Choose my pied's gender!

[aureptiles]

Hi all,

I have a pastel female and a spider male and I'm definately going to get a pied in the near future, but which gender would be more versatile in the long run? One of my goals is to pied a spider

My impression is that it does not matter with recessive as much as co-dom... although I'd be able to get multiple clutches of het pieds in 1 season with a male.

What do you think?

[Mike Schultz]

Depends.... are you planning on getting any more ball pythons?

If you arent getting any more snakes i'd say get a female so that you have two snakes for your spider to breed to.

If you are getting more, I'd decide whether or not you want to get more pied-compatible stuff or not. I.e. pastel het pieds, spider het pieds, etc etc.

[steveboos]

Well you have to consider that a Spider Pied wont necessarily look that awesome since the patter would barely be noticable on the colored parts and it would just give it a Spider head. Anyway i would definitely get a female because it gives you a lot more to work with and when she grows up she will be a prized posession. I think people really appreciate the large Pieds that they have in their collections and most wont give them up.

[Ouroboros]

I voted female - mostly because it is what I normally do when buying animals.

But also because a female will produce eggs for you and then you can use the offspring and pair them up with her to get some sweet combos.

[BChambers]

Check out the spider pieds on Roussis Reptiles site-they are awesome!

Get a male, hand's down-you can cross a male to several different females in one season! A female can only have one mate a season.

[aureptiles]

I do plan on getting more morphs in the future, so the'rell be more other females for sure.

so far the advantages i see are:

male = more than one mate per season, therefore more hets

female = 1 clutch, but her male offsprings can be bred back to her earlier as males mature faster.

what are your thoughts on this?

[trott]

Depends on how far your willing to go. If you get a female you'll have to first produce hets then breed them back to get a chance at spider pieds. You'll be a few years away. If you want to produce more pieds id say get a female, feed her up and get a male het pied and get 50%(theor). takes time to get recessives to mix. Thats why there arent so many and they usually come from breeders with larger stock.

[Watever]

The male can breed more female. It can also produce sooner. If you have some female ready for him, might be worth it.

On the other hand, if you want to breed for a pied combo. You better get a female, but you gonna have to wait to raise her to weight. but once there, if you put a spider to it, you might have a spider 100% het pied for her the next season and eventually get a spider pied. So it's a bit shorter to procude them that way.