Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Okay, see the post below if you need more info. My female is Big, weight is not a problem. What do I do when introducing them to avoid yesterday's problem? I really don't want to have to pry them apart again. Thanks.

--Doug

I guess the first thing you need to do is make sure your female is well fed maybe throw another mouse into your feeding schedule. You mentioned 2 a week so try and make it 3 a week. This will facilitate a shed and make the female less appealing to your male (hopefully). Also try introducing a shed skin of the male and vice versa with the females shed. If he is more aggressive towards breeding then he can make the right moves to signal to your female he isnt just there for food lol. Try putting the female in the males cage as well this can take away some of her comfort and feeding response. In her own element she will be more secure but in another she will be confused possibly. I usually end up putting my females in with my males instead of the other way around.

Keith
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Putting the female in with the male works! Done it last year! Feeding the female as much as she will eat (at least for a few weeks) also helps. If all else fails there is only ONE solution:
You need a bigger male. You did say your female was 40% heavier right? In many (but not all) cases the female considers a smaller male a food item, even if she's in the mood!
Here's one of my rare examples: Last year I WAS able to breed my 3 foot male Cal King to my 4 foot FEMALE Cal King! The only way I pulled this off was to feed my female every 2 days for about two weeks!!! Then, finally her aggressiveness wore off! (She's so aggressive that she fears nothing and will take a mouse from your hands even after taking her out of her cage!)
But with that one exception I just mentioned, ALL of my other male snakes are bigger than the females (in all of my pairs).
I BELIEVE in having larger males than females - it makes breeding a less nervous experience, LOL!

Zee

Thanks to you both. It's a bit unnerving to deal with the aggressive female. I love that snake, though. Beautiful animal (IMHO). I'll get her eating more as of tonight. As far as the male... I'll see. He will sometimes go off food for a couple of weeks. He just does not seem to be able to get the size that the female has.
One more quick question. How long after a feeding before I can put them together?

Thanks again. Doug

(How long after feeding can you put them together?)

I would wait AT LEAST a few hours (providing the snake is FULL), but it's much better to wait until the next day, to insure the feeding response has dwindled (right after feeding, up to a few hours thereafter) most snakes think that the very next item put in their cage is another food item and will attack first and ask questions later).

I remember an incident (many years ago) where I placed a male and female Kingsnake in my mother-in-laws front yard side by side. The snakes where both wild caught in different locations two days earlier. As soon as I placed them on the grass, the male started following the female as she tried to crawl away. The male then proceeded to copulate right in front of me in the front yard on the lawn! I crawled away a few feet and sat down and observed and they stayed in that spot for 2.5 hours mating, from 8pm until 1030pm. (took a lot of patience). Then they separated. I picked them both up before they could escape into the woods and a couple of months later I had 14 eggs!!!
This goes to show you that they could mate at any time - Even in front of you at your mother-in-laws front yard, LOL! Just be patient and don't give up - YOUR time WILL come!

Zee

>>Putting the female in with the male works! Done it last year! Feeding the female as much as she will eat (at least for a few weeks) also helps...
>>Here's one of my rare examples: Last year I WAS able to breed my 3 foot male Cal King to my 4 foot FEMALE Cal King! The only way I pulled this off was to feed my female every 2 days for about two weeks!!! Then, finally her aggressiveness wore off!

Your interpretation (being fully fed overcame her aggressiveness) is one possibility. But it's also possible she wasn't ready to breed at the beginning of that period, just wasn't yet in the right stage of her reproductive cycle, and WAS ready at the end of it, possibly stimulated by the additional feeding. TIMING is everything--in comedy, they say, and perhaps in animal breeding as well. There's a time when breeding is the dominant instinctive impulse; the rest of the time, a feeding response is to be expected. So waiting a week or so might do a heap of good, and as others have suggested, waiting til after the next shed might be of huge significance too.
peace
terry

Breeding kings can make one nervous. I keep my kings in large tubs. When introducing males to females, I'll feed heavy for a couple of weeks. Then just right before I put them together, I'll put a new tub (clean the old one) with fresh bedding and all. I put the female in and immediately introduce the male. This way, they both are in basically new territory and hopefully the feeding response isn't bad. But with most of mine, they are pretty much at least the same size. I only have one male that is quite smaller than the female, but she is extremely docile and I haven't had a problem with them.

Scott