>Have you ever bred two unrelated snakes and gotten any of the following outcomes:

>4. Eggs that come out infertile from day 1, or go bad soon after being deposited



Back in the 1970s, I had a Burmese python male that was wild caught (AFAIK) that mated with a captive bred female. How closely they were related is anybody's guess. The female laid eggs that went bad fairly early. I opened one that I thought was bad and found an embryo with a beating heart, so I know that one was alive, but the entire clutch didn't last much longer than that one. The female died about a month after laying the eggs. She would not eat and developed the oddest looking skin I've ever seen, partly from the scales developing a sawtooth edge. When I examined a piece of shed skin, it was at least twice as thick as normal shed skin, and the skin was irregularly thickened rather than uniformly thickened. I had four Burms at the time, and none of the rest showed what that female did.



Paul Hollander

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