skynoch;4183403; said:
So would the thought be the the females take long to mature, the male, or both. Or do you think it might be just do to the right circumstances if you had to guess?
Where the males trying to breed with the females long before the pgregnacy happened? How long was the pregnancy?
I'd guess that they both take longer to mature than many fw rays, but that perhaps the females also need to be larger before being sexually mature. Our group consists of 2.3 and only the largest female has bred. I do think that this species is more finicky when it comes to breeding but I do not know why- something is missing is what my gut tells me.
Males were not trying to breed with the female before our initial pregnancy. We do see evidence of reproductive behavior now (bite marks and such) that often do not result in a pregnancy.
Length of gestation.... This to me is an interesting question. It seems to me that many hobbyists count pregnancy beginning as the time that they see a mating behavior or evidence that this has taken place but we see this with no pregnancies and I have had pregnancies where a female never looked chewed on so in my opinion this is not an effective way to judge length of pregnancy. Also keep in mind that elasmos are known to store sperm, delay implantation of fertilized ova and a whole bunch more interesting reproductive quirks that may occur in this family as well. So, we usually try to base pregnancy start on when we see a pup in utero using ultrasound. This doesn't necessarily mean that we couldn't have missed a pup on an earlier exam, they are tough to see when they are really young, especially with a female that will not sit still. We also have a more limited number of pregnancies we are basing our 'gestation guess' on with this species. That said, at this time my best guess from the data we've collected is ~ 20 weeks.
Hope that helps.