From my clutches in the incubator this season, my earlier hatching eggs made huge babies, the later eggs had small babies. Perhaps I'm just skewing the grade curve.
I see so many people fussing over their snakes not eating for a couple weeks, yet they are willing to have a female that hasn't eaten regularly for about a month(while gravid) go through a further TWO MONTHS of not eating, just to have the maternal incubation?
And how exactly is a female going to "instinctively know to seek out a suitable nest site" when being kept captive? Are you allowing her to roam the wilds of africa or keeping her in a secure enclosure? She has the "choice" of "the enclosure" or.... "the enclosure". It's not as if the female can crawl out and adjust the thermostat herself.
If someone wants to try maternal incubation and doesn't mind having a female basically fast for nearly 3 full months in order to do so, fine. *I* won't ever do it, because I prefer to allow my females to eat and recover from being gravid. I fuss over the weight they lose just producing eggs, I won't add to it by refusing to incubate the eggs for her.
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