Reptile & Amphibian Forums

If a female is introduced to two males, can some of her eggs be fertilized by one male and the rest of the eggs by the other? Anybody have any documentation of this? I'd be interested to hear some feedback on this. Thanks.

Dewey

It can take place in cats and dogs, why not rat snakes. One way to tell is to get a leucistic female and introduce her to both a normal male and a leucistic male in a few days of each other and see what hatches, If you get a mix, you will know for sure that it can happen.

Why are you asking the question? I can tell you for sure that female Black Rats in the wild will breed with any male that comes across her while she is in season. I also know that Black Rat Snakes can store sperm for a few weeks so it is quite likely that clutches in the wild are mixed in areas with high populations of Black Rats.

I tried it in 2005 with 4 males per female [with Corns]and got results I'd guess were influenced by all 4 males. You can read a little about it on my site. Tom Stevens
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TomsSnakes.com

I have heard of studies that have shown multiple paternity in live-bearing snakes like garters and watersnakes. So I would assume it's possible with egglayers as well. I think the old line of thinking was that once a female mated with a male "the store was closed" to other males. But that seems to have been proven false at least for some species.

Yes it does happen. I had it with my hypo everglades. I had a female produce normals from a het breeding after I made a sexing mistake on a very nice WC that I thought would be giving me hets as a female, not a male.

I caught the WC as a six month old and never sexed it after I first caught it. It was a stupid mistake to never look at it closely again but I did get first hand experience with the question at hand. After I saw the two males fighting in the cage one day I could tell from across the room the WC was a male. But to answer your question I ended up with six good eggs a bunch of duds and the good eggs had 4 hypos and 2 hets. Shannon Brown also posted on this before as well.

Later Jason

I read about someone who accidently mated an albino boa with a normal (he thought he was a female) AFTER she copulated with an albino male. He recieved one albino (from the albino male) and something like 20 hets (from the second mating with the normal male).

This showes two things: 1) two males can fertilize the female and 2) albino genes are weaker from inbreeding (the sperm weren't as viable, as only one recieved the albino gene from the male sperm even though he had first crack at her).
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