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At work we have a female eastern kingsnake that was part of a confiscated collection (41 snakes including 2 illegal eyelash vipers) from a guy back in 1999 who was being evicted from his house and later was charged with animal cruelty over conditions some of his animals had been found during the eviction process. After all the court stuff, the guy apparently never petitioned to get his snakes back so Animal Control gave them to us to find homes for. The two vipers had gone to a zoo. We kept a few snakes for ourselves and distrubted the bulk of the rest to other facilities and the leftovers went to a local rescue to find homes for them.

I did have a male I had intended to breed to the female in 2004 once he finished putting on some growth to match her size, but the summer before that happened she laid a clutch of infertile eggs of which ended with a prolapse and emergency surgery. I had figured her breeding days were over after that - even the vet said not to make an attempt in the future.

To my surprise, on May 20 she proceeded to lay eggs. She had not shown any signs of even being gravid.. eating right up until the week before she laid eggs. Nothing unusual (except for the fact she wasn't supposed to be able to lay eggs again). I was resigned to the fact that it would be another infertile clutch. We have had her almost 7 years now and she has not been placed with a male snake and here she was laying 10 eggs. Four of the eggs were slugs. The other 6 looked pretty good. Just for the heck of it, I set them up in a container with vermiculite and have been keeping an eye on them. It's been almost 2 weeks and the 6 eggs look awesome. When I candled them last night I saw that 3 of the eggs have blood vessels visible.

My question is...

We know the guy whom the snake was confiscated from had been breeding his snakes as he had several adult breeders and a small number of hatchlings. It's possible she could have retained sperm from a breeding this guy may have done in the year prior to the collection being confiscated. What are people's opinions on how long females can retain viable sperm? Or is this possibly even a case of parthogensis?
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PHWyvern

There have never been a proven case of longterm sperm storage. There are many cases of parthnogenetic reproduction in kingsnakes. There appears to be a least two different types. Diploid and triploid.

One type results in all male offspring. You can check for this.

Look up the work by Dr. Gordon Shuett(ASU west). I attempted to publish this type of reproduction in the early seventies, but of course, that was long before they could actually work with DNA. Now its proven that parthnogenetic reproduction occurs.

We know it occurs when no male is present, we do not know why. We also do not know how common it is when a male IS present. Cheers

>>There have never been a proven case of longterm sperm storage. There are many cases of parthnogenetic reproduction in kingsnakes. There appears to be a least two different types. Diploid and triploid.
>>
>> One type results in all male offspring. You can check for this.
>>
>> Look up the work by Dr. Gordon Shuett(ASU west). I attempted to publish this type of reproduction in the early seventies, but of course, that was long before they could actually work with DNA. Now its proven that parthnogenetic reproduction occurs.
>>
>> We know it occurs when no male is present, we do not know why. We also do not know how common it is when a male IS present. Cheers

So I wait to see what hatches and if all males then it's the one type and if all females, the other type I guess. The 6 good eggs are still going strong. This week, a 4th egg started showing blood vessels when candled. Of the 4 eggs, one looks like a spiderweb inside..multiple small vessels going in all directions. The other 3 eggs have one or two vessels visible but they are much larger than the spiderweb egg.
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PHWyvern