Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This gal produced a litter of 10 last year for me. I gave her this year off. But she's acting and looking a lot like she is gravid. Her appetite isn't what it normally is. Normally, if she hadn't been fed in two weeks, you could walk by her cage without her stiking the glass. She doesn't even seem to get excited when I bring rodents into the snake room which would normally get her feeding response aroused. She is eating just not as aggressively. Also, she's looking a little thicker than normal, sometimes laying a little on her side and just doing things that a gravid animal would do.

She has not been with a male since last year in May. Have you ever had an animal ovulate a year after producing even though she wasn't bred the second year?

Mark

THAT IS ONE FINE PERUVIAN!

My first thought is perhaps she had some retained sperm from last year's breeding? A more remote possibility to me is that she may have performed parthenogenesis. I subscribe to a weekly online publication about reptiles and amphibs and they had an article about a female burmese who apparently is parthenogenetic. I've also heard of parthenogenesis in a rattlesnake. For reference, I have pasted the mentioned article below.

1b) Meet The World’s First Self Cloning Python: Popular Science, June 2003
A sleepy Burmese snake named Mary at the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam has become the first known python to clone itself. Reptile curator Eugene Bruins announced this spring that nearly 40 percent of Mary's unhatched eggs harbor tiny embryonic replicas. Several snake species are known to reproduce without sperm, a process known as parthenogenesis, though the phenomenon has never been documented in pythons. Stranger still, the embryos are all female, a first for parthenogenic snakes, whose chromosome setup typically produces males only. The Artis Zoo plans to hatch the eggs to see if they inherited Mary's cloning powers. Meanwhile, Mary is being kept far from any male: A single conjugal visit and "the whole special thing would stop at once," Bruins warns
For more information contact Artis Biologist Eugene Bruins at bruins@artis.nl
Photo available.

...I think Jeff Ronne had this happen once. What say there, Jeff?