Thanks for the info!



You are very welcome!



I know that one of the pros for brumating is to time the pairings.



Well, that is still a tricky thing as after brumation, both males and females will be actively hungry, especially the females as they will need to bulk up prior to mating as developing and laying eggs is very taxing on their bodies. So there's still a lot of guesswork being done as to when to ideally pair up the snakes. Some people might take a month or two for feeding prior to introducing a male while others might introduce the males off and on shortly after brumation until they witness a lock-up.



Anything you look for in deciding when to pair up? Any routines you follow?



For me, I usually only introduce the males if the females are of a decent weight and relatively calm, in other words, aren't in the eating frenzy mode that can result in an accidental cannibalism. It seems that because of the summer months, with the heat and higher metabolism that goes along with it, my females are often times so overly active and hungry that even if they show no signs of being cannibalistic towards the male, they are far too active for the male to even try hooking up with her and most of the times I just find my males hiding or buried somewhere to avoid the female. Those instances rarely yield anything positive.



However, if I do have males that are equally active and especially showing no interest in feeding, then that usually means that they are wanting to seek out a female, so in that case I'll introduce the male and monitor the two for several days. If the female proves to be non-receptive to the male and/or so active that the male loses interest or becomes inactive that he's now hiding, I'll remove him. But some males will be persistent enough despite the female's behavior and will attempt to breed with her which usually does result in successful lock-ups but it doesn't necessarily mean that the male is fertile, has successfully fertilized the female or that the female will lay in a definite timeline if her body has decided to retain the sperm to use at a later time.



Bob Applegate, a long term pioneer and author of many books on the care and breeding of kingsnakes, has an interesting housing system for his kingsnakes that basically allows the kingsnakes to cohabitate together despite the common myth about the dangers of cohabitating, especially of kingsnakes, due to cannibalistic tendencies. He told me that it's the snakes that will determine when they are ready to breed, not by us the keepers who generally toss in a male when we think they are ready to breed. And you know what, he's absolutely correct! His system is an awesome display of ingenuity and genius and maybe one day I can incorporate such a system.



Having mentioned all of that though, I don't have such a system and I'm still one of those guys that puts in a male when I think they are ready to breed. The one thing I do differently than some people do though, is sometimes I will cohabitate certain males with females for 2-3 months at a time and I've never had a single problem, especially if the female is well fed. This way, they can spend enough time together and hopefully breed when it's more convenient/natural to them as it were living in such an artificial environment.



Bottom line is, sometimes it's just a read that you get from long term care of the snakes and other times it's a crap shoot.



Please keep us all updated. I'd love to hear if you see any trends from year to year in your breedings w/o brumation.



Definitely! This year will be more interesting as last year could have been a fluke or perhaps I'm onto something. I've already started pairing some males with females and have witnessed a lot of attempted lock-ups from very actively sexual males, so we'll see what happens.
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Troy Rexroth

Rextiles

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