Sorry I could not respond to anyone but I was walking out the door last Friday morning on vacation and just got back last night. I had the car loaded, kids shoes on etc. and just thought I would check the snake room to make sure I did not do something careless like leave a cage door open and that is when I saw her delivering. Needless to say, my vacation was delayed a few hours to set up the babies. I did manage to snap some quick photos Friday.
I wanted to share some things that may be of interest but first of all let me qualify this by saying I do not stress out about being very scientific about breeding and do not keep detailed records & data. This is a leisure hobby that I do to de-stress from my job where I do have to be very scientific.
This birth resulted from the female seeing virtually no cooling other than the few degrees that happens in the whole snake room in the winter. She is at chest level in the room and the nighttime ambients may have poked into the high 70’s on the coldest nights but I do not think her core temperature was ever below 80. The two males are down at knee level and must have heat pads but if I recall, I shut off the pads for a couple weeks just prior to introducing them into the female’s cage. I would suspect their core temps were in the mid-high 70’s for this short time period. I have had respiratory problems lowering temps as low and long as most books, websites and people have stated and since I have had success and failure both ways, I choose to have live adults when everything is said and done.
This girl had no thermo-regulation ability during her gestation and actually, had none for her entire life. She has always been kept at chest level or above with no heat sources other than room ambient. For her gestation, I did not even move the oil filled electric heaters on the floor over near her cage to give her a warmer corner. I just slow cooked her at an ambient of about 86.5-87 degrees F. She heat gunned at 87F during the few times I checked but I think if my gun is not accurate, it reads a degree or so high. There were 15 live babies, none with big bellies, no dead and 15 slugs. I usually get a half of litter whatever I do. Only once did I have a BCC give a full litter with no slugs.
I did not see an ovulation swell and did not record the shed date but I think she shed twice during this period. I started the breeding around March 1st. This girl was one of the original 2002 Cypress Creek’s from the Guyana to Guyana breeding and I bred her sisters and brothers starting in 2007 but did not try her until 2008. I screwed her up for various reasons and slugged her out in 2008 and in 2009 so I was very pleased to have her reproduce this year. Another reason I did not think she was ready is that she did not drink much water for several days before giving birth. I usually make sure the bowl is full of the distilled water I give them and watch for when they suck the whole thing down before giving birth. It did not happen this time and she had no problems.
In the past, the colorful BCC that I produced generally had saddles shapes that I did not favor and my super peaked ones tended to be too light or too dark for my liking. With this litter, I tried to produce the complete package (gold & pink body color, blood red tail color, contrast, and nice saddle shapes) and these look like they will have it all but time will tell. There are a few that look like the Mom when she was born.
