Based on things I’ve learned here on the forum and seen in my animals behavior I decided to try something very different this year. In the Fall of last year I paired up all my breeders – kings, pits, and rats.
I dropped the hotspot temp to 88 degrees - from the normal 91, and let the snakes do what they wanted…… I housed my pairs in 40 inch long tubs with the front third outside the rack (I’ll have to get photos so you can see what I mean). This allowed the front of the enclosure to stay at room temp and created a good temp gradient.
A good number of my breeders are young and this was their second or third year producing – giving me somewhat of a benchmark for comparison….
Most all of my females – of all species, spent equal time on and off the heat source. They feed normally and never refused a meal. My males spent more time on the cool side and some ate less but all did eat. They only used the heat to digest and went right back to the cool side. It should be noted that ALL of my Cal King breeders – all wild caught animals, shut down on feeding in the late Fall, but NEVER left the heat source – and I mean at all. I found this very interesting. They were offered food weekly like all the other snakes but they never once took the rodents.
In the late Spring I noticed a lot of activity in the males and then in the females. Breeding started very shortly after that.
I got the same sized clutches this year – allowing the snakes to do what they wanted, as I did in years past, when I forced them to cool. My Gophers, Bulls, and Kings produced large healthy eggs with an average of fertility rate of 90%.
My Texas rats and Glades rats double clutched with all good eggs (as usual for them), and my Rosy rats produced for the first time this year, very large 100% fertile clutches. As well, my Mexican Bairds produced a large good clutch.
My Black rats threw slugs and I actually sort of expected this because I’ve heard that Black rats need to be cooled to reproduce… I don’t know if this is fact, but my personal results show this to be accurate.
For what it’s worth; I live in So. Cal. So the nighttime lows this past Winter hit the 55 degree mark only a handful of times and never for more than a few days here and there. Average daytime highs really vary… some day were very warm and others were what we consider cool – mid to low 60’s.
All of my eggs are hatching now and so far I’ve had the same hatch rate as I have in the past - 85-90%.

A couple of keepers here have posted results of their “choices” trials and I wanted to give up my results. From this point forward, I’ll be doing this every year.

Thanks for reading and I hope it helps some.

Byron.d

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