Reproduction
As with most reptiles, L. g. splendida lays eggs. Courtship and copulation occurs between the months of March and June, with clutches of 5 to 12 adhesive-surfaced eggs deposited in late June or July, sometimes buried as deeply as a foot to prevent drying through their moisture-permeable shells. After about 60 days of incubation the 8- to 10-inch long hatchlings, weighing about a fifth of an ounce, emerge. Brightly yellow-speckled in vertebral cross-lines, they also exhibit a lateral row of large, dark brown spots which, as they mature, are gradually fragmented by encroaching yellow flecks.
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Famous quotes containing the word reproduction:
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Although Samuel had a depraved imagination—perhaps even because of this—love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of the intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: “Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile.””
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)