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How to determine the sexual of sub-adult tegu

Riplee

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5 Year Member
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You can know your sub-adult tegu sexual by your touch feeling.

Here is the different. in the red cycle of male there is a little hard gibbose point, you can feel it and most of time you can see it.

Picture of Male.
[attachment=3474]

Female has not that little part. Touch feeling very smooth.

Picture of Female.
[attachment=3475]

This is an easy and certain way to determine your sub-adult tegus.

Hope it is helpful.....
 

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dragonmetalhead

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The femoral pores on the males feel, for lack of a better word, "fuzzy" to the touch. Kodo is the first male lizard I've had and the first time I felt them, I thought he had a bit of debris stuck in his cloaca and it still weirds me out a bit. Also, how the hell did you get those pics? Whenever I try to secure Kodo to check his underside, he thrashes like a madman and I usually get a tail slap to the face.
 

Bubblz Calhoun

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Femoral Pores/glands are not the same as Spurs, males have both while females only have femoral pores. Femoral pores are the scent glands that line their thighs. You can see them on both pics that Riplee posted, it's a line of scales with tiny holes in the middle along the thighs. They run the length of the thigh on each side towards the bottom.

On the female you can see a section of the femoral pores in the circle on the left. On the male if you look at the black spots at the bottom of both of his thighs the femoral pores run right through them.

Spurs are found lower than femoral pores just under the cloaca on both sides on males.
 

Rhetoric

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Neat I never noticed the pores. The spurs are like little zits or bb's. As they get older/larger you can see them on the males without having to really "look" for them. When my males are basking I can see them at the base of their tails. I was only able to see/feel one on Rango for a while. His second spur wasn't too noticeable until this last summer.
Depending on the age of your tegu you won't be able to tell the sex. In argentines, they usually don't start to show spurs (if male) until they are closer to 18-24". I am not sure if it is the same for colombians since they tend to stay smaller then argentines.
 

TatianaTegu

New Member
Messages
1
Riplee said:
You can know your sub-adult tegu sexual by your touch feeling.

Here is the different. in the red cycle of male there is a little hard gibbose point, you can feel it and most of time you can see it.

Picture of Male.


Female has not that little part. Touch feeling very smooth.

Picture of Female.


This is an easy and certain way to determine your sub-adult tegus.

Hope it is helpful.....
 

Roadkill

Active Member
5 Year Member
Messages
497
Location
Earth
chriswizz, those are excellent photos that can actually demonstrate what I've been trying to say to people about detecting sex in tegus for years. Everyone focuses on the "feel" of those scales, and while that is an accurate gauge, it is a feature that develops later in life. In other words, what we are all taught in school as a secondary sexual characteristic. What those points actually are is, internally, the location where ligaments attach to the integument that anchor muscles running from that point to the hemipenes (I think these are hemipenal retractor muscles, but I could be wrong). In neonates and juveniles, the hemipenes and those muscles aren't being used, so the integument is not being reinforced (and so we cannot feel these points). As they reach puberty, these points thicken, kind of like a callous, and therefore we can feel them. However, from the day of hatching, the hemipenes, the ligaments, the muscles, those are all there, the basic underlying structures are present. If you look closely at those points, one should notice that the scaling around those areas between males and females are distinctly different. I'm not talking about the "raised beads" or the colour pattern (or the fact that the internal cloacal scales of the female are not as everted as they are on the male in these photos, this is something that changes by volition in all tegus), but the area of the "beads" consists of larger scales surrounded by a "ring" of smaller/miniscule scales on the male, while the same area on the female is just larger scales. This orientation is present at hatching because the associated structures are present, and therefore someone with a keen eye to detail can actually sex the tegu as neonates and not have to wait for development OR pull out probes that are highly inaccurate in young animals anyhow. Going back to the school comment on secondary sexual characteristics, people are concentrated on looking for the tegu equivalent of a deepening voice and growth of facial hair, when the 'penis' has been in front of their face the whole time.
 

Renske

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5 Year Member
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196
They have the beats from the day they are born. I can see them with all my offspring. I have now a nest of 28 red babies born 2 weeks a go. I have 17 females and 11 males. And i am 100% sure. People always told me you can not see it till they are 1 year old. But thats not true. Its very easy to see if you know how too look. Specialy if you have some brothers and sisters to compair it with.
 

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