Do you lower temps for breeding season?

I know a lot of you breeders lower temps (usually a night drop) when breeding ball pythons...

My question: are there many people out there that have been able to successfully breed without changing the temps? If so, what are your temps set at? the normal 82 cold side 92 hot side???

The reason I ask: My problem is that I have an 8 tub rack filled with females. I only plan to breed two of these females this year. I want the other 6 to continue to grow and put on more weight and be ready to breed next year. The rack in question is ran off of one helix... I don't want to have to lower the temps on all 8 because I am afraid that will cause the 6 non breeding females to go off feed... and I really want to avoid that if possible.

Should I just attempt to breed without lowering temps, or should I lower the temps for everybody in the rack?

Any help on this subject would be greatly appreciated!

One more related but very different question...

The males specificly.... do most lower their temps just like they do the females during the breeding season?

I didn't purposely cool last year, but the room temps did drop a little bit. But as far as making manual adjustments on the thermostat - I didn't. I went 3 for 3 on my clutches.

If you go to like adams sight in his breeding info he lowers the temps but i guess to each his own, i know some who do and some who dont. hope this helps

I did lower temps this year... at roughly 8pm I would cut the power to the flexwatt on my breeder female and breeder male racks, bringing them to the ambient room temperature of 80F at the lowest. During the day I offered a 88F hot spot from the usual 95F hot spot, with cool side temps still at 80F.

Out of doing this....I only got one clutch out of five pairings, and it was late anyways. Despite my regulation of the room temps, the animals must've been able to tell that it was still winter out in MN here.

I didn't get really good follicle development until mid april, when the outdoor temperatures here finally starting climbing, despite returning them to full heat cycles about mid March.

Am I going to cool next year? Probably not... they go when they want to go.

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Originally Posted by rabernet

I didn't purposely cool last year, but the room temps did drop a little bit. But as far as making manual adjustments on the thermostat - I didn't. I went 3 for 3 on my clutches.

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Almost the same here, but I don't lower the temps. I purposefully lower the ambivent temps in the environment by turning off the heat in that section or by moving the racks to a cooler room. I maintain the 90-92 with Johnsons, and the middle still stays about the same temp..but the cool end is cooler. This gives the female access to a cooler section if she so desires.

I do not risk great changes in body temperature, because it's been suggested that doing so can cause R.I.s. I have successfully bred every snake that I attempted (well one fooled me, I mistook a building for ovulation and pulled the male too soon:weirdface)

Hope this helped.

ball pythons may breed without being cooled but i would think that lowering temps before breeding season is to induce a build up of testosterone in males so that they may become more effective breeders. my ambient room temp naturally drops a few degrees during the colder months and thats about all the cooling i do. i also keep breeding males on the upper rack levels where the ambient temp is a little higher and come cooling time i switch them with lower level tubs to exaggerate the cooling for those specific animals.

Last year I cooled this year I didnt and got pretty much the same results.

The ambient temp in the room drops during the winter, this seems to trigger off the breeding season for us.... I do drop maybe 5F over night, but just to mix it up.... not every night and sometimes I'll just switch a rack off over night.

I like to mix it a bit, mother nature does the same.

We didn't lower temps at all this year other than the room the BP's in is naturally a bit cooler in the fall months anyways but we didn't change our heating source temps at all. Most of our females took and our males certainly seemed to show lots of interest in breeding. :)

What we did do is watch the weather forecasts very carefully. As soon as there was a change coming, a storm, whatever, we made sure the males got into the females enclosures. Something about that barometric shift as storms roll in really seems to trigger breeding activities.

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Originally Posted by frankykeno

What we did do is watch the weather forecasts very carefully. As soon as there was a change coming, a storm, whatever, we made sure the males got into the females enclosures. Something about that barometric shift as storms roll in really seems to trigger breeding activities.

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Storms do help, kinda like candles and romantic music and settings.... anyway, it does help. Not that a male needs much help! :)

To answer your question Mike here are a couple of ideas. Like Julian said the lower levels run cooler. Also, if you use bedding (I like cypress) you can add more to the tubs you want cooler. A thick layer of cypress would insulate the tub, keeping some of the heat out.

Some experimentation would be in order to fine tune your temps. One thing to keep in mind is this will result in an overall drop in temps, not just at night. Personally I feel as long as the snakes can get to 85ish on the warm end all is well. Just look at the way Tracy Barker keeps her ball pythons.

I dropped my temps for about a week prior, to 85-6, and had locks from day one till the end of the season. I stopped putting them together when the snakes stopped locking for 3 consecutive tries... this was after I had raised my temps...

I dropped them in Oct, raised them back to normal in Jan... and the snakes kept locking until March-April.

I got two for two.

Bruce

Of course, I'm not an experienced breeder by any stretch of the imagination, I can only share my own personal experience. I'm convinced that barometric pressures have far more to do with the successful pairing of your animals than temperatures do.

Know your females. Tracy Barker said on Reptile Radio, if she has a consistent feeder that suddenly goes off food, she puts a male with her. I've got a female that is going to a friend (one I picked up as a pet store surrender about six months ago) that's been a voracious feeder that went off food recently. I talked to the recipient and asked if they minded that I put Winston in with her. No objections, and they were locked within the hour (this is just last week, with temps in the high 90's in Atlanta).

I observed multiple locks and a lot of courting in a 48 hour period that they were together. I also placed them together on a stormy night. We're in the middle of the summer, with longer daylight and warmer temps. But a crazy weather system that rolled in, and I had a receptive female - badda boom, badda bing!

I followed the Markus Jayne (ballpythons.ca) ball python breeding page as closely as I could, and I had 9 out of 10 successful clutches last season.

Hope this helps.

All excellent information, thank you.

One thing I think is interesting is the use of light cycles.

1) Ball pythons come from an area near the equator where, if everything I've heard is correct, the difference between summer/winter is less than 1 hour of daylight.

and

2) This is an animal that spends virtually all day in a rodent burrow anyway, and probably has no idea whether it's light outside or not.

It seems like it's one of those "to each his own" type setups.

IDEA: Link your thermostat to weather.com's current reading for Ghana or Togo to get a better replication of seasonal changes.

JonV