Pi Reptiles

Fresh Pi

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:05:00 +0000

Wow October already and things just never seem to slow down. Last season was built of plenty of ups and downs. The ups coming early by getting more of our peach ball project going (lemon blast het peaches) and a couple of very nice clown clutches. With the downs coming later with a couple of clutches that went bad. But such as is the life of a ball python (or any other reptile) breeder. We hit some fantastic odds this year and forwarded a lot of our own projects. Only 18 clutches, but what that means is that a lot of the females who didn’t breed last season are all now big and full of food ready for this coming season.

And what a season it’s shaping up to be.

As many of you know, we begin our pairing early. Armed with our ultrasound machine Jackie is now able to identify follicle structures, and we now have a way to make sure that females are being bred at the best possible time. This means that males aren’t being over bred, and that females don’t get harassed when they are either already gravid or empty.

So, with these early pairings this time of year also calls for much more of a feeding response from the royals. It makes for an exciting and rewarding time, and also goes in favour of disproving that urban legend about royal pythons not feeding.

All this feeding is of course their natural response to this time of year, it’s starting to get colder at night and due to the inevitable strain on their body when breeding they try to pack on the pounds.

This year really is a special one for us here at Pi. We finally have a lot of the animals that we purchased when we first decided to keep royal pythons making breeding age and weights, so we get to see the plans we made (and changed a hundred times) come full circle.

As many of you know, Indica the Burmball didn’t produce for us last year, but that doesn’t mean we’ve given up hope just yet. As mentioned earlier last year was a bit of a flopper on numbers of eggs on the ground, so we’re much more optimistic for this coming year. We’re also much more prepared, it seems that she produced follicles for a much longer period of time compared to full blooded royal pythons, so that means that we’re going to try pairing her for a much longer length of time. We’re also going to try a couple of different males this time. The super pastel that tried last year is a fantastic breeder, but I think he may need a little more help with this one. It may be time for Repo to step up to the plate, as there’s very little that he can’t handle. I hope he likes big girls :)

-Rain

Overdue slice of Pi

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 16:22:00 +0000

Well, 2011 is partway gone already and we’re into the new season. The tail end of last year flew by in a flurry of wedding preparation as Rain and Kat became Mr and Mrs Weston, followed by a busy family Christmas, (not sure that I should admit this, but my Christmas tree is still decorated in my spare room, I’m still hoping for someone to break in and undecorate it the same way she broke in to dress it up!) and suddenly it’s March already and the first two clutches are on the ground.

1st news is that Poor Chicken Little didn’t make it, she and we tried very hard, but the odds were stacked against us on this one, and she never made it to her second feed.

Other news is that the Ultrasounding is coming on in leaps and bounds, constant practice is enabling us to identify slugs from eggs and to find identifiable body organs, and it’s fascinating to do. It’s a wonderful tool and has probably helped this year to save the males from overuse on females that are either already gravid or re-absorbing. I think with the use of this magical window we may have doubled our clutches, though with the amount of effort we put in with 20 clutches last season we will be going without some sleep this season to cope with them all.

Indica the burmball may well be on her way to being a mommy, but sadly in order to Ultrasound an animal as powerful as she is, a degree of co-operation is required and she doesn’t always play ball, sometimes she wants to play burm instead.. (Ok, bad pun, I know) She has produced follicles, and has recently shed, and is exhibiting gravid behaviour, but who knows with this one, it’s a whole new ball game.. (yeah, see what I did there?)

More news, Pi have been granted UK and European distributorship of ARS racking and we ran a competition to guess the weight of Grail, the Axanthic Killer Bee at exactly 3.14 pm on Pi day, March 14th. This was won by Dave Rushen with an amazingly close guess of 1412g, he’ll be getting his prize soon and I can’t wait to get my hands on these lovely displays.

This year we welcomed the newest member of the Pi team, Dave The Brat. Dave is a panther chameleon, a little less than a year old that lives on my desk in my office. When I say on my desk, I actually mean he spends most of his time out and about wandering over the office furniture and staff, and has become a much loved member of the staff, follow his antics on his facebook page.

Well, that will do for now, I’m off to check for more clutches, the day is bright, and the future is snake shaped :)

- Jackie

Chicken Pi

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:43:00 +0000

It's been a busy season for Pi, had some highs and lows when we hatched a worlds first, and then lost a whole clutch before it hatched, but few things have been as odd as the Tale of Chicken Little.

One of the pairings we had was our Caramel girl having a first time fling with our Bumble bee. In due course, she was shown to be gravid, so we weren't too surprised when we went in one morning and found her in the classic " how clever am I, I'm sitting on eggs" pose. What was unexpected was to find her sitting on a clutch of slugs! We did the usual washing off, de-scenting the box etcetera, and had a look at the slugs.

Well, one of them was not quite like the others, it was white, and looked like a viable egg...... except that it was absolutely tiny! exactly the size and shape of a hens egg.

Without a great deal of hope, we candled it...

and it was fertile!

Unable to consign this tiny life to the bin, we gave it a chance, incubating it as we have all the others, checking it every day, not expecting it to survive, but crossing fingers anyway. About day 30 it started to go mouldy, but was still viable so we powdered it with anti-fungal powder and sat back to wait.

Day 53, and it was collapsed, but still showing veins, so we carefully put a tiny tiny slit into it to check that the baby was alive. To our surprise, not only had the tiny little chicken egg beaten the odds and survived to full term, it had produced the top combo possible, and we had us a Bumble bee het caramel in the egg.

Day 55 , and Chicken Little was born, weighing 19 gms in the egg, and 17 out of it. The smallest baby royal I've ever seen, perfectly formed in miniature. I hope now we can get our little survivor to eat and grow, and we'll keep you posted on progress.

-Jackie

Another Slice

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:58:00 +0000

June already and our feet haven't touched the ground for weeks, 15 clutches already detailed in our incubator section, one of which has hatched. A milestone was reached with our first visual morph baby, a cinny hypo, followed by two more and a hypo. A day of high fives, followed by a "down in the dumps" as we thoiught we'd lose one of the babies with a yolk sac un-absorbed, but no, Lucky survived, and is looking beautiful.

Our second clutch was a dinker female who looked more Fire than her chosen mate, Ember the Fire male. We crossed our fingers for little white noses, but sadly it looks like my beautiful Mouse is a simple normal and not a secret fire after all. We appear to have 3 normals and 2 fires from this pairing.

The two remaining eggs from Our honeybee train wreck clutch continue to survive, the larger of the two having a lively baby within, and the tiny one is also hanging on in there, a live embryo visible through the uncalcified "window". Our fingers are crossed for this teeny baby.

Cleaning and feeding takes up much of our spare time these days, and when we have all these tiny mouths to feed our time will be further condensed. We have roped in an enthusiastic friend to help, but I suspect the rate we're going we'll need to bribe him with coke and cookies to put in an extra hour or two! fun times..

We still have a few ladies still to lay clutches, the ultrasound has proved invaluable to identify the optimum moment to introduce the male, and has been useful in identifying eggs within the girls, even to the point where we can cautiously identify "slugs" . I have loved seeing the development of the follicles to the calcified egg stage, and I hope to develop my skills further in this area, it's useful and fun to do, and such a thrill when the eggs are visible..cheating? nah, learning? yes, I think so.

So, whats next for Pi? first goal is the safe arrival of this years babies, then a period of reflection I think, did we do it right? time will tell.

- Jackie

2010. The story so far

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:15:00 +0000

Only two and a half months in to the year, and it’s shaping up to be quite a ride.

This year was always supposed to be our first big year. We’ve been building up our 2007 females for this point. Just about all of our wild type girls are up to weight, and after having last year off, they are all well fed and rested for this year. Most of our morph females are at good weights too, except for the usual suspects (our 07 albino who’s still to this day under 400g), and the odd one or two who got to 900g and then stopped feeding.

Other than that, it’s shaping up to be a good year. Except for one small problem….

We always intended on breeding our female honey bee to our male cinnamon hypo. He was imported specially so that we could pair them together to breed cinna-honeys. This plan A was all going well. She was feeding as well as she always has, and hit the 2000g mark late last year, he was feeding on defrost finally and put some nice “pre-season” weight on. We paired them up like we had done with dozens of others and …. Nothing. No interest what so ever from the male. So, we decided to try him with some other females, our WC butterscotch ghost being the first, and again, no interest. Starting to think that he might be out for the season, we decided to put her to a different male, as our pastel clown is young, we went with our proven breeding clown male, and he’s done the business quite nicely, locking her many times, and we’ve now been able to ultrasound 5-6 good follicles inside her, so all is well with her. The male was given one last try with a big proven female ghost (who also had last year off), and he locked her within the hour! He’d finally found his mojo, and he’s since gone on to lock a female cinnamon too, but still unwilling to pair with the honey bee.

Such as is the way with some animals, they just don’t seem to get along. But that’s what keeps this all such good fun, and so interesting, the uncontrollable variables. We can feed them, clean them, pet them, love them, some times even hate them, but we can’t bend them to our will. It’s a nice balance keeping these snakes, they bring us such pleasure, and in return we bring them a secure and comfortable environment.

Pi have also expanded a little over the last few months with several animals not shown on the website. We’ve a nice small group of reticulated python morphs including becoming only the third owners of an albino golden child, along with a normal golden child female, and a few locality animals. We’ve also acquired the one and only Burmball. A hybrid between a royal python and a burmese python, who has, to say the least, caused a major stir in the reptile world. Finally, our latest additions outside of the ball python world is a lovely pair of angolan pythons, who will be coming home with us later this week. A dream come true species for me personally.

- Rain

The Pi Shoppe??

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:28:00 +0000

Well, having started our second breeding season, it’s time to reflect on the events of the last 2 years.

We started this venture on a tiny scale, never expecting to be overwhelmed by the addiction that is royal python breeding, the more snakes we bought, the more we were tempted with, until we reached the level we are today, with almost 200 colour morphs and wild types.

Our breeding plans last year were limited to starting to prove out our wild caught desert ghost, Al, (if you’ve ever watched Sahara, you’ll understand the connection)

We captured on camera the lock, the ovulation, the eggs in utero by ultrasound, and the clutch of 9 big fat eggs that Nellie (the elephant) subsequently laid. The clutch weighed well over a kilo, though we were unable to separate the individual eggs as she laid them overnight. Having candled 9 viable eggs, incubation was uneventful, though nail-bitingly long, and we, unable to resist finding out whether Al was a co-dom, snipped the eggs at 55 days.

Our first baby ……how beautiful..

The next baby pipped on its own, and within 3 days all nine were out, named in sequence Uno, to Nove, all weighed a good birth weight, and the ratio seemed to be 5 girls to 4 boys. Those little babies couldn’t have been loved more, and so many pictures were taken in those early days,

We learned a lot, both happy and sad from this clutch of little het-for-Al babies. 4 fed instantly, and are growing well, 5 needed assisting, and sadly I have to report that 3 of the 5 are lost. Cinque, Due and Quattro, goodnight babies, you were not to be.

Of the other 2, one is now starting to feed independently, and the other is still afraid of food, but we’ll get there,

While all this was going on, we have moved 3 times to accommodate our ever growing collection, and we now keep them in a purpose fitted room within a factory unit. We decided that with such a collection there was no point spoiling the ship for a ha’penny worth of tar, so we invested in the best possible racking in which to house our precious animals, thanks here are due to the lovely John Charles from Pro-racks, I can’t thank him enough. I wouldn’t use anything else now.

We’re settling in to our new rooms, lovingly known as “the Pi Shoppe” . We have the main room housing royals, and our corns, hoggies and carpets. The Retics will move in eventually after quarantine, which leaves us a quarantine room, an import quarantine room, and a rodent breeding room. Who would have thought that one little male royal would have started this particular “ball” Rolling? Bless you Pan, you will always be remembered.

So, season 2 has started, some locks already, what will the Odds Gods have in store for us this time?

- Jackie