Well, after snapping some pics of the hypo shorthead, I decided today was the day to clean out the adult melanistic female's enclosure. She was in there with a male normal eastern, to see if she would mate. I figured my male melanistic was infact, not male, because when I put them two together on multiple occasions, they never did anything and the male just seemed scared and kept his distance. So I had a normal eastern in with her, and I had to get her out. The one thing I hate about keeping eastern garters, is the fact that the majority of the ones I had associate your hands with food. So while I'm trying to grab her to get her out of the enclosure, she's trying to get the food from my hand, and there is no food there lol.
I had an adult eastern garter female on loan, was found in New York and she is a nice blue color, which is quite rare from up north, so I got her on breeding loan. I put her in with the "male" melanistic and put the female melanistic in her enclosure. So I cleaned out the female mel's enclosure, put in some new newspaper, and went over to check on the melanistic male and the blue female. Needless to say, he was trying to coax her into mating, I saw him do a couple of body humps, and a couple minutes ago I checked on them and he did infact succeed in coaxing her.
I was convinced that he was a "she", so much so that I bought an 05 male off of Tom earlier this week. If only I could go back in time lol.
I'm glad to know I'll have some blue, het melanistics being born this year. I'm going to put the female melanistic in the male's enclosure tomorrow and I'll give it one more shot with the pair.
I got pics of the mel. X blue mating, they'll be up within a couple of days.
Peace
Mike
Michael's Place
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KingPin Reptiles Inc.
Helmz777@aol.com
www.freewebs.com/mikesnake
