Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey Guys Matt here from Harlequinboa.com/A Cut Above Reptiles and I specialize in High end Boa morphs. I have been thinking of Picking up some red babies from a Cyclopse from Aqua Boy Pairing. I want a pair but can you not sex these animals in the first year? I have heard so many things from sexing from Sheds with Sperm Plugs to waiting a year to try and Probe. Any help will be appreciated.
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This post should probably have been in the GTP forum and not the ETB forum but regardless, the answer is no, baby green tree pythons should not be sexed before reaching 80 - 100 grams which is approximately 10 - 12 months of age. Their tails are extremely delicate and are easily kinked. Sometime the damage doesn't show for months as the animal grows and it is not reversable. Just not worth the risk in my opinion and I've dealt with A LOT of green tree's.

Emerald tree boas are a different story though. They are born significantly large than green tree's and they are far less delicate. An obvious indication is that their tail isn't used as a caudal lure like GTP's. I usually probe emeralds a couple months after birth when they are established feeders.

Hope that helps.

Rico Walder
Signal Herpetoculture
Signal Herpetoculture

Rico is spot on and definitely knows his arboreals.

With that said, I just wanted to note that a couple people are working on a way to genetically test sheds to sex babies. This issue with this is that it may not be cost effective and that not all sexual markers are easily differentiated.

There are people working on it, and if they do work out a cost effective method it will be available this year. You'd probably have to have the seller pay to have them sexed or pay for it yourself and keep paying until you find a pair - not the ideal situation. Also, with the babies being sexed you'll probably start to see a bigger differential in prices between the sexes, the same as you see in ball pythons and boas.
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Chris Carille
Marist College, NY
Department of Biology
Chris Carille Photography - carillephoto.com
Garden of Eden Exotics - edenexotics.weebly.com
http://nyexotics.blogspot.com/

The genetic sexing would be very interesting.

Many lizard keepers would benefit from it too. I heard people tried to do it for some monitor species and it didn't work out.

That's interesting. I wonder why they had a hard time working it out. I know reptilian genetics work similarly, but different from ours. I wonder if the testing is having a hard time locating ZW chromosomes.
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Chris Carille
Marist College, NY
Department of Biology
Chris Carille Photography - carillephoto.com
Garden of Eden Exotics - edenexotics.weebly.com
http://nyexotics.blogspot.com/