#python breeder

[flabofsteel]

Some of the best treats you can get today! Everything from proven breeders, ready to breed, subadults, double recessive projects and more! Check out the Morph Madness sale going on now over at Morphmarket.com! Everything for AK Morphs is 10 - 50% off!

[barksbog]

protyping the beast

[a-noodle-named-daemon]

He shed and immediately started begging for food

He’s due to it Wednesday; something tells me he’ll eat that rat no problem 💛😅

[turochamp]

ball python people tell me how bad is spider gene. how hard should i be frowning when people mention intentionally breeding snakes with that gene. with or without "head wobble"

[reptiphoric]

So every so often I make the (poor) decision to peruse my local craigslist ads to see what's looking good in the neighborhood. Well, today I came across an ad posted by someone who needed to rehome their ball python since they're moving soon and couldn't take her with, and as you all know I'm always more than happy to take in a spider morph if it means keeping one more off of the breeding market...

Everyone say hi to Tipsy!

[creaturegoose]

Also the newcomer in quarantine. Demonstrating his ball technique.

[grimtoucher]

God I should commit to getting a snake. I've been thinking about it for a while but I think owning a pet that specifically relies on me would help me with financial reaponsibility. And I need this guy in my house

[starlightvio]

My town had a small reptile expo today and I got to hold a Burmese python. Her name was nagnini and she only had one eye. This was actually my first time holding a snake.

[pointy-kitty]

Thinking about opening for art (non-needle felt) commissions as well.

Really really wanna be able to afford a snake before winter comes around

[arsanatomica]

Story from today. There is a local engineer that is a python breeder on the side.

Reticulated pythons are the longest snakes in the world. They are massive snakes. They get to be like 25 ft long and thicker than a human thigh.

Anyway, a while back he gave me a 10 ft male.

This was a wild snake that he had imported from Indonesia and was trying to breed it to one of his females.

Breeders do this sometimes because animals in captivity tend to become inbred, so once in a while some breeders will hire someone in a foreign country to go out to the forest and catch a wild animal and then put it in a box and ship it to the United states.

That way it introduces fresh genes into the gene pool. bonus money if it has any special patterns or coloration.

Anyway he got the young male shipped in and put it together with one of the females and instead of having babies the female killed it.

So he gave it to me and I've had it in the freezer.

I pulled it out last night to thaw.

Males and females snakes need to be prepped and processed differently. The anatomy of male snakes requires special equipment.

So the day before I got all the equipment ready. I got up early, started work, cutting into the tail section.

It doesn't look normal on the inside.

I'm not seeing the structures that I'm supposed to see in male snakes.

I'm very confused..... does it have some sort of condition where it didn't develop correctly?

Maybe it's too young? It's 10 ft long. I don't think it's too young.

Could it be intersex? That's super rare but I've seen it a few times.

It's a FEMALE

So it turns out that this breeder had gotten someone on the other side of the world to catch and ship this snake to him for thousands of dollars and all this time it was a female.

And then he put this smaller female in with a much larger older female and she killed it.

Through the dozens of people who have handled the snake and imported it and worked with it, everybody has completely missed the fact that its been mistakenly sexed

Welp...

[a-noodle-named-daemon]

A satisfied boy after eating his second meal with me 💛

Accidentally dropped the rat by the hide’s entrance and he struck before I could pick it back up, so he ended up eating inside the hide 😅 But happy that he seems like such a good eater so far!

[kedreeva]

I didn't know peafowl also have incomplete dominant genes! I mainly know ball python genetics. Question, are there any incomplete dominant genes that are fine/mostly fine in het but cause health issues for the super/homo form? I can think of quite a few like that in ball pythons and a few dangerous genes in other common captive snakes.

The only incomplete dominants we have are white and white eye, where white is the total leucism gene and white eye is... either a form of pale leucism, or more likely a white spotting gene, we don't really know. The actual genome has not been mapped where the public can access it, and the mutations haven't been scientifically identified, so the genetics for them largely goes off of knowledge of genetics in general in combination with practical knowledge of what we see and how it travels and shows in the phenotype.

White shows white flights/throat latch in het form (most of the time, but it CAN be carried completely silently). White eye CAN turn some eye markings white (in the train's eye feathers), and some forms of it also cause "frosting" on the feathers where the color is diluted like it is in cases of pale leucism, where the bird looks like a window with a layer of frost covering it.

Pied is the only supposed dominant, where one copy and two copies looks the same in the phenotype, and (USUALLY) looks different from the wild type buuuuuuut it can also be carried completely silently, even in homozygous form. What people think of as a "pied" bird (by phenotype) is genetically a white/pied het (white and pied are alleles, the pied phenotype results from a bird that has one white and one pied gene).

Neither white nor white eye (nor pied) appear to have any deleterious health effects on the birds, aside from the fact that white feathers break down faster in the sun than dark feathers, so birds with more white tend to look rattier faster. Socially, white birds are sometimes rejected by colored birds, to the point where some hens have been noted to refuse mating from a white male if they can see other, colored males (even if they cannot reach the other males).

There ARE a few mutations associated with health problems. The only one that matches what you are asking about would be charcoal- where het hens can lay eggs, but homo hens do not, and for both sexes het birds do not seem to experience the same feather quality or shortened lifespan issues as homozygous birds.

The other deleterious mutations are "progressive pied" aka vitiligo (which isn't a morph, just an autoimmune issue that shows in the phenotype) which presents with autoimmune issues, and cameo which is OFTEN found with vision problems (which may or may not be directly linked with cameo, but cameo originally presented with birds that went blind a few years after maturity, and this problem was NOT weeded out properly before distribution, so cameos face a LOT higher instance of blindness than any other mutation). Fawn, in Australia, has been noted to face some of the same health complications cameo originally had (and may be or be an allele to cameo, given the similarity in phenotype), which if the mutations end up being the same or alleles may point to it being a problem, but that has yet to be proven or disproven.

There is a new, unnamed mutation in Denmark that causes weak feathers to the point the entire train "wilts" and makes the bird look like it is sopping wet, and it's unknown if the breeder will decide to perpetuate this monstrosity or not, and I don't know if heterozygous birds share that particular complication. Many are hoping the breeder doesn't breed more, but there's nothing anyone can do if he decides to go forward with it, outside of just avoid the mutation. Avoidance of mutations CAN cause a mutation to die out, as it did with Steel in Australia, but it's hard to get the "every mutation is precious and must be preserved" people on board with "some things are better left dead if it's not good for the animal."

[zooophagous]

We should start naming dog colors like ball python breeders name snake color morphs.

It's not a blue merle it's a Blue shatter thunderstorm het blue eyed white

[i-m-snek]

AVOID BOA CONSTRICTOR . COM/JEREMY STONE REPTILES

Normally I don't post things like this but I cannot stand by and not say my piece on this. The ball python hobby has been going down the shitter for a long, long time. Not the keeping part of it, no, the big minimalist breeders who see these living, breathing creatures as nothing more than a dollar sign in a plastic tote, are absolutely ruining the hobby for us. Jeremy Stone, owner and runner of boaconstrictor(DOT)com, was throwing ball pythons high up into the air, 'juggling' them, to show potential customers how 'docile' they are. Absolutely no respect to the animals, and with how much he dropped them I would be surprised if one or two of them didn't have a broken rib. If you want to watch the video, a screen grab was taken before he dirty deleted it. It's here. (Sorry its on facebook, I havent seen it on any other platform yet) Not only is he risking these animals being majorly injured, he is showing just how little most big ball python breeders actually care about their animals. Because this is how other big box breeders are reacting:

(Screenshots are not mine, but are shared with permission) NONE OF THEM SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH IT I am appalled and disgusted. I look at my babies, at Leliana most of all, and I could never imagine treating any of them with even the slightest bit of disrespect. These animals are so sweet, and so curious, and so special. And they're being treated like garbage. Adding on to that, now PETA and other places that exploit pet ownership for money will take this video and try to use it to end the reptile keeping hobby. Because they see this and can share it, and can make it seem like us small hobbyists, that actually love and care for our animals, are treating them like that. He is making us all look terrible. Needless to say, I am not breeding ball pythons anymore. I can't stand the thought of any of my babies going to someone like that. As much as I vet through people before they buy, I can't stop them from rehoming, and there is always a possibility that they'll end up in the hands of someone who only see them as a dollar sign. I'm not 'getting out of the hobby' as it were, they are my babies and they are here to stay. I just won't be breeding them anymore. I may breed other species in the future, but I can't stand the way the ball python hobby has turned out.

[the-mighty-python]

lol this day might actually come sooner than i thought

I want a ball python Bad

[giulliadella]

Day 28 of posting cute creatures we found on our field trip:

Aesculapian snake (Zamenis longissimus) is my favorite native snake. Called some variation of smok or smuk in every Slavic language, this snake was believed to be able to become a dragon. It was also believed that this snake protects people, especially children and that if it bites you, then you’ll be cured of all of your ailments. That’s the snake you see twisting around the Aesculap’s staff used as a symbol in medicine. There are countless rituals and myths all over Europe dedicated to this particular animal. And such insanely rich mythology originates from just one fact about this snake:

It’s so damn friendly!

This girl that we caught literally wanted to take pics with everyone. She let every single person in the class of 30 to play with her. No bites, no stress poses, she was constantly so calm and curious. And that’s true for all of them.

When I was doing my herpetology education, our teacher told us that these snakes probably perceive humans as warm trees. They always freak out when you catch them, but when they realize that they’ve been caught by human they immediately relax. It’s really weird, but wonderful to hold such a friendly little snake. Some wild caught ones were friendlier than pet snakes I interacted with.

But, we can’t have these as pets! They are protected by every law imaginable. One of the greatest herpetology experts in my country who is also a snake breeder, told me that aesculapian snake would be as popular as ball pythons or corn snakes if it ever reached the market, but unfortunately, it is a forbidden pet.

These snakes are very common and very useful to people as they feed on mice and other rodents. The one we caught has wonderful "eyeliner" marking on her face, but some don't have it. But they all have those nice bluish-white speckles on their body. This is a 10/10 snake, I definitely recommend interacting with one.