So I was digging back to old threads and I came across this one, and something I had read previously came back to me. After spending a while looking for it, I finally found it:
http://www.caudata.org/triturus/temp/dan.gif
This article is about inducing a second breeding via artificial hibernation, which is nothing new to us at this point/probably isn't the best for your animals anyways in terms of stress/needing that time to recover, but there was one line I did find very interesting.
On the right hand side, he states "If the females are kept without males, they will deposit less than a dozen unfertilized eggs." So I am wondering if the earlier post about the two different crested newts producing more than 50% hatch rate, may have been because the female was kept separate prior?
Has anyone attempted this, or noticed such a thing? I had kept females separate from a male just because I didn't have some before breeding season, but haven't been able to observe that yet, however I will be keeping my eye open in the future and may attempt to keep males and females separate (of the same species) until breeding time and see if it yields any interesting results.