Old hands chime in please

Curious,now that we have decades of captive bred and raised snakes,have you seen an increase in the size of bps? With better living conditions and regular feedings,I wouldn't be surprised if there is.I know genetics holds the Trump cards, but still...

Hmmmm.... I guess I'd consider myself an old hand, but this is a great question. I know there are breeders who are selectively breeding for larger animals, but I don't know if there's been in upward trend in overall size throughout the hobby.
Interesting question. I'll be very interested to see what others say.

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Originally Posted by Zspook

Curious,now that we have decades of captive bred and raised snakes,have you seen an increase in the size of bps? With better living conditions and regular feedings,I wouldn't be surprised if there is.I know genetics holds the Trump cards, but still...

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Accually the Opposite. All the Balls I owned in the 80’s were much larger. The problem id have in comparing is that all mine were wild caught so I did not know the age as were 90% of Ball Pythons and Boa’s back then.
I have seen Balls for sale now that are around the same size as what I had but they call them Volta Ball Pythons now. Even their heads are twice the size. This is referred to by the location and a Lake “Volta” outside East Ghana.


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I hold back larger females (since they tend to produce more eggs) and sell the smaller ones. I know a lot of breeders do the same and thus are applying selective pressure to the population. This is only for females though--I still use whatever males best fit into my morph project goals. Following this process the specimen size of my collection has no obvious increase/decrease. Given long enough the selective pressure on female size may start to become noticeable, but, not in the generations I have produced. :)

I'm not a BP breeder but I've had some BPs over the years, both c/b (I bought) & w/c (turned over to me): The largest BP I've had or seen was a w/c import female,
hefty & about 5'. No idea of her age, of course; I got her from a family whose kid lost interest after they got her from a pet store the year before (& I KNEW they were
selling w/c). She survived the kid's ignorance & did well with me, despite the hundred or so ticks I removed from her...they "didn't know those were ticks, they thought
they were just scales" and then she had no heat for a while too, after her "hot rock" broke....:rolleyes: She sure was a survivor. :snake: