Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have owned a Ball Python for about 4 months now and she has been very healthy. When i first got her i had her checked out and no problems were found. Yesterday however i noticed that she was a little swollen and wasnt acting right. 20 minutes later she was giving birth. This was very unexpected and now i have no idea what to do. PLEASE HELP!!! ALl i have is her cage including her hiding hut, water bowl, and heat lamp. Any help would be extremely helpful. THANK YOU!

~Ryan

Let her handle it....try to keep temps at around 89 and in 60 days you should have some babies

Raul

Incubating the eggs isn't terribly hard but perhaps the easiest thing would be to post where you are and you might find a “neighbor” with an incubator already up and going. Are the eggs white or yellow/brown?

If they are good (white) eggs and you want to hatch them you could try setting them up in damp (but not wet) vermiculate at 89 deg F for 60 days or so.

It is also possible to let the mother incubate them but I'm only trying this myself for the first time and I'm assuming that you need to have pretty good background temperature and humidity for success. Is she in an aquarium with a screen top in an air-conditioned room?
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ALthough the room is not air conditioned...it is a screen top. I've asked around and no one that i know of has an incubator. Would i be better off gettin a heating pad or will the heat lamp be enough?

If you use a heat lamp it will dry out the eggs. If you use a heat pad it might be hard getting the temp just right, unless you know how to use a thermostat. You could just adjust the room temp. What ever you decide to do, don't let the eggs get to dry. Eggs absorb water and gain weight as they grow.

Wayne

Unless you live in a rather humid area, I suspect you will be hard pressed to keep the eggs from drying out too much in a screen top aquarium. If you don't decide to go buy an incubator (the $40 Styrofoam chicken incubators at a farm store can work passably) I would cover as much of the top as you can without fire hazard with plastic or glass. Perhaps you can fill the end of the tank she isn't in with damp sphagnum moss (from a garden store) and spray it periodically with warm water. Also keep a water dish where she can reach it without leaving the eggs. I'm not sure if she will use it but I've heard a rumor that they might drink and pass fluids to help with dry eggs. I don't know if this is true but if nothing else it will help humidify the air and stabilize the temperature. You don't want to spray the eggs directly except for emergency dehydration and certainly don't want water running under them but if you can get the cage up close to 100% humidity that would be great.

I think you would want the temperature at her end to be around 86 - 88 deg F. If you do place heat directly under them it must be controlled carefully so as not to get too hot. I would think one of those proportional thermostats would be better than a simple on off to avoid too much temperature cycling. Maybe best not to have heat directly under them if it wasn't already there when she decided to lay. Maybe with a hot spot near by she can stretch out into it when she wants to raise the temp. Also maybe you could insulate around the outside of the tank, all the way around and top and bottom (but away from lamps etc.) to keep the air temperature up so it's not just surface heat. It would also help with privacy and keeping her calm. Mine threw out a good egg the first few days and I think it was because I was stressing her out looking too much. I think they are tougher than we think but I still believe you have a challenge to materially incubate eggs in a screen top aquarium. Maybe if you live in a warm costal area or are willing to turn her room into one but I know it would be extremely difficult where I live. Don’t give up on the eggs though as some pretty nasty looking ones have been known to hatch.

Also, how much fat does she have? Some pythons raise the temp by shivering and I think this would be hard on a skinny female (I'm not sure if ball pythons do this anyway though). I wouldn't think you would want to try to feed her while incubating though but if you do take the eggs then start feeding small meals and work up to get the weight back on.

I recomend letting mama do it this time.
I let 2 or more of my females that surprised me w/eggs
self incubate their eggs and had all success.
I wish you the best of luck!

Also, what about handling my girl for the next 60 days? I assume that I should leave her alone except for cleaning and changing the water. Anything else special that i should do?

No handling of the female or cleaning the cage while she is on eggs (shouldn't need cleaning, she should not have eaten in a month or more). In fact, you should cover the cage and hardly ever even look at her. Ball pythons are very shy to start with and females on eggs are tightly wound. The nicest female will hiss and quite possibly try to bite when on eggs. I actually cut down to only checking mine once a week because she seemed stressed and kicked one of the eggs out. Keep interaction to a minimum.

One more thing, make sure flies can't get to the eggs (especially if there is a bad one in the group). If you don't already have a tight fitting screen lid see if you can't get some netting or cloth or something to make it fly proof. It only takes one to really mess things up.

...in addition to all these good suggestions, you'll probably need to balance not disturbing her with daily or every other day spraying the cage with warm water. Females do a great job of maintaining a microenvironment around the eggs so as long as you keep conditions near to optimum the female will do the rest. In my experience BP eggs are very forgiving of sub-optimum humidity.

...female BP's do not twitch like Burms or Indian pythons.

Ball pythons don't give 'birth.' They lay eggs. Boas give live birth. Just letting you know, cuz if you go around saying "My ball python gave birth!" you'll sound kinda silly.
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A twisted mind is a terrible thing to waste.......so is BEEF JERKY!!!!!

Sorry...I did mean lay eggs. Thanks for the heads up.

I want to thank all of you for your help and suggestions. Your help has been huge!!! I will try and keep you all posted on how well things are going. Any other suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks a TON!

I guess in addition to trying to keep the humidity up without stressing her out, I would recommend that you not give up if she doesn't. If the eggs (or what you can see of them on your infrequent peaks into the cage) start to look dry and shriveled, that may be perfectly fine. There is a bit of an urban legend about someone throwing out a clutch of shriveled burm eggs and the trash man finding them hatching at the curve. I don't know if that one is actually true but I could see it happening.

Another thing...currently she has the eggs under a reptile hut. Is this ok or should i take the hut out? I notice in most peoples pictures they arent in a hut or under anything. Also...if the hut is ok, will that help protect the eggs from drying out? I put moss in the cage as well.

They might not be good eggs.
it would be good to see if they are any good.

Is she even wrapping around them?