Hey everybody! I've been meaning to post some of the microchipping pictures we took while working on Allen's collection. Here is a little sequence of the microchipping process.
To start our assembly line off we weighed and measured the geckos, entering all known information into the database.
Next came injecting the microchips. Allen or Andrew got the enjoyment of restraining while I inserted the 12 gauge needle underneath the skin. As you can see here we tried to insert the needle right where the ventral side meets the dorsal side, most of the times the needle slid right into the excess skin. The needle was inserted in a cranial to caudal direction in hopes that the gecko would not push the microchip out as it moved around.
Much to my amazement the geckos hardly expressed any form of pain when I inserted the needle. There were only a few that struggled and growled at us when they got poked. There were also only a few of them that bled at all!
After inserting the chip we had to glue the hole left by the needle back together. I brought some surgical glue along from work and it worked great! One drop and a little squeeze and they were good to go.
Finally, we had to scan them and record their number in the database and on their cage card.
We microchipped leachies ranging from 11-400 grams. We also took 4 photos of each gecko and linked the photos of each particular gecko into the database by their chip #. The database is going to be an awesome attribute to the gecko community. It is allowing the geckos to be sold with basically a "pedigree". I really hope that others will be willing to contribute in expanding the database by getting their geckos microchipped.
A big thanks to Allen for starting this project, and for letting us be a part of it, it was an awesome experience!