Is that 85 deg on the cool side and 90 on the hot? That would be good for maternal incubation but I’ve noticed some of my gravid females sometimes seek the cool end and the water bowl when kept that warm. I think they generally need that kind of warmth but perhaps there are times when they want to cool off for some reason so it might be better if you had a big cage with an 80 deg end and 90 at the other. Should be fine, just don’t let the water go dry and check the temp to make sure it’s not any warmer than 85 – 90.

I used to put in tubs of sphagnum moss for next boxes but they usually laid under the hide pots on newspaper. I think I had the sphagnum too wet for their liking. Perhaps in the wild flooding is more of a problem than drying out. I’d still recommend a plastic storage box with slightly damp sphagnum but don’t be offended if she doesn’t use it.

If she hasn’t eaten in a month or more and you have pulled the male then go ahead and put in the box in. Clean it if she should make a little mess in it though.

I’ve never really paid much attention to pre-egg laying sheds but I think it’s something like 20 to 40 days after that last shed that you expect eggs.

What I look for is when I set them on the ground and they relax and stretch out and the widest part is in the lowest 3rd of their body but they haven’t eaten in a month or more so I know they aren’t just full of it. It seems like their eggs usually drop noticeably low in the last week or so. Look for fullness near the tail.

I also had a girl get really nice colored about three or four weeks before laying this year. She seemed to get a cleaner and sort of a bright pastel look to her. She then went back to normal about a week before laying. Her mother went through the same thing and just went back to normal and her eggs are fairly low so I’m getting and incubation box warmed up for the eggs today. I haven’t really noticed this color change in all my snakes so maybe it’s just something odd about this line.

There is always the chance that your snakes both carry the same recessive mutation. It’s not a big chance but knowing it’s there always makes hatch day exciting. I did a pseudo scientific (didn’t account for localized inbreeding so may not be much good) calculation once and thought that perhaps 1 in 100 wild ball pythons are het for albino and perhaps the same for some of the other fairly “common” recessive morphs found in the wild. What makes it unlikely that you will get morphs is the chance that both of your animals will happen to be carrying the same recessive genes. At 1 in 100 carriers, only 1 in 10,000 random pairs will both be carriers and this is needed to produce recessive morphs. However, as het males get cheaper you can up your odds to the 1 in 100 by using het males.

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