Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I want to see what kind of genetic melting pot my ball python has in him. I believe he is a normal ball. I purchased him last year from an individual in southern Missouri; the guy didn't know a lot about his past. He is a classroom animal. My plan is to teach genetics through breeding ball pythons. I just want to breed for hobby and educational purposes.

I would like to purchase a female this summer. I need some ideas for a reasonably priced morph.

Desperately seeking advice on how to enhance my thinking outside the box when teaching genetics.

Your best bet would be to forget about him and go another route. A female of any morph would take 2 years (if fed agressively) to reach maturity. If you purchase an adult female morph your going to spend ALOT of money. Even pastels (the least expensive morph) will go for $800-$1200 for a adult-subadult thats over 1500grams. If I were you I would search the petstores or classifieds and find yourself a 1500 gram female and get an 07 male morph. You'll save yourself money and chances are you'll be able to produce next breeding season. If you don't know how to sex them.....learn. Most petstores don't know how to sex them and you'll really be disappointed when you pair them up for breeding and find out you have 2 males!!! If you cant figure the sexing part out then cancel the petstores and just buy from a reputable breeder. Also If you want to see results your first breeding season buy dominate or co-dominate morphs like pastel, spider,or yellowbellies. These are some of the more affordable morphs. I don't know your experience level so some of my advice may seem basic, but best of luck.
Chris

Breed fancy rats instead. Ball pythons are going to be difficult to incorporate into a classroom sort of setting - their generation gap is about 3 years, and it takes the entire year to feed, cycle, breed, get eggs, and then the eggs hatch. Your students might never even see the babies.

Find a local rat breeder, and pick up a blue rex rat, and a black standard coated rat that carries blue. Blue is a recessive trait, and rex is a codom trait. Breed the two together, and you'll get babies that'll display both traits (hopefully). Since rat color genetics have more than a few dimensions to them you can get more in depth with the variations. You can raise up the babies you get from the breeder in about 2-3 months (then they'll be large enough to breed and have a nice big litter), then you have a 3 week gestation, and then babies that'll be weaned at 5 weeks.

Any babies the students don't want to adopt can be snake food.

~jenny
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"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."
- Anna Sewell (1820-1878)

I 1,000,000% agree if you want to play with genetics, get some rats/mice. In a 6 month project depending on how old your rats/mice you begin with you can easily hit F3 maybe F2 if you have to grow out the P1.

There's alot of fun messing with rats/mice, only bad side is that they need constant cleaning (every 3-5 days) or your classroom will get known as the stank room

You can stretch it out to weekly if you don't crowd the rodents much and use a better quality bedding - my allergies make me use Carefresh Ultra and during the semester when I was crazy busy I was able to stretch cleanings to every 10 days without it being too bad. That's with 4 or fewer rats per cage, though.
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"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."
- Anna Sewell (1820-1878)