Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello everyone,

My question here is about knowing the gender of your pet snake(s). I have five snakes in all, of which I am only sure of the gender of two of them (my adult burm, and my adult boa). The other three are young (a kingsnake, a milksnake, and a ratsnake), and so could still very well be probed to determine for certain just which gender they are.

But I've heard that probing isn't the nicest thing you can do to a snake (an understatement there, of course). So I wonder, how important is it to know? I understand of course the implication it has on naming the animal, but I don't name my pets (I'll explain that in another thread if you're interested as to why). And I don't intend to ever breed any of my snakes. But I can't help but have a compelling desire to know, if for no other reason than to just be able to correctly address any of them as either a him or a her.

So, is that enough of a reason to have the snake probed? Or do you feel it isn't worth the stress it would put on the animal?

Whatever your thoughts/opinions are, please share.

Thanks,
- Mark

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Probing done by an experienced and careful person is not harmful or risky.. the problem is where does one get this experience? .. too often it is on somebody else's snakes!

But you should be able to get any number of people to look closely at your colubrids and tell very quickly what the sex is on each without probing.

Hope this helps.
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Gus
A. Rentfro
RioBravoReptiles.com
www.riobravoreptiles.com

"Quality is not an accident. Perfectly healthy animals are a minimum requirement.. everything else is just salesmanship" gus

Sexing colubrids can be done fairly accurately, especially once they are adult size or almost adults. Basically you are looking for bulge of the hemipenes in the male and a quickly tapering tail on a female… it is hard to describe so go to Bill and Kathy Love’s corn snake site corn-utopia.com click on “About Kathy Love more” then click on “cool corn snake photo gallery” and about half way down is a pic “Collage of snake sexing methods”. With practice it can be pretty easy to tell the males and females apart. I hope that helps a little…

So, why don’t you name your snakes?

take it easy,
april

If you post a good pic of the king and milk snakes tail and post these on the kingsnake forum I am sure someone can tell you the sex of your snakes. The rat snake should be the same.