Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This girl laid yesterday morning. We came in to find her sitting on a pile of 42 perfect pearly whites. She is a Tiger het Titanium bred to a Tiger het Titanium. This girl, as with all of the other Tiger het Titaniums and het Titaniums, did us proud with a big, good clutch. Now comes the wait!! Thanks for looking.

Patrick Powers
Manager of Prehistoric Pets

A big congrats!! I asked in an earlier post and I'm not sure if you saw it or not, but are you guys planning on being at Tinley?

nope not gonna be there. they are to good for tinley lol i was hoping they were also but not gonna be

I didn't see it before, but I'm not 100% sure if we are doing Tinley. We did it about 2 years ago, and then there have been talks about doing it again this year. I don't think that Jay has made up his mind completely, but there's a reasonable chance.

Patrick Powers
Manager of Prehistoric Pets

Congrats Pat!

Man I wish I could take retics off eggs almost year round! haha.
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Ben R.
www.benrenick.com

LOL!! Just wait, you'll get to it. The thing you're going to have to worry about is taking baby anacondas from mom!!

Patrick Powers
Manager of Prehistoric Pets

I realize you were probably kidding, but it got me thinking about my previous experiences with birthing in green anacondas. In my previous 25 - 30 years with gravid python species, all have been extremely defensive of their clutches. However, Jud McClanahan and I have produced 3 litters of green anacondas from two different females, and they never once showed any type of defensive behavior when I removed the young from in and around the mothers coils. It didn't really ever hit me that significantly until you made that comment in your last post. Interesting stuff.

Kelly

That is pretty interesting. I don't have any experience with Anacondas, but with boas in general. In my experience with boas, they basically want to thrash anything and everything that is not a boa in the enclosure. The only time that I was ok and didn't have issues with a defensive mother was the first time my own boa dropped a litter. I was able to get her just as she finished and was still in sort of a trance, so she didn't really move at all. But by the time I had removed the babies and cleaned the enclosure, she snapped out of it and was ready to thrash me. Do you know if the females had JUST finished when you removed the babies or if they had finished earlier? Although, I suppose it could be just from the animals because we do have some REALLY nasty females and then we have some puppy-dog tame ones, too. Anyway, something cool.

Patrick Powers
Manager of Prehistoric Pets

Actually they had each been done with the birthing process for a few hours before the young were removed. There is obviously a pretty big cage mess to clean up afterwards, and I have never run into any issues when removing them for cleaning. Both females are extremely docile, and I am sure that has something to do with it. Thanks,

Kelly

I've helped friends out with a few boa clutches and ALL of the females have gone berserk, same deal with pythons. Could it possibly be that the female Anaconda's have a rougher birth and are simply to tired to go crazy? They do have large clutches of large babies.

With our green anacondas, I would place the main reason for their calm behavior after the birth of the young on the extremely docile temperament of these particular female greens. They were raised from neonates to adult size without ever showing any sign of aggression and can be freely handled. These females have acted normally and never appeared exhausted after giving birth. Litter sizes are averaging in the 25 to 30 range with the young being 28 to 30 inches at birth. It is possible that greens do not inherently posses the defensive nature over their young that most other boids express. The problem is that true captive bred and born young are extremely rare and the very small number of these litters in captivity doesn’t allow for any type of representative sample size to make an accurate judgment on this type of species behavior. I currently have another different female green that is due to give birth to her first litter in a couple of months, and it will be interesting to see if she shows this same docile behavior with her young.

Kelly

I would say that it has a lot to go with how they are raised. Since you have raised them from birth and handled them frequently, that would most likely greatly affect their post-birthing behavior. It seems that the females that give us the least problems as far as the retics go are the ones that are easy to handle in general and the normally aggressive females are the ones that try to kill us to keep us from getting to the eggs. I just find that my female Colombian, even though she is nice normally, is a bit temperamental after birth. It's an interesting topic.

Patrick Powers
Manager of Prehistoric Pets

I would attribute these greens calm temperament more to their genetic background than to handling. They have actually not been handled all that frequently throughout their lives, but have always remained calm when they have. As we all know, many boid species are aggressive at birth or hatching, but inherently calm individuals will even out fairly quickly. I have produced numerous boid species over the many years and have noticed that parents with even temperaments, regardless of species, will virtually always produce offspring with even temperaments. And the converse, aggressive parents will usually produce aggressive offspring. Species specific behavior and amount of handling will definitely make a difference, but I believe the greatest factor of all is the genetically inherited temperament of the parents, regardless of species.

Kelly