Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi Everyone,
I am looking for some peoples opinions into the value of albino ball pythons. I am trying to figure out if they are a snake that will loose alot of their value in the next 6-7 years? I would also like to know what people think their value will be at in the next 6-7 years? I am asking these questions for two reasons--
First the price of 100% hets is very variable I have seen guarateed pairs for $600. to $1200. but the albinos seem to be less competitve.
Second I am trying to figure out if it is a project that is to late to get in on starting with '03 babies. I remember the albino burmese craze and the sudden crash after mine were breeding age(of course). Please let me know what you guys think out there.
Thanks!

I dont know about 6-7 years. It should only take about 2-3 years for a pair to be mature enough to breed. I dont think albino ball pythons will reach below 1k in the near future. Look at albino boas they are still up there and produce more babies. You cant go wrong with the albino market. MHO you should buy a albino and breed it to as many het females as possible and get a het male for backup. Hope this helps

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There is a higher demand for Balls, due to their small size, so theoretically, there will be a lot more people breeding them.

While some consider this to mean there will be a consistently higher demand for the babies (proportionally) and that is not entirely true!

How many people in the past have purchased baby Burmese not knowing how large they get? How many people can afford an albino Ball compared to an albino burm? The demand for $200 snake is a lot higher than for a $2500 snake.

Also, a lot of people think that the Burmese market crashed because of the large number of eggs they lay and that the Ball market won't do this. But they don't think about how many people have the facilities that can breed giant snakes like the Burmese? This limits the number of Burmese breedings out there. This limit is not put on the Balls, to the same extent, due to their small size. There are a lot more Ball Python Breeders than Burmese breeders! How hard would it be to keep 10 breeder size Burmese compared to 10 breeder size balls? How many people can keep 10 breeder balls (almost anyone) and how many people can keep 10 breeder burmese (very few). (I personally keep 20 balls and about 200 colubrids in one room, and I would never own a Burmese again due to the problems of it's strength, breaking out of it's cage, relative danger due to it's strength, etc.) I plan on breeding a lot of balls, and I never even wanted to try to breed my Burmese.

Consider this, any animal breeding is a geometric progression, not linear. When you consider that Burmese breed at a faster rate (more eggs per clutch thus a more quickly increasing geometric progression) than balls, but they also have a limitation as to how many people can breed them (due to their size) that balls really don't have, thus they are far more similar than most people portray.

How many eggs will be produced, per average breeder, is a more accurate way of looking at the market, than how many eggs will be produced per snake! Eventually, the market prices will catch up with the production so that crashing Ball prices and crashing Burmese prices will be very similar. It's just a matter of when!

Rodney

In my opinion, they will drop in price quite a bit because so many people are now trying to breed them. (I have 2.2 albinos and 14 50% het females that I just bought this year, and know of many colubrid breeders that are getting out of colubrids and into ball morphs because they think it is a better market). Due to their very fast growth rates, they can be bred very young. Mine are currently breeding (Male at 1000 gms. and females around 1500 to 1900 gms.) and I bought them as 200-300 gm. babies in March-May this year!

That being said, I got into albinos instead of pieds/spiders/ghosts etc. because I believe they will drop in price less than those other morphs.

I personally don't like pieds very much. I know a lot of people are ga-ga over them, but they don't do it for me. If they were the same price, I'd take an albino over a pied. Since pieds cost so much more than albinos, it's a no-brainer for me. (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I like bright shiny objects-LOL----Many adult Pieds I have seen don't look nearly as nice as young ones, and I prefer a pattern/high contrast, bright yellows over white/patternless) Spiders/pastels are co-dominant so you can produce a lot more of them per breeding than albinos. Thus, they should flood the market sooner than simple recessive traits like albinism. I say should, because they will be sought after by breeders to produce things like bumblebees, pastel spiders, orange ghost spiders, etc. and it isn't a market that is generally "open" to the public--making it hard to predict. Will certain breeders get tired of raising them? How many will get tired? Will breeders get burned out on all the new morphs? Will newer morphs crush the prices of older morphs? Will certain morphs create such a rage that everyone wants one, and then that morph will be over produced and plummet in price, bringing the other morph prices down with it? Will anti-reptile laws force breeders to sell their stock or move? Will those breeder then decide to move or sell?

Then you have to consider the economy, etc. Most people don't spend $2500 on a snake unless they are in this business, or have a lot of expendable income. If the economy is bad, so there is little expendable income, selling $2500 snakes will be very difficult. Fortunately, the Bush tax cuts have caused an enormous surge in the economy, so that shouldn't be a problem in the near future. There is also a higher demand for a $1500 albino than a $2500 albino (since so many more people can afford them), so a lot more will be sold when they reach that price. And the same can be said as the price goes even lower. There are really way to many variables to give an accurate answer. But if you bought them now, you should be somewhere into your second to fourth generation of breeding them in 7 years so you should be able to easily make your money back well before then. If you bought 2 albinos for $5K today, and you produced 20 albino babies within the next 7 years (a very reasonable figure for 7 years, you should actually produce more of them by then), do you think you would have trouble selling them for $250 each in order to recover your initial cost? And consider the first ones you sell should be sellable by 2005. If you produce just 3 that year and sell them for $1000 each, you now have 5 more years of production to recover just $2000 of your initial cost.

Rodney

Isnt it supposed to be a bad idea to breed B/Ps at such a young age as 9 mths?Wouldnt there be some serious problems with the animal itself such as getting egg bound,infertile eggs,slugs,etc.Oh and about the whole feeding thing,to me feeding once a week as a baby up until about a foot or so is enough after that go on a stricter diet of every 7-10 days so they can grow naturally.Faster growth IMO means faster death to your snake.Trying to get a snake to breeding size in such a short time is in itself ludicrous,being old enough should be the factor not the size.Is the breeding of B/Ps or any other animal for that matter more important than the safety risk of possibly hurting it in the long/short run?Why are people so hellbent on trying to breed so soon instead of waiting at least 1.5 years or more?The market isnt going anywhere that soon so why the rush?The imporatnce of the next morph doesnt significantly hold water,the safety of the animal does.I say save an animal an run over a human,save god the trouble.Regards Bill McLeod

As posted in more detail above, I am not at all sure that it is bad to breed them early. If they are too young, will they produce eggs? If they don't, is that still a bad thing?

I have heard this theory about breeding age said a lot, but I don't know that it is true.

I have heard a lot of things that aren't true, and hearing them over and over does not make them true.

If I knew it was true, I wouldn't do it. But at this point, I really think it is far more rumor than fact.

For instance, it is possible that a constant growth of feeding more often may give better digestion, and thus, fat reserves. Maybe better calcium retention. Maybe breeding earlier depletes fat stores on a yearly basis so there isn't as long a period in the snakes life with a high body fat content and that may actually make a snake live longer. Who knows? Snakes tend to grow their entire lives, and while animals that tend to reach a certain size at maturity (like mammals) may apply to this age/breeding logic, do snakes?

Since I don't know what is really true, and since there have been no studies that I know of to prove this, isn't acting on the assumption that breeding later is better just as wrong as breeding them earlier and assuming that later is better?

Again, I don't know either way, and I hope I don't find out the hard way--for my sake and the animals.

Also, the animals were purchased in about March and were then at about 300 gms. So if they fed the entire winter, they were about 2-3 months old when I received them. If they went off feed like many do, they are probably more like 6-7 months old when I got them.

Rodney

Be cautious when buying hets, whether they are full price or "bargain basement." Many are not hets, just someone trying to scam you.

Good luck, Christy