Reptile & Amphibian Forums

i now have a good number of breedable normal females that are all feeding well and i now plan on investing in a male. so the question is do i go with a dom/co dom and make some quik offspring Reinvest any profit/trades in other dom/codom females then go for double dom/co doms the next year or go with a het gene male and take the several addtional years to raise up the hets to breed back?
my natural inclination is the dom/co doms but i have heard many people saying that with the market trend they would go with hets. thx

What do you want to do?

Do you like Pastels? Cinnys?
Do you like Spiders?

Chose what you want to do and go with it. That's what I did. I'm starting small...
A few breeding females and a pastel male.
Next on my list...make super pastels. (After I hatch some pastel females of course)

I'm thinking bumblebees after the supers...but we'll see.
-----
-Man fears the beast in the Wolf because he does not understand the beast within himself.

First off, You need to decide what you want to do. What morphs you like and want to make. Then you need to know how much you are willing to spend for the morphs you want, Be careful this hobby is addictive...LOL...You will always want another morph.

In my opinion I would start with some type of co-dom morph( pastel, mojave, cinnamon, yellow belly, clown, etc). The reason to start this way is a quick return, I am not talking cash either, when I say quick return it could be in trading for stuff you don't have thus you collection gets bigger and then you can move on to the other morphs. But like I said before it all depends on what you can spend, If you can afford to get both co-doms and recessive genes that would be best and here is why. During the time you are raising up your HETs you will be breeding the co-doms, so then within 2-3 year you will be producing several different kinds of ball morphs. That is the way I started, It has been a pretty long road but I should get albino's and pieds along with all of the other co-dom stuff I have this coming season. I would say buy a few HET females along with a co-dom morph and start breeding because you looking at around 2-3 years on your HET female and 2-3 years is a pretty long wait until the cash/trade starts coming back in. Then after you get some babies from the co-doms you INVEST in the MALE morphs of your HETS. That you let everything flow really well on that 3rd year. Hope this helps, But this is just my opinion. Thanks DAVID

-----
WRONG... The only time I was WRONG is when I thought I was WRONG but I was really RIGHT.....LOL...LOL...LOL

Dave ole boy, since when did the Clown become a Co Dom like a Yellow Belly, Pastel, Mojave, ETC.? Your mind is the first thing to go....

Dave

My advice to you is to invest in the animals you like the most. If you have more than 5 females going to be ready,
Your always better off to invest in both Co-doms and recessives.
Like investing in the stock market,
You never just invest in high yield high risk stocks you put some of your investment in lower yield but less risk stocks.
With todays market prices coming down to an affordable level for almost everyone; you can get lets say a male spider and a male pied and still have codom production next year and het pieds to keep and make pieds in a few more years.
They all sell at whatever fair market value is and the truth of the matter is that you can not lose if you just make babies.
The only way to lose oney even in todays volatle pricing market is to sell your breeders or kill them...

This is based on LOW Yield and Poor purchasing.
EG.
buy a male Mojave for 3x going market value 10000.00
breed him to 5 of your adult females...
get 3 clutches out of the 5 breedings....
average 6 egg clutches produce 9 mojave's
sell 7 of the 9 you produced @ only 1500.00 ea
sale value 10500.00 @1 yr or less....
you profit in one year with a 3x market value investment 500.00 cash and you have 2 baby mojave's to keep and your breeders... Next year its all profit...Try to start a business doing anything else and get that kind of return... No its not the days we saw where you could sell your 7 babies at the same price you paid for your breeders But lets be reasonable that was just too good to keep going....

Now take the above numbers and do the math with a male at market value and getting five 6 egg clutches and selling them at current market value...
05 or older male 3500.00 purchase price
produce 15 baby mojave's
keep 2
sell 13 @ 2000.00 average
total sale 25500.00
profit 22500.00 plus keep 2 babies and all your breeders
-----
Michael Cole
Ballroom Pythons South
863-439-3015
WWW.BallroomPythonsSouth.com

That is great advise and works! We went pastel male now mojave! then spider and cinny!

Good Luck
Paul

-----
www.nydistortion.com
www.thenyxl.com
I breed ball pythons bearded dragons and play paintball!
3.7 dragons
1.11.8 Ball pythons
5 pastels
15 normal balls

I personally went with all recessives, but I did not have any normal females at the time that were ready to go. If I were in your position I would go with 1 or 2 of the higher dollar codoms and have babies ready to sell next season. You can use that money to buy your recessives. Even with the way codoms drop, if you have enough females ready you should make quite a bit of money. I don't know what you are looking to spend, but I would go with a male Spotnose. The market for these seems to be really hot right now, and the super is unbelievable. They are not really baing mass produced yet so I would be suprised to see the price on these drop too much in the next season or two. How many females do you have? I would probably pick up a couple female pastels to get some combo morphs going also.
-----
John Vandegrift

thx for the advice everyone, right now i have 5 females in the 1400 range eating f/t rats weekly, a few of them on the larger side, as well as one female around 1100 (jumbo mouse eater only ) i was looking at going with a spider male but seem to be hearing alot of negativs lately, i guess right now im really leaning towards spending a bit more and going with a nice mojave male so that i could go for supers with my holdbaks in a few years maybe trade for hets. imo mojaves are great looking snakes and seem to have alot of varience and crossbreeding potential. i drool over the blue eyed leucs

Could you afford a lesser? They seem to be coming down a little recently, and they have a much nicer lucy than mohaves. I have seen a few for sale recently for under $8000. I think the ship has sailed on the mohaves.
-----
John Vandegrift

Have you bred Ball Pythons before? Have you bred any snakes before? Have you hatched out any Ball Pythons before? If the answer to the first three questions is no, I suggest you put your money in the bank, and buy a nice looking $300-400 Pastel male, or a really nice proven male Pastel for around $700. Breed the Pastel male to your females next year, and if you have your incubation technique down, and actually hatch out some babies, keep the females and sell the males and buy yourself a "I am a $#%^$ awesome Ball breeder" reward male...like a nice Mojave Het Hypo, a nice Pastel Het Hypo, a nice Cinn Het Hypo, and some Het Hypo females. If you crash and burn like I did on my first year, you will not feel so bad. It is alot easier to have normal or Pastel eggs mold vs. having Cinn or Fire eggs mold.

no, i have not bred balls yet as I have been raising up these females for the job, I have experience breeding western and eastern hognose and 'blue beauties'. I also breed Panther Chams and some gecko species. Im fairly confident in my incubation abilities (have to moniter temps/humid for *9* months for the panthers). although i was considering trying maternal incubation as I have heard it is actually quite successful...thoughts on this? thx