The following is an excerpt taken from Bob Applegate's site. For the entire article, see...



http://www.applegatereptiles.com/articles/methodology.htm



"Using your data base of weights and your past experience, you can decide if your adult female or your two year old female is large enough to breed, or if you might be better advised to defer breeding until the following year. I have had some female colubrids that were low in weight, so I kept them warm and feeding over their second winter. They developed follicles anyway, so I assumed that if they could develop follicles, they were in fact large enough to breed. I quickly introduced a male to each, which promptly copulated with its respective mate. Good sperm counts, wrong assumption. all three in this example laid infertile eggs and died of complications soon after. This was a costly, but valuable lesson. I will defer breeding future underweight females until the following year, even if they develop follicles."

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