A lesson learned. Know who your daddy is.

[Mike Cavanaugh]

In prior years, I have always had a few "whos your daddy" clutches. This is where you breed multiple males with one female... and when eggs are laid, you have no idea who the daddy is. Usually you can figure out the dad once the babies hatch....

It is all fun and games, until you get lucky, and something special hatches out. Then the reality of what you have done, and how you have totally screwed yourself sets in.

This happened to me this last season. I posted about the situation I experienced several times on this forum. Here is one of those threads.. http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...you-requested.

Summary: I bred a virgin female pastel to up to 3 proven breeder males. A cinny, a spider, and a pastel. The resulting babies were 2 bumble bees, a cinny, and the "???" snake. Here are the facts....

1.) The clutch had at least 2, possibly 3 dads.

2.) I have no idea what the "???" baby is other then I know for a fact it isn't a normal pastel, spider, or cinny.

3.) Cool problem to have right? Yeah, the snake is cool but the situation it put me in sucked.

4.) I have no idea who the dad of this baby is. In order to try to make another one, I would either have to breed the baby back to the mom, or try to breed her to the same males again (1 at a time this time).

5.) At the end of the season I made some hard business decisions and ended getting three males with multiple morphs to replace my old male breeders... therefore I had to sell off all of the possible dads of this snake.

6.) Now that I have all this money invested in my very expensive new male breeders, I can't waste a year (anytime soon at least) breeding the baby back to the pastel mom and possibly getting nothing.... I can't afford to take that chance... Instead she will be bred to one of my new 4-morph males.

7.) So I ended up having to sell the snake for next to nothing because I couldn't guarantee its genetics in any way, and there is no place for it in my future projects. Most think the absolute least it could be is a weird looking super pastel, but because of the uncertainty I couldn't even charge a super pastel price. (By the way the possible pastel dad just had another clutch hatch out with 2 super pastels. Neither one looks anything like this one... no way its the same morph)

Lesson learned: I will never not know who the dad of a clutch is again. It is all fun and games until something special happens... and things get very complicated, very quick.

Sure I could have kept him and done the necessary breeding to try to prove him out, but that just didn't fit into my plans. I would have had a lot more options if I knew for a fact who the parents were.