An aquarium at the Postojna Cave has welcomed two little Slovenian Dragons into the world.
The creatures are commonly called baby dragons but are actually olms. The species only reproduce every 5 to 10 years, but the aquarium is actually still waiting on more brothers and sisters to join the initial two, as there were 23 eggs that fully developed from an initial litter of 64 (via BBC).
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Saso Weldt, who is responsible for caring and studying the olds for Postonjna Cave said: “It is the end of one part of the story and the beginning of a whole new chapter: feeding and living without the egg,”
The success rate here was much improved over what happens in the wild, though, as out of a group of 500, two are likely to survive. Weldts added: “It’s quite normal – the losses are expected,”
The initial hatching wasn’t personally seen by anyone, but it was luckily caught on camera. “I was in the cave doing some other biological work. Since we have all the eggs on an IR camera, we saw that one was missing. Then you rewind and suddenly you realise, something has happened.”
In fact, seeing the process happen at all is very rare, with Weldt adding:”In the cave, in nature, they hatch all the time – but nobody here has ever seen a hatchling younger than about two years,” More astounding is that all the hatchlings came from one mother. “We did not do a paternity test, so we cannot know if it was a single father or not. But it was one mother. She’s with our colony of proteus and she’s doing well.”
You can see the footage of the first hatchling entering the world above.
