Breeding Chinese Alligators

Here at CAKES Alligators, we know just how hard it is to get Chinese Alligators to breed in captivity - so below we have put some articles together to give other keepers of the Alligator Sinensis some of our ideas and the information we've gathered from books and the Internet on successfully breeding Chinese Alligators whilst keeping the species (Alligator Sinensis) commonly known as Chinese alligator.

At this time some of the things you read here won't be proven facts, as we are currently studying our own Chinese alligators, so they may be just our own observations and theories. However, It's fair to say that over the last several years we have watched many hundreds of hours of our cctv camera footage that are recording in all of our enclosures, and are filming 24/7.

Whilst watching this footage, we have observed many interactions with our females in enclosures with other females, our males with our females, and also how they react to each other when they are in enclosures on there own, but fully able to hear each other calling, being able to smell each other, and also able to see each other when we choose, to see how they react.

Our purpose for all of this is so we can learn as much as possible to potentially help other people who may have an interest in keeping the Alligator Sinensis and further our knowledge so that we may some day successfully manage to breed our chinese alligators, and hopefully with the information that we share, you'll be able to breed your own.

This year (2018) we successfully put one of our resident males with a few of our female Alligators with minimal aggression shown, and a good friend of ours, Shaun Foggett who is the curator of Crocodiles of the World, and our selves decided to collaborate in breeding Chinese Alligators. We went up to Shaun's place in Oxfordshire and collected his male Sinensis and brought it back to our facilities.

We introduced him after a couple of hours to 1 of our females, and amazingly it went very well; she came out of her tunnel, observed him for a couple of minutes from the side of her pond, and then as we sat holding our breath, she slid into the water with him and in no time at all they both began to go into breeding mode - they started to swim around each other, going under water where he would embrace her. You can see footage in our Gallery section of the progression of our Chinese Alligators breeding in action. This footage was captured back in early May 2018 when we introduced our Chinese Alligators to eachother.

It is now early July and we are still patiently waiting for them to start building there nests. We have observed one of our females scraping about her outside enclosure, and inside her island conservatory out of sight but clearly hearing her on the microphones that are in our cameras.

Although our other female chinese Alligators who were seen regulary mating with the males introduced into there pens, as yet have shown no signs of scraping nesting materials together, but they have both filled out mid section substantially and are showing less interest in eating there food.

If we manage to get eggs this year, we will give as much info as possible learned by us leading up to the breeding season, and info gained when we brumate our alligators, which we feel is very important in helping our Sinensis come happily into there breeding season in the Spring time.

Keep checking out the News section on our website for any updates about the 2018 breeding season...