One of my lesser shown projects close to my heart.

[Mehelya]

Well, I've been pretty prolific on the ball python side of things, and as much as I love the variety of colors and patterns of balls, i never really had that "this is my passion species" feeling. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love and care 110% for the ones I do have, and they still excite me when I do get to breed them, and see what pops out of the eggs. The market on this side of the pond, however, over the last few seasons, has become over-flooded with "big" breeders just producing en mass, just for the sake of producing, and the market has buckled badly because of it. Stacked gene animals usually worth at least 4 to 5 digits are being dumped at petshops for a few hundred just to be moved quickly, and many of the small, passionate breeders are unfortunately taking the repercussive knock, and many are just getting out of the game completely. And, while I've kept a few of my most prized ones, I've slowly sold off most of mine due to those reasons, and the responsibility of not wanting to add to an oversaturated market, has led me to stop breeding balls at all for the foreseeable future.

But...

I have been holding a bit of a passion close to my heart for the last 7 years, in relative secrecy, and I've finally decided to do something with them. And those are my Malaysian yellow brongersmai. Sure, they don't have the pizazz of a bright blood red brongermsai, or some of the stunning morphs from overseas that are not available in my country, for many blood breeders, but, to me, they are even more stunning, and their colors and patterns just did it for me. Their manageable size, voracious appetite, their perfect attitude, and just everything about them got me thinking for a few years about a change in direction. So, in late 2016, and early 2017, I started searching for breeders, and eventually found a chap, on the other side of the country, who had some real nice lookers that had hatched mid january 2017. (There are only 3 or 4 reputable breeders in this country, so my choices were limited). I'm not going to show all of the brongs, just one or two particular ones, because I decided to test the market this season for them, and I'd rather be a responsible breeder, and sit with one clutch of babies, instead of two clutches that move slowly, if the market isn't receptive to them. I have already made plans for a bulk deal to another private breeder/wholesaler who is passionate about bloods and has more clientelle contacts than i do (locally and internationally), should I be unable to move them myself, and I have written guarantees of the deal already, so there's no backing out from the buyer's side. I'd rather be responsible, than reckless with living animals and an ever volatile market. If it wasn't for the bulk deal, I probably wouldn't even have bothered at all.

So, without further ado, a bit of history of my one girl, and a male I got almost a year ago, to start this new venture into a not so new species.

One of the two babies I got in March of 2017...


As of the 18th of September 2023, she is now over 1.8m, just over 6.5 years old, and barely tipping the scale at over 8kg...


She loves to soak, and gave me many a fright over the years for fear of mites (im still not used to a snake that enoiys soaking for 3 days solidly because she likes to), but her colors and pattern always get me drooling.


After 2 years of failed breeding with the "male" I bought with her, it became apparent through probing, and several other less conventional methods (feeling carefully for those tell-tale marbles in the hemipenal area), that I had in fact gotten 2 females in 2017, so I started searching in late 2022 for a worthy male, old enough to do the job. In the beginning of 2023, I met a chap with a spare 3 year old male 100% het t- for sale, and jumped at the deal.

The male eventually arrived in February... a nice burnt orange 100% het t-...


It didn't take long, after quarantine, for them to get going, and I observed 4 prolonged locks, one every month. I think she was actually ovulating during this last lock pictured...


She has since shed (17th/18th September), and has seemed to me to be getting slightly chunkier every week and more active in hopefully searching for a good place to hunker down and lay her eggs. I will be giving her a nest box, just in case, this coming week, I just need to build it asap.

So, I'll be starting up ye ole incubator this weekend as well, and making the necessary adjustments and tests, seeing as I have a few weeks left, IF she is gravid.


Let's hope I get to post a massive pile of pearly whites in the near future. By my accounts, she should drop anywhere from the 18th of October to the end of October if she did take...

And, as a bonus, seeing as sstps and bloods are relatively uncommon in collections here, from the seller of the male, I was offered a pair of sstp hatchlings (15th January 2023 hatch date) at a price (non feeders) I could not refuse, and scooped them up at the same time. The male took to ft rats straight away, but the female was a bit more finicky in her choice of feeding on ft a few times, then only wanting live, but she is picking up nicely. The male took 6 months to shed, the female took 8 months to have her first shed this week.

The male, which I'm sure is going to be a dark adult worthy of breeding...


And the sibling female, I'm beginning to think might be a chrome head, but I cannot find much info on the development of colors between chrome heads and blacks...


I have traced the lineages of the male brong to an US imported yellow visual female t-, and the mother of the sstps to a well known, sought after, lineage from the states (that's supposed to regularly throw chrome and black), and the father of the sstps to a black sstp sired from a possible pumpkin head x black sstp, who happens to be from the same breeder that has the grandparents (imported well over a decade ago from the states) of my yellow females. I like to trace lineages, because I try not to have related pairs, unless it's for the benefit of specific traits, or if it's impossible to get unrelated pairs, then I prefer the line breeding to be as minimal as possible. Now just for some breitensteini to hunt down and I'll be as happy as a blood in a marsh.

Well, thanks for looking, for those that do.

[Homebody]

All I'll say is that I hope more ball python breeders follow your example and start breeding something else. I'd be nice to have more variety in the market.

[Mehelya]

Homebody, the ball market started here around 2010, and within a few years, basically everything else had disappeared off the market. Even the "reptile" expos should have been renamed to "ball python" expos. Thankfully, some savvy breeders here kept on doing the various staple species, but in way less numbers, and higher prices, but a fair amount of species have disappeared into obscurity on the market here.

Anyway...

The last couple of weeks have been interesting, to say the least. My girl decided that she didn't like her enclosure at all, which is an understatement, seeing as she's enjoyed it for several years now, without issue, and decided to give herself swollen gums from nose rubbing last week. I tried various lay box setups, and switching a few things around to give her more options for lay sites, even stupidly upped temps to see if that was the cause due to a cold spell that hit our area for a good couple of days.

Needless to say, antibiotics were off the menu, due to her being gravid and so late in the gestation period, and I managed to keep the swelling down and prevent any infections with good old furex ointment (similar to betadine, but way better in my personal opinion). I started getting worried on Friday, because she hadn't laid yet, was heading past the internet posts average of 30-45 days after prelay shed. And i had actually considered giving her till Friday to do her thing, or blow the eggs, and give her antibiotics to sort out her mouth. But, on sound advice, I decided to hold out for a few more days.

So, i waited it out a bit, stopped the ointment treatment for a day or two to alleviate the stress from that routine, and see what happened by Monday, and spent the weekend doing a whole lot of praying. And by jove, today at around 17:00, thanks to God, I was rewarded for that decision. Don't get me wrong, I was still worried about the girl, and her health was still high priority over getting the eggs if she relapsed or got worse. I had already contacted our local vet to make sure he had antibiotics on hand, so I could work out the dosages, if need be. I do my own calculations, because our vet knows nothing about reptile medicines or treatments.

She had started popping out the precious pearly whites at around 17:00... Day 48...


I knew this position well enough, from pics around the web, and from breeding other python species in the past, that she was now done laying, and was caring for her eggs now.


Such an attentive, exhausted, mother, who looks perfect and healthy, even for giving me a hair raising last week of gestation...


Managed to unwrap her, without much of a fuss from her, or rolling any eggs. She was exhausted, but did huff a bit, but she's done well for a first time mom.


I weighed the eggs quickly, and then popped them into the old faithful incubator, set up the probe between the eggs, and now it's just a waiting game for another 2 months...


The whole clutch weighed 1623gr, and there are 15 healthy eggs, all with veins at roughly 108.2gr per egg. I weighed the mother about a week ago, when I had no choice but to clean her cage of all the urates she was dropping from the pressure of the eggs growing inside of her, and she weighed 6.5kg, about a kg lighter than when she went into her prelay shed. So, her clutch totalled almost 1/3rd of her total body weight by the time she laid.

I will now attend to the mother this evening, get her washed down, and wash and clean her enclosure out, so she can't smell the eggs anymore. Then I'll have a look at if she still needs antibiotics, but with the swelling having gone, and her lips back to normal, with no sign of infection, I might just offer her a weaner rat tomorrow, to get her juices flowing again, before I decide on the next course of action for her health. We can only get baytril here, and that is a hammer on the kidneys, and after the ordeal of being gravid and laying eggs, I think it's safer to take it slow, and not go ape with meds all at once, if it's not absolutely necessary. But, the health of the mother is priority number one now.

She will also get a pass on breeding next season, seeing as I have her sister here as well, so she can take it easy and get back up to full health before I even decide to breed her again, maybe.

I must give a big thank you to one of the forum members, who is an amazing blood python breeder, from your neck of the globe, and short tail python officionado extraordinaire. I won't mention him by name, to save him from being bugged incessantly (and me not having his permission to name him in this post), but he gave me a lot of sound advice from his years of breeding, which made a world of difference to me as well, seeing as this was my first time breeding bloods, and the knowledge on this is limited to those that actually breed them. So, thank you for that dear sir, if you ever read this post.

[Homebody]

Such wonderful news! Thanks for sharing.