Pi Reptiles

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