I am pretty sure in the wild, female snakes are bred by more than one male. Some species have techniques to make it more difficult for other males to get the job done, from aggressive sperm, sperm plugs, staying 'locked' for extended periods of time to ensure their sperm fertilizes any available eggs etc. Boas mate many times, so plenty of time for a male to mate with a female and move on, for other males to come and try their chances. This does give the female the opportunity to store alot of sperm, all of various health etc and give her a higher chance of all her eggs being fertilized.
On the breeders side, using more than one male per female just makes it impossible to accurately determine who's the 'daddy' of the offspring without genetic testing. Since most breeders don't have the time or money to do DNA comparisons for each baby they produce, its not practical to use multiple males.
I know many ball python breeders seem to like to toss in as many different males in with a female as they have available...this does cloud the genetics..but most use co-dom and dominant morphs. As only one male can be the daddy of any given baby, it gives a greater variety of potential morphs in the litter.
Codom and dominant morphs in ball pythons (I think the trait terms are actually mixed up in ball pythons...but I am no genetic expert) when bred to a normal have a 50% chance to produce visual morphs. So using different types of codom and dominant morph males with a normal female...you get a chance to have different types of these co-dom/dominant morphs in a single clutch.
Personally I think this is a silly way of doing it...as ball pythons have such small clutches sizes (average maybe 4-5 eggs) and rarely double clutch...why reduce the odds of getting multiples of a single morph type by mixing in several types...when you can just get a couple more females and match them up with individual males and have a greater chance to produce multiple babies of a given morph.
Using multiple males of dominate and co-dominate morphs in species of snake that produces larger clutch sizes would make more sense to me. If the average clutch size is 20 eggs, greater chance to get multiples of the morph of each father used, as well as normals etc.
Using recessive morphs, even visual morph males to normal or het females...would make it even harder to figure out who the father really was in a multiple male pairings. It may speed things up if you are trying to combine different recessive traits into future generations..but it would be a hit and miss in combining the offspring to get the final result. Unless of course all males used were of the same morph (ie 2 or more albino males for example) It may work to help mix up the gene pool. However, again, it would work just as well using different females with a single unrelated male of the recessive morph. Or having unrelated pairs completely...then mixing their offspring up, as you will have unrelated offspring as well, between the two clutches. Would be far easier to track the genetic lines etc.
So, on a breeding perspective, using multiple males really isn't useful. Not if the breeder wants to keep clear genetic paths in the offspring.
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PHLdyPayne
Forum Princess
