Opinions needed

[WHerpsunlimited]

Well I have two ball pythons. I am a newbie and it is very addicting. There are so many morphs to choose from. My question is what type of morph I should get? I have a regular and an albino i picked up from pet store. Don't know sex or any hidden genes. My plan is to breed in the future. I was thinking bumble bee or some type of bee female. After this one i will be getting a male next year. Either a clown or pied male. Thanks for all the opinions.

[Chkadii]

What do you like? If you go with a pied, spider tends to make very high white pieds, which some people love and others find disappointing. With enchi (if you like stingerbees or enchi pastels), the reverse is true - you'd get very low white pieds. It all comes down to what will take your breath away when you see it in your rack/tank.

As far as a business sense standpoint, you have a few options because pied and clown are recessive genes. Depending on your budget and how much time you want to spend on a project, you can either:

Buy a hatchling pied or clown female now to grow up over the next couple of years, then get a multi-gene het or clown/pied male in a year and (hopefully) have them hit breeding age around the same time. There will be a chance of hitting on pastel, spider, or bee pied/clowns in their first clutch.

Get a female bee het pied, or part of a bee (spider het pied or pastel het pied), then get a male clown/pied that has the gene you're missing from the female. Again, you could possibly get your bee pied/clown in their first clutch.

Get a female clown/pied now and a male bee clown/pied in a year (or female spider/pastel clown/pied and male pastel/spider clown/pied), which will be the most expensive option, but when they breed all babies will be at least clown or pied and you'll have a better chance of getting your goal morph combo.

Go with your original plan, breed the two and have bee hets you'll raise up to breed in 2-6 years, depending on the size of the animals you end up purchasing initially.

Get two morph het clown/pieds, like a female bee het pied and a male honeybee het pied, which gives you more genes to play with but you may not get any visual recessives in your clutch and the babies would be possible hets, not 100% hets, so you'd be gambling on the time it takes to hit your end goal - 2-6+ years.

The typical advice is to put a more valuable male to a less valuable female, otherwise you're wasting her potential. That's for people who are breeding for business though - if you're not looking for a return on investment you can breed whatever you want! Recessive females tend to hold their value longer - an adult pied costs ~$1500 right now, and hatchlings are ~$450-500. Male pastel pieds are going for about $750 or so, to give you an idea. In another year, the price may come down a little lower for both, but that's still $1400 vs. $650 as adults. Spending a little extra money now on a visual recessive female will shorten your time line, and you may be able to get a multi gene male for a lower price in a year or two than you could right now. Of course, if you start playing around with getting hatchlings versus adults, those figures may change.

If you already knew all of that and just wanted to know what I'd personally do, well, I'm tentatively going for the panda pied right now with a black pastel het pied male, but I love pied everything. I just bought a female pied 66% het albino, so possible albino pieds will probably come before black pastel pieds do, since albino het pied males are more within my price range now, and double recessives are awesome longterm projects. If you want to go with something colorful, a coral glow yellow belly would give you some nice pied options. For clown, pastel combos and spider/enchi combos look hot! There will be a ton more clown options on the market next year if the past two years were anything to go by. You'll have a lot of neat combos to choose from either way!

[WHerpsunlimited]

Thank you for your opinion

[Chkadii]

Anytime! BTW, I was checking out classifieds and happened to find a couple snakes that might fit your plans. A female pastel het pied is listed for $350, bumblebee leopard het pieds are $400 (males) or $600 (females), and pastel pieds are also $400 (males) or $600 (females).

Just wanted to give you an idea of current market prices. PM me if you want the seller's name - I have no experience with them so I can't vouch for them, and I don't want to blur the lines and have this be mistaken for an ad.

There are some awesome clown collections belonging to people on this site, so you'd have no trouble there!

[maudie]

so cool. I'm in the same position as you with the same 2 snakes. a female normal and a female albino. but before getting another snake, I'd highly recommend you figure out the gender of your 2 current snakes. good luck!

[WHerpsunlimited]

Thank you. I plan on hitting up lone star expo this month and one in july in Austin. I've never been but hopefully i can find a nice selection.