Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have herd of lots of people having a hard time incubating there ball python eggs, so why not just let the female do it for you? dont they know best ?

Most people like to have the control themselves rather than leaving it up to the female. I've only tried maternal incubation once but suppose that depending on how stable the humidity and temp are in your cage it might not meet the mother's basic requirements. I'm not sure how much the mother can do to change the temp and humidity. I suspect that she can do some environmental manipulation but in the worst case your cage might be too far away from optimal for her to compensate. In the wild she would have a much larger choice of places to nest and of course it would be in a regional environment where ball pythons have successfully reproduced on their own for a very long time.

If you can provide an appropriate environment for the female to incubate her eggs, then the next question is which is best for the mother and the babies. Conventional wisdom is that the extra 8 weeks or so that maternal incubating females fast is an unnecessary stress and results in lower weight going into the next breeding season. This is probably accurate but it would be interesting if someone would actually study it to be sure. I've seen females put on weight remarkably quickly when they feel like eating well so if females that had just finished maternal incubation tend to felt like eating better I think they could possibly catch up. It would also be interesting to study if there are any differences between hatch rates and how the maternal incubated babies do.