Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am confused about the right weight and age for breeding. In the classifieds I've seen some people (idiots) selling 03 BP's and saying "with the right feeding schedule have this one ready to breed this year". Come on, you can't breed a 03 this year. Here is where my delema comes in. From my understanding a female JCP should be 1500-2000g and a male around 1500g. Well My bigest 02 female is 5ft 850 grams now and should be getting close to 1500 by early next year. So I think she would be heavy enough. I know it would be like breeding a baby, but don't you think all of the people racing to make money with BP morphs are stuffing there snakes and breeding them as quick as they can. Hell I'd like to stuff mine if they would eat. What are the complications health wise of early breeding. I'm not in it for the money just the excitement of little baby snakes. I would like to ask: What was your smallest and youngest snakes to successfully breed??

I am just starting to work with Carpets so I cant give you specifics on them....Buuuut I have worked with corns and have had some accidental breedings in the second year that I wasnt too happy about. That being said it is not something that I would recommend. I would say that it could probably range anywhere from 2-3 years would be long enough provided they where of adequate size. I dont think personally I will mine until age three, or unless I am sure they are nice big, and healthy. I dont really want to have small snakes with small clutches, I want big females, with big healthy clutches. I have no doubt that some could be breedable by age two, but I am not sure if I would jump on it that fast. Just my opinion.
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"Victory is reserved for those willing to pay its price"

I think two years is the absolute youngest age at which I would breed snakes.
I can't tell exactly what Problems you can get by powering your snake or by feeding them to much, but as far as I've heard snakes that are fed that heavy, tend to get Liverproblems (Fatliver) and other health problems.
Since the end of '96 I keep two JCPs (CB '95) those two are beautyful snakes and they've never had any health problems (fingers crossed).
Maybe one reason for this is, because I didn't try to get them to an breeding ready size/weight too early. In contrary, I fed them less and it worked fine.
I never bred those two because of different reasons, this fall I will try to breed them the first time.
Maybe its very late, but I hope they will not get any problems through this.

I think its better to give them the time to grow up and then breed them. You can't compensate time with anything.

Regards, Sinael

One thing you have to realize is that there is a big difference between breeding males early and breeding females early. If powerfed, an '03 male ball could possibly be large enough to reproduce this winter. It also doesn't hurt males to breed them early. If you breed a male too early, the only possible bad thing that might come of it is infertile eggs.

Breeding females, however, takes a lot more out of them energy-wise than males. Thus, a lot more can go wrong--with the worst possibility being her death--if you breed a female too early. If you do breed a female early, and she does manage to survive and lay eggs, she might have a very small clutch. Also, her entire breeding career can be compromised by her immature breeding--resulting in low output of fertile eggs for her entire life.

I would recommend waiting until your female is 1500-2000g. You might even want to wait until your female is 1500g, and then wait an additional year if she's particularly nice and valuable. As for males, I don't think it's ever too early to try. One of my males is just a little over 400g right now. If I can get him up to about 800g by this fall, I'm going to give him a shot.

Jake

But yes, you can breed 6-month old BP males. Easily. Done all the time. Here's my 6 month old Pastel breeding a female just this spring. He bred 6 females this year, and 4 will have eggs.

And that leads to this:

www.jefffavelle.com