Another one for maternal incubation...

[anatess]

It's been a while since I posted updates on our snakes. My husband, the kids, and I have been on a debate on whether to try to breed our pastel and spider. I was all against it, everybody else was for it - so, I lost the vote. Again.

My husband's friends have been egging him on because of the kind of morphs we have. So, they put the two together every other week starting last December. By January, nothing was happening and the spider (who is usually a really good eater) stopped eating, so I put a stop to the whole operation.

Curly, the pastel, never did show signs of ovulation or anything, so we figured she was too young - she was only 1500g at 3 years old last Christmas. Everything went back to normal until about 5 weeks ago when she went through a shed. Curly stopped eating and I was getting antsy after weeks and weeks of her refusing food.

Well, last Wednesday, we tried to feed her again and got a surprise - she had eggs! She tried to bite my husband, so we left her alone trying to figure out what to do next. Since we don't plan to do any other breeding besides this one, we've decided to do maternal incubation before we tried to breed them last year. I read up a lot on it from this site and on some books and it felt like that's the route for us.

Today is Friday - 2 days into the thing - and we are ready to be co-parents. We think. We prepared a plastic shoebox with a hole for her to get in and out of, and put the set-up into a sterilite container to get the humidity better controlled. It's running steady at 80% with temperature in the shoebox flunctuating between 86 and 87F and temperature outside the shoebox around 80F. So, we attempted the move. Man, she's gone from docile kids' pet python to nightmare momma overnight! We had to do the towel maneuver!

While we were moving her, we were able to see the eggs and there are 5 of them - candled nice and pretty. And since we were able to get her uncoiled from her eggs for a little bit, we figured to try to feed her. And she ate! Yep, she did. So then we put her in the shoebox and she went and curled right around her eggs.

It's a great relief... for now. But, I'm still biting my nails - I was half ready to beg Mike C for his incubator. But now that she fed, I think we're gonna be okay. I have to say, I wasn't liking this idea of breeding, but now, I'm kinda excited! This is going to be a very long summer.

I know you're gonna want pics. So here goes:

Eggs:


Swallowing her food down (I didn't take a picture of her while the rat wasn't swallowed yet because I had only the flashlight on to give her a safe feeling):


Back to her job:


Hope this all works out and gives the maternal incubation crowd a success story.