So, I have male 1 with female 1, and male 2 with female 2. These animals have all been in my collection for 4-7 years each.
Pair 1 has been together since the end of February (BCC). Pair 2 since last year (island BCI).
Female 1 has swelled like she swalled 2 baseballs, but she's been that way for weeks. Doesn't seem like I can get her over that hump!
Female 2 swelled and had a shed on 3/21 and hadn't eaten since last year. Weird thing is, the male 2 still tries to court her...? Well, today, male 2 was just sitting there like a bump on a log and male 1 wasn't doing much either. Time for a boa experiment!
I grabbed male 1 (BCC) and put him in with pair 2 (BCI) to see what would happen.
ps... this is gonna get looooong, grab a snack and a drink
So, female 2 is stretched across the cage with her lower half on top of the heat, still a bit swollen from mid body to her cloaca. Male 2 is coiled up on top of the heat a few inches away from her.
I put male 1 in the cage and he immediately goes to the back corner behind male 2 and just coils up like a scared puppy dog! WHAT THE HECK??!!
He stays there for a few minutes and then male 2 starts smelling around his territory and apparently doesn't like intruders! So he starts cornering male 1, barricade style into the corner. Male 1 doesn't like this too much and starts trying to get away. He starts heading out of the corner and comes across female 2. He touches her ONCE with his tongue and draws his head back into the corner with male 2.
They keep fighting for dominate position and it looks like male 2 is kickin butt! They both take an occasional "sniff" of female 2 and head back to the corner. About 10 minutes later after writhing all over each other, they both make a mad dash for the females head! Male 2 out-muscles male 1 to pin her head down. The whole time, she hasn't moved an inch. Her head didn't NEED to be pinned down, she wasn't going anywhere. Actually, she looks rather indifferent to the charade!
So while male 2 is pinning down female 2 and fending off male 1, he backs his tail into the corner they were fighting in, lifts his tails, and proceeds to spread urates and urine all over the corner.
Male 1 completely bails out of the corner and heads for drier ground in the middle of the cage. He is now behind the happy couple (pair 2) and moving like a saw scaled viper! QUICKLY! Only, he's doing all this in the run-off from male 2's urine! BLEH! I'm thinking this little boy's lost his mind! Actually, I'm thinking he's trying to get himself to smell like male 2 so he can mount the female (hey, I don't claim to be correct in my interpretations of boa behavior).
He keeps making advances on female 2 and keeps getting pushed back by male 2. After several minutes of writhing in male 2's urine, he slows down, and starts crawling backwards, tail first (like when they're looking for something to grab on to with their tail) and ends in the corner. He starts lifting his tail and unloads a little urate/urine mixture of his own. He's straining so hard, he everts a hemipenis AND drops a couple pieces of poop! Turnabout is fair play I suppose!
Male 1 proceeds to go back after female 2 and male 2 is still protecting her head like a basketball player who recovered a loose ball and is trying to avoid a "jump ball" call, but he's still not doing anything about the rest of her body, NO courting activity. Male 1 gets bumped back a few more times and is frantically pacing the cage.
At this point, I decided there was WAY too much urine in the cage and I had to clean it (I'm kinda OCD about that), so I grabbed male 1 and put him back with female 1 (who he hadn't been doing much with today).
I cleaned cage 2 and put them back together and the male is back to not caring a BIT!
Back to cage 1. Male 1 is pestering female 1 like a champ within seconds of reintroduction. They literally do 3 laps around the cage with him riding her trying to pin her head down and she's acting like a bucking bronco!! They finally settle into a corner and now their cloacas are RIGHT NEXT to each other. But I still got no action. Although, I have witnessed copulation twice before and remember, she looks like she swallowed 2 baseballs, but no shed!!
Hopefully that whole debacle will end up with SOME sort of progress in at least one of those pair. I don't know if female 2 is gravid or not because as I type, female 2 is crawling across the cage and Mr. Coma (male 2) is trying to get on top of her.
We'll see!
Hopefully, this little story will get those who haven't bred boas before to take a close look at boa behaviors to see what they can learn. 
jb
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Jonathan Brady
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