Reptile & Amphibian Forums

During cooling,,should i put the male with the female or intro him when warm up time starts????which will i get better results?,,ive heard lots of crap like after 3 weeks of cooling go ahead with the male and keep swapping him out the rest of the cool down time and warm up time too....pleez set me straight on this guys.............thanx in advance.

I have had very good success with exactly the crap you mentioned. I Start introducing them two to three weeks into cooling and keep switching them in and out until ovulation or until no breeding or interest is witnessed for an extended period.

George Knaack
GLK HERP

thanx,,sorry bout the frustration,,but this came from someone who messes with colubrids...when its my first time i want all the right info i can use..as ive never had the time to start this project till now.

1. pastel
.4 normals

n/p

There are many ways that ball pythons have been bred. I suspect the only hard and fast rule is that you have to put them together at some time. While not technically breeding, even absolutely needing a pair to put together for reproduction is questionable - pathogenesis has been confirmed in other snake species and suspected in several ball python cases. It’s probably too rare to count on though

I put them together during the period of nighttime cooling and periodically separate them for a few days and then re-introduce them for a week or two at a time. Python cooling is not nearly as extreme as colubrid brumation (heat during the day at least to keep immune systems going for these tropical snakes) so they are fairly active and you don’t need to wait until after cooling to breed.

Randy, can you point me to some documented cases of parthenogenisis in snakes (any species). It's fairly common in primitive organisms but I've not heard of it in snakes. I'd love to read up on it and see what my Zoology professor has to say about it. Thanks, Dave

This is a suspected parthenogentic mother T. albolabris with her offsrping not seen in the picture. This is owned by Rob Charmicheal. Cases with snakes are rather interesting because unlike lizards, the babaies are not clones of the mother and a parthenogenic birth often results in one MALE baby. This is because the way snakes chormosomes line up (females ZW and males ZZ) and when they divide a single W chromosome cannot survive making is almost impossible for female baby. Can get into this topic more if you like. It is very hard to find cases and studies on parthenogenesis on higher vertibrates like snakes but it has been increasingly found.

http://www.albinoburmese.com/parthenogenesis.pdf

Too bad that it's practically impossible to do breeding experiments because Burmese pythons get so big, take so long to grow up, and are so hard to breed (sarcasm based on a statement in that article).

I bet it has more to do with the convergence of Zoo and European politics.

Maybe we’ll find it in ball pythons soon. The last person I heard from who had a long term isolated female lay eggs couldn’t get help incubating them because all the experts where just so sure they couldn’t be fertile that they didn’t want to bother checking.