Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Well i almost had a hard attack over the weekend LOL ...

I saw a reply to the post before about splitting up breeding pairs after a while and to give them a meal if they look like they are hungry and are searching for food, which of course makes sense .. well my female was non stop searching for food and striking sometimes thinking food was present.. so i split the pair up .. now before i go on u must now that the male was a nicaraguan morph that was no more then 4 feet long at most and of course a skinny build like most nic. males ...his head is pretty small and he is just a smaller snake compared to other species ..the female is more around the area of six feet and pretty thick with a much much bigger head ..so to continue i put the male back in with the female and within seconds SHE STRUCK AT HIM RIGHT ON THE HEAD ... HIS WHOLE HEAD WAS LITERALLY IN HER MOUTH AND SHE WASNT LETTING GO .. ONCE AGAIN WITHIN A SPLIT SECOND SHE HAD THROWN HER COILS AROUND HIM AND STARTED TO TRY AND EAT HIM ...now dont think i was just looking at this .. it happened really quick and right when i saw her strike i was already half way in the enclosure .... after tuggling her around for a couple seconds she finally let go and i threw her on my bed ..my first thought after that was OH SH$T my breeder male nicaraguan morph is probaly dead after that ...and my heart was beating FAST I MEAN FAST as he was not cheap ;0).. so i check the enclosure and he is just kinda sitting there, then i picked him up and he started to move around fine .. so i went ahead and checked for wounds .. REMARKABLY he didnt have any heavy wounds on his head or body .. he only had a little blood on the side of his mouth and thats it.. i disinfected it and so on...after some time went by i put him back in the enclosure with the same female and he just sat in the corner .. as if he was amost shivering and not wanting to move .. i sprayed the female with water to make her shy away and not strike at him or anything like she did before,to kinda stop the instinct to strike and it worked very well.. after a bit i could see he didnt want to have to much to do with her but i wondered, " maybe what happened to him was just to stressful that he wouldnt continue breeding till next year"...so to see what the verdict of that was i put him with another breedable female .. and within an hour he was BREEDING HER ....

THANKFULLY i didnt loose my male to this incident but i know that i was very lucky for him to get away without any serious damage .. SO BREEDERS DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN TO U .. i know that there are alot of hungry females/males out there so when u re introduce them i reccomend to spray the animal already in the enclosure with water.. it seemed to work very well as it suppresses many instinct reactions and causes them to shy away .. when this happens they can tell that its a boa and not jump to the conclusion that it is a rat ..so watch out ... u dont want ur heart pumping as hard and fast as mine was ;0) ..also has anyone ever heard this happen before?? have a good one and i hope all u have a great year with offspring..

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Message:
If I got a big,hungry female & I'm introducing a male or reintroducing. I spray the female with a little lower than luke warm water. This makes the female draw back & coil up.
I then litterly put my male right down on top of her. Since I've been doing this,I've had no problems. The female does not see movement of the other side of the encloser & has never struck.
The same female is docile BUT during feeding,I've seen her come up bout 2ft out of her cage & swing her head back & forth with her mouth wide open! Se's struck @ the side of the cage by just turning on the lights in my snakeroom! She couldn't even see me either! The above is how I do it & it works for me. Just my thoughts only. Heres a pic of her
Dave @ East TN Reptiles

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Actions Speak louder than words.
Dave @ East TN Reptiles

Ok a couple of years a go I had the SAME exact thing happen to me except my male was decent size about 5 foot or so. My female was around 7 feet. I had them in one of those sliding cage systems youve seen them. Well I was feeding everything around them and bam ! I heard this knocking around. I look in and both boas have their mouths around the others. At first I thought it was the big female trying to attack the little male. I took the ball of snakes out after tryihng to seperate them and placed them under water which didnt work. Then I tried the old alcohol trick which didnt work either. I think it took me 30 minutes to get them apart all the while Im tugging the huge female. And I realize its the male thats wrapping her. So I start trying to untangle him. As I was pulling the heads apart you could hear popping noises from the jaw and niether would let go. It was a pretty bad experience and I didnt even feed them lol. Just everything around them. But that wasnt the worst mishap Ive ever had breeding this was........

Female papuan python ate the male I had for about 10 years. Funny I bought him back in the day when papuans were $3500 each! Ouch! Any how What can you do right? Im guessing something triggered her feeding response and she ate him. They were both about the same size as well. The female may have been a little bigger but not too much. Anyhow wierd stuff happens when you breed snakes for any length of time. But Good stuff happens as well!...............

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