Second year in a row laying infertile eggs after mating?

[FatalFramer]

Hi everyone, I wanted to get your opinions on this.

I have a male bearded dragon who hatched early late November/early December of 2010. He is currently 5 years old, going on 6 years of age. My female bearded dragon hatched on July 16, 2011, so she is 4 years old, going on 5 years of age.

I first mated the pair together when my female bearded dragon was two years of age, and my male bearded dragon was 3 years of age. I put them together and they successfully mated with each other and my female ended up laying a clutch of 11 healthy, fertile eggs. I incubated the eggs and had a 100% hatch rate and the babies were all healthy.

The next year, I mated the same beardies again (male age: 4 , female age:3), but this is where it got weird. The two successfully mated, the male successfully mounted her, raised her tail, and did the deed. Then a month later (guestimating), my female beardie laid her first clutch of eggs that year in her lay box. I dug up the eggs to incubate them, but all of the eggs were infertile. The eggs were pale yellow, deflated, did not retain their shape when you touched it, and they did not have the sperm coating on the outside of the eggs so the eggs felt dry. A few months later that year, she laid another clutch of eggs with the same result. All of the eggs were infertile. A few months after the second clutch of eggs, she laid her third clutch of eggs, all infertile again. Each clutch of eggs that she laid contained an average of 10-16 eggs.

This year (3/2016) I mated my beardies again (male age: 5, female age: 4). Just like last year, they successfully mated, and my female laid 2 clutches of eggs, both infertile with the same description from last year. I noticed however, that after my male mater with her this year, after my male bearded dragon unmounted her, my female bearded dragon had his sperm slowly dripping out from her vent. It wasn't a brief drip either as it continued to leak for a few minutes (5-10 minutes?).

I'm wondering why she was not retaining the sperm after mating? And also, why is she laying so many infertile clutches of eggs after mating? I took both of my beardies to the vet before mating them and they both were healthy. I had a fecal and a physical examination done on my male and he was healthy, and he weighed 588g in March 2016. His fecal was normal, and he did not have any parisites that needed to be treated. My female had a physical examination, fecal, blood test, normal and barium x-rays. Everything checked out OK with her as well. The only abnormal things on her blood test was a high CPK level which could have been due to the fact that they had to try a few times to draw blood from her tail, causing trauma which elevates the CPK level. The other thing was a high calcium level. I cut back on her calcium to drop her levels down to the normal range. Her fecal showed that she had Trichomonas, and an ameobic cyst. Both were treated with metronidazole back in September of 2015 along with the rest of her tests from the vet except for the x-rays that were done at the end of February this year.

Any ideas as to what is going on? Temperatures for both of my beardies enclosures are 106F-108F at the basking spot, 92F-95F on the hot site, and 78F-82F on the cool side. They are eating mustard greens, dubia roaches, occasional red pepper, yellow squash, and rep-cal adult bearded dragon food. They are housed on reptile carpet as well. I'm starting to think that maybe she just cannot lay fertile eggs anymore after her first clutch.

 

[FatalFramer]

After doing some research on the web and in my microbiology lab manual, along with the symptoms from my female bearded dragon, I have came to a conclusion on what is going on with my female (if anyone is reading this for future reference). As stated before, my female's fecal sample revealed that she had trichomonas. Trichomonas is linked to infertility be causing inflammation in the cervix, therefore causing the cervix to swell. The swelling closes the canal (or drastically decreases the size of the canal) that sperm travels through. This was observed when my male mated my female, and it seemed like all of the sperm just flowed out of her for 5-10 minutes as I mentioned earlier.

My female bearded dragon was on metronidozole to treat the trichomonas. I never did another fecal to see if she was completely free of it or not. It was also believed by my vet and I that she got it from her feeder insects (dubias). I am 100% positive now that she got it from the dubias because when I got a shipment of dubias from my usual seller online, the dubias seemed drained of energy days after they were settled in their new enclosure. Then within the next few days, there were massive die offs of the new dubias. Within the first week, I guestimated that 60% or more of the new dubias strangely died. I then noticed that whenever I would get my next to shipments from the same seller, the same results happened, except when I introduced new dubias in that were 7/8", they would quickly massively die off, and take a portion of my established colony with them. These strange die offs is what I believe to be the trichomonas parasite along with the other 2 that were found in her fecal sample.

I swab my colony of dubias and look at samples from my dubias under the microscope to look for trichomonas and any other parisites. If trichomonas is present in the colony, I will be getting rid of the dubias and starting over with a new colony. I will also do a fecal sample on my beardies to check for trichomonas and other parisites as well and get them treated again.

That is my conclusion, if anyone see's this in the future or happens to have the same problem. I'm getting my microscope tomorrow so I'll run the tests then and update if my hypothesis is correct.