Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Pretty quiet around here today so I thought I'd post a question I've been curious about.
I've seen classifieds and posts where people only want virgin females or won't breed a 'proven' female to a valuable male. Now I know that they can retain sperm for quite a while but has anyone actually had a case where a female produced offspring that were clearly sired the previous season?

Maybe you bought an adult female normal bred it to your Butter and produced Pastels? Or better yet...vice-versa.

John

John,

In 2008 I produced a mojave and three pastels from a pastel bred to a normal. The year before I had bred the same normal to a mojave and produced several mojaves in that clutch, but it had been over a year since this normal female had been with a mojave. The only thing I could figure was that the normal femal had retained the sperm from the mojave the year before.

I hope you're having a great season.
-----
Brian Gundy

www.for-goodness-snakes.com

That's really interesting...so you've experienced exactly the scenario I was thinking.
I must say that I'm surprised. My thinking was that it might happen if she wasn't bred to another male. The only sperm present would be from the previous years mating and that a new mating would somehow cancel out the old. But I guess I'm thinking in mammalian terms where things are pretty much now or never.
Very cool. Thanks for the reply and have a great season!

John

Back when I bought my first het ghost male the guy I got her from had a ghost female that he was really bummed to only produce ghosts bred to a pastel male. At that time pastels where more expensive than ghosts and pastel het ghost where really what he was after but he just got ghosts again from the previous year's breeding.

This is actually very common with ball pythons! As well as multiple males sireing a single clutch I've seen where as many as 3 males sire a single clutch

I had that happen. I had a normal girl which I bred a Pin to and she did not go for me that year. I sold the female to a friend who did not breed her the year I sold her to him. The following year he bred that girl to a Pastel an produced Pastels and one Pinstripe. At the time he did not own any Pinstripes to breed to that girl. Now that is two full years of sperm retention.
Just something to think about when breeding a female to a co-dom one year and then to a Recessive the following year.

I read up a couple years back and found that paternity tests had been developed for most all farm and domestic animals and even some fish. IMHO between sperm retention and parthenogenesis we could really use a snake paternity test. Ideally could be cheap insurance for both buyer and seller.

Randy mentioned it, but has anybody here seriously considered that they might have experienced parthenogenesis with their ball pythons, or any snake for that matter?

-Joan

So let's say you breed a Male Spider to a Female Pinstripe. Then the next year you breed a Male Pastel to the same female pinstripe. Is it possible to get a spinner blast? If so I'm sure very rare because sperm from each animal would both have to fertilize the same egg and even if that happened your chances would be small. But it would be awesome if anything like that ever happened. On the other hand if it did you just blew any chance you'd ever have at hitting the lottery.

Not possible. Best case, you would get pastels, lemon blasts, pinstripes, normals, and if any sperm was retained you might get a spider, but the two fathers' sperm will never cross. Even if you put two males with the same female in the SAME year, you will be lucky if both father the clutch, but their sperm will never impregnate the same egg. You will either get spiders OR pastel/lemonblast/pinstripe/or normals.