This is a spinoff from this thread: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...nal-Incubation
Here are the reasons I would NEVER do Maternal Incubation:
Originally Posted by Mike Cavanaugh
Maternal Incubation would be something fun to "play" with if your breeding normals, or working with inexpensive snakes. But for those of us breeding higher dollar snakes it is something I would never even begin to consider, and for good reason.
1.) Cost. You can build an excellent simple incubator for less then $300. Mine is four years old and still works perfectly. Considering it has successfully incubated more then $60,000 worth of snake babies, I would say that the less then $300 spent on it is absolutely irrelevant.
2.) The babies. I have total control over the babies. Because of all the work our founding snake fathers have done, I know exactly what the perfect incubation temperature, humidity, conditions are and can consistently provide the best possible conditions to insure the highest hatch rate and the healthiest babies in the end.
3.) The what if's. My incubator is a completely insulated large cooler. The bottom is covered with full water bottles for temperature stabilization. In the event of extended power loss, even in cooler weather, I will be fine. In fact it has happened. Because it is an insulated cooler it holds temperatures WAY better then a rack ever could. The water bottles on the bottom retain heat for a long time in that insulated scenario. When my power went out it was 24 hours before my cooler temperature dropped 10 degrees. At that point I ended up plugging the incubator into my car power inverter for two hours to bring it back up to temperature. About 20 hours later when I was ready to heat it up again the power was restored. The whole thing probably ended up costing me a gallon of gas. There was over $11,000 worth of eggs in the incubator at the time.
4.) the mom. I want those eggs away from the mom the second they are out of her. The day she lays the snake is removed and the tub is scrubbed top to bottom. That next day she is offered food for first time. I then put her on a very heavy feeding schedule feeding multiple rats often. My number one goal is to get the weight back on her absolutely as quickly as possible so she is ready to lay an even larger clutch the next season. Yes the mom may eat some while she is incubating the kids but she isn't eating nearly enough. "playing around" with maternal incubation could cause her to not gain enough weight back in time for the next season. At this point in the game a missed year for some of my females could be a loss of $10,000 worth of babies.
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