipenes. Some people I know like it, I like probing.