I've come full circle...

[MrLang]

I haven't been here in so long - hello to anyone who remembers me!

This year I had a strange occurrence happen. Of course when you have a real specialty question, you run back to the few real information sharing communities that makes the internet such a powerful tool. Thank you to the admins for keeping the page going!

I had paired a male and female and they were sparring aggressively. After repeated attempts I thought "did I mis-sex this animal?" and probed the female - seems to be female. But after repeated sparring incidents I decided to put the female in with another proven female. Within 2 hours the female in question was locked with the proven female, taking the dominant position on top with the underside tail position. In my grief I started gearing up to sell this female as a male and cut my losses. Then I looked through my phone for a record of a different clutch and lo and behold, I see a picture from 2018 of this very female sitting on a clutch of eggs!

I had literally forgotten she was a proven female...

So I logged in here to find out about this strange occurrence and used the search bar before making a post. What comes up? A thread of my own from 2015 with this same exact question and multiple helpful responses. There are a couple of takeaways here:

-Females can and will mock lock with other females, even while refusing a male
-Keep detailed records of your breedings and clutches, even if it gets tedious after doing it for multiple years and even if you have a small collection
-Hit that search bar on BP.net!
-Never take for granted the free time and energy that the people in this community put forward to educate others. We all have a responsibility to pass it forward

Hope to spend more time here soon.

[Bogertophis]

Maybe you have a very rare hermaphrodite "female" BP? Do let us know if the other proven female has a clutch?

Snakes do some weird things sometimes. I have some adult FL rat snakes that have never mated & have laid double-clutches of eggs every year for some years now, & when I finally decided to incubate the eggs that looked "good" the summer before last, I got 3 new hatchlings (now approaching their second hatch-day this coming summer). They're either parthenogenic offspring (my assumption) or else these 2 adult females mated when about 1.5 years old (before they were sent to me) & then they've retained viable fertilization for 9-10 years...take your pick, LOL.

Anyway, welcome "back"!