>Thx for your reply to my message below I just read it . Im curious though you said that there is a possibility of bad sperm from long term males, I had never heard of this (besides the normal percentage of males with bad sperm).
By LTC do you mean CB LTC or WC LTC or both.
>Can you give me some links to info on this, Ive never heard of it and would like to read up on it.
By long term captives, I mean both CB and WC. And that should have been "improperly cycled or uncycled long term captives". And, IMHO, improperly cycled or uncycled long term captives are a large percentage of that "normal percentage of males with bad sperm".
Years ago I had this problem with a male bullsnake that I picked up on the road as a neonate and raised up. He had to go through two winter brumations before he was fertile. A friend had a similar problem with a northern pine and a black pine snake. History was unknown to me, but there was a good chance both were WC as adults.
Try searching for something like "heat induced temporary sterility". I've seen it in mice and heard that it can happen in humans. The problem with it in snakes is that many temperate species don't produce sperm all year round. They only produce sperm in the summer when food is plentiful and use it in the fall or spring breeding season. And environmental factors trigger sperm production. So when the sperm on hand die off from heat or old age or something, the snake will be shooting blanks until environmental conditions trigger sperm production again. IMHO, brumation is one of the environmental conditions that trigger sperm production. But not the only condition -- photoperiod also seems to be a trigger in the breeding process in corn snakes, too.
In 1970, Henry Fitch had a paper, Reproductive Cycles in Lizards and Snakes, in one of the publications of the University of Kansas Museum of Zoology. The Occassional Papers or Miscellaneous Papers or something like that. That would be a good place to look, too.
Paul Hollander
. Im curious though you said that there is a possibility of bad sperm from long term males, I had never heard of this (besides the normal percentage of males with bad sperm). 