How many of your ball python females lay eggs every year?

[cchardwick]

Just wondering from some of you larger breeders how many of your ball python girls lay eggs every year? I was watching a video of a guy with 1000 females and he said he only got 1200 - 2000 hatchlings per year. I thought those were really low numbers for hatchlings, that's an average of only 1-2 eggs per female. So for an average of a six egg clutch that's only one or two in six snakes laying eggs that year. Doesn't seem right to me. I'm wondering if the guy really has that bad of odds or perhaps he has a bunch of females that he is raising up and not ready to breed yet?

[bcr229]

He may not pair every female every year. Some years females don't go, or they slug out.

This year I paired five females and got three clutches.

[wolfy-hound]

My females generally have only laid every other year with few exceptions but I also don't push my females.

If they don't get back up to weight, if they aren't big enough yet, if he doesn't have plans for that morph pairing, if he has a different plan for the following year(like the male he wants to use isn't ready)... he may not breed a female. Then the females he does breed, some may not catch, some may slug out, some eggs may fail.

Nothing is guaranteed with livestock.

[cchardwick]

So here's the follow up question - how do you pair up your males? How many days of breeding to you get per snake and how many females per male? I've heard you can pair a male to up to 12 females, and from what I've seen most people will pair one male per 3-5 females. Believe it or not in some videos on the web I've seen people pairing one male for up to 16 females! Not sure how successful they were though...

I have some males I'm rotating between females and some males that get paired up to only one female. For my rotation I'm doing five days with the females and weekends off to feed. I have one male that is servicing five females and he gets one day per female unless he is copulating, then I give him an extra day with the female before I move him along. And I'm planning on rotating the males and monitoring the follicle growth with my ultrasound until they reach about 40-45 mm, just around the time they ovulate, then I'll remove that female from the rotation and hopefully continue until all my females ovulate. I only have a couple females that don't appear to have any follicles at all, not sure if they will go or not. I'm guessing that the more females per male the less likely that they will lay a fertile clutch.

[Stewart_Reptiles]

Roughly 80%/85% of my females paired will go, it's up to them and while some female will lay year after year some will not.