I certainly hope nobody is keeping 2 ball pythons in a little ten gallon tank...especially if they are bigger than hatchlings...

The chances of having a pair of snakes both carrying the same recessive trait is very unlikely...now, if both snakes were purchased from breeders who have recessive morphs etc...then I would say the chances are a little better that both could be 'hets' sold as normals...

Most breeders, both big and small, especially those who have been around in the hobby awhile, have picked odd looking normals which they hoped possessed some special quality...and are not just odd looking normals with nothing genetically inheritable. Also, many of the first morphs, even recessive ones, came from captive hatched babies, bought in bulk...and since they were captive hatched, the odd visual morphs wouldn't have ended up eating due to poor camouflage capabilities.

Though I don't have anything against breeding normals...I certainly don't think its a good idea to get into breeding normals to hope you get lucky and produce a morph...because of such easily obtained captive hatched snakes all over the place, it would not be easy to sell normals, unless female. Canada may have the best prices for sellers...but the demand up here is alot less due to just not having a huge population...even if every Canadian household kept reptiles...still wouldn't be anywhere near the demand for pet reptiles. Thus a normal ball python (most likely captive hatched) at a petstore in Canada goes for about $99...some for $89...but for the same type of captive hatched ball python at a reptile show, most are $20-$30.

One benefit however with ball pythons, even breeding normal to normal is the clutch size is small enough its not too much a financial strain if they don't sell right away.
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PHLdyPayne

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