5-2-16 Scale Update
No big changes on the scale front. Since I began observing a few crawlers last week UNDER the scale cover, I decided to monitor twice weekly. So far, nothing's changed. This week I found ONE crawler on the stem, which is new. Of the 237 live scale I observed this time around, 9 of the adults had a couple live crawlers under their armor (that's about 4%). Remember, those live crawlers are 2 out of 40 or more eggs. The bottom line: I think we're still early. I was hoping for more development over this past week, especially with the warm weekend we had, but I'm just not seeing it yet. I know bloom is right around the corner, so this isn't great news, but it is what it is.
Here are a couple of pictures of live scale, if you're interested.
This first one is a shot of five adult females with their armor removed. They are incubating eggs.
This second image is one of the females I observed that had live crawlers. There were two live crawlers in this instance, but only one began actively moving around when I flipped the adult female over. The other one had legs, but wasn't moving much. The remainder of the 'crawlers' didn't have legs yet ... I don't know if this is typical or not, but these eggs were located under the armor but outside of the female's body.