This litter has been many years in the making, and our perseverance and patience provided a beautiful result today.
Produced by Jason Gonzales in 2010, we acquired this female as a Hypo RLT 50% possible het-Albino (Jason outbred a Heather Martin-produced 2007 male RLT 66% het-Albino to a DH-Sunglow female, and got a litter of 10 with no white babies, one of which was this female; we also acquired the father of that litter, and through additional breedings later demonstrated him to NOT be het-Albino to within a statistical certainty of 99.87%, or 13 in 10,000 – more on that to come in a future post).
We slowly and patiently raised her past three and a half years old, and bred her for the first time this season to the best male Groovy Coral Albino RLT from our July 2011 litter (the result of outcrossing a male RLT het-Albino to one of our female Groovy Coral het-Albinos). It is hard to imagine how it could have gone any better.
Back on my birthday, Feb. 18, she gave me a post-ovulation shed as a gift – my favorite present this year! She looked perfect, acted perfect, and followed all the rules all the way along, including delivering a near-perfect litter this morning, June 3rd, between 8 and noon right on day POS+105, AND proving out het-Albino!
I believe these are the first Sunglow Roswells (supers), and the first Hypo (DH Sunglow) Roswells ever produced (please feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this). There are also an Albino Roswell, Sunglow Roswell-Laddertail “RLTs”, DH Sunglow RLTs, Albino RLTs, RLTs het-Albino, DH-Sunglows, a Sunglow, and a het-albino – AND they are ALL possible/likely Groovy Corals! I think the only combos we didn’t get in the mix were Roswell het-Albino and regular albino. The downside was quite minimal, consisting of two DOA female Sunglow Roswells (died very late pre-birth, loaded with yolk), one dead-in-sac male DH-Sunglow RLT (don’t know what happened with this guy – no obvious problems), and one slug.
Some of these babies have obvious yolk bulges, but they are mostly in the normal-ish range and far from the largest I have seen. I don’t anticipate having any trouble pulling them all through. We have actually had very good survival rates the last few years for our baby boas with even very large yolk-bellies. We keep them all together so that they can all ball up together and collectively retain heat and moderate temperature fluctuations better. We keep them moist via 2X daily misting, such that the paper-towel substrate is slightly moist but not wet (we also lightly mist the babies directly along with the paper towels and tub walls). Finally, we keep them hot – surface temperatures of the boa ball measured with an IR temp gun register 92 – 94 F. We keep them like this at least until their first shed, or longer if they still have more yolk to digest. I will post an update after their first sheds with some post-shed pics and info on how they are all doing.
With that, I will let the photos speak for themselves. Thanks for looking!
Steve Reiners
www.BoaMorph.com
Oh, and here’s the father of this litter – the Groovy Coral Albino RLT Ferrari!
At 4 months old:
At 10 months old:
Need to get some current photos of this boy!
