Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've been seeing a lot of ads for Gravid female ball pythons. They are WC and appearently were just recently shipped in.

Has anyone ever tried this route, buying the female and incubating the eggs? How did it go?

It seems like the shipping, twice or more, would stress the females and make this a pretty big crap shoot.

Please share your experience, Thanks!

Yeah, you're right. It is a pretty big crap shoot. I got a bunch of bad eggs and a few good that went bad almost full term. That could have been my fault because my incubator messed up but out of 3 gravids I only had 3 or 4 good eggs to start with. You never know though. They are also pretty hard to acclimate afterwards. It takes a lot of effort. Personally, I don't ever plan on doing it again. That's just my opinion and my experience with them, but if you do decide to do it just let me know and I can help you out with the acclimation after she lays.

Great reply, that's the info I was looking for. Given your experience, I'm definitely going to steer clear. Thanks for saving me from a bunch of stress and heart ache.

That's probably your best bet. Something else I forgot to mention was that even though I got mine from a guy who sells a lot of WC's and claims they are free of parasites, there were many easily visible ticks that I had to remove. Everything else was fine and I guess ticks aren't a huge deal but it's definately something you don't want to bring into a collection. I've also found that nice captive bred animals eat and grow so much better.

i purchased 6 wc gravid females in feb. or '07.
i ended up with 72 babies, only one of the bunch was deformed.
i think it really depends on how you plan to take care of the eggs once they pop out.
purchased them from a regular importer in my home state, and they were pest free.
i did however have issues with getting the females to eat after removing the eggs. i ended up giving them to a local long term breeder that was able to get them to eat.