Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey guys:
I have a pair of unrelated 2002s. I hadn't planned on putting them together until next year (didn't brumate) but don't heat the species and I think the general cooling in their room has caused the female to ovulate. She seems almost gravid so I have considered putting the male with her to beed against my better judgement. She's over four feet long but narrow, compared to an adult breeder corn. Would infertile eggs be any harder on her body than breeding her now? Thanks for any input.
Chip Bridges

if they were my pair. In fact, I have some '01 black milks that are between 4-5' in length that I am giving another year. Gaigae eggs are huge, and I've heard from one breeder who says that you're likely to get an eggbound female if you breed them before 30 months of age. I would risk her having slugs vs. having her eggbound, IMO.

Not quite as big as yours, but they are rapidly approaching the 4' mark... I'm going to wait until at least next year to breed them, maybe the year after. The female should be well over 5' long and have plenty of girth before breeding is attempted. Who wants to spend 2-3 years raising their little tricolored hatchling up to a 4-5 foot black giant, just to lose the female on the first breeding attempt? Not worth it in my opinion!

Nate

The following is an excerpt taken from Bob Applegate's site. For the entire article, see...

http://www.applegatereptiles.com/articles/methodology.htm

"Using your data base of weights and your past experience, you can decide if your adult female or your two year old female is large enough to breed, or if you might be better advised to defer breeding until the following year. I have had some female colubrids that were low in weight, so I kept them warm and feeding over their second winter. They developed follicles anyway, so I assumed that if they could develop follicles, they were in fact large enough to breed. I quickly introduced a male to each, which promptly copulated with its respective mate. Good sperm counts, wrong assumption. all three in this example laid infertile eggs and died of complications soon after. This was a costly, but valuable lesson. I will defer breeding future underweight females until the following year, even if they develop follicles."

Not quite the same problem, but it does suggest that breeding younger female will be more likely to present such problems.