people confuse me

[Pythonfriend]

They are worth more when they are up to breeding size. Also sometimes people get very good deals on clutches and hatchlings.


So some guys might just have a rack for female breeders, a few enclosures for males, and a hatchling/subadult rack. And then they buy and trade for hatchlings, and sell well-started hatchlings and subadults and adults and proven breeders.

People do it with tropical fish, some discus fish breeds are 20 dollars or 50 dollars as well-started babies and 120 or 300 dollars as full-grown adults retail, with price going up with body length in several steps. So one economic model is to get large numbers of babies, to grow them up while continuously selling a few, to get a stable group of 10 with selected high-end optics, and then sell that group for a hefty sum to a breeder or derive breeding pairs from that group. (a bit different, they are kept in groups but bred in pairs and you need a group and watch its behavior to determine sex and select good breeding pairs). Others specialize on the difficult breeding process, to produce maybe 100 offspring at a time, to be sold as babies in quantity as soon as they are off plankton and getting coloration.

Very different animals, but one thing is about the same when comparing BPs to discus fish: it takes years to get them to breeding size and their price rises during that time until they are mature.

Maybe its just economics for some? people can have one foot in the business if they dont breed but on the side always raise a few hatchlings up to perfect breeding age and weight. And other people can focus on the breeding by buying ready to breed BPs and selling hatchlings.

another reptile example would be: i heared about a breeder of albino aligators that offers a deal where you get a baby, raise it up, and once it reaches a certain size you can trade it in for another baby to raise up.

of course there is the odd person that majorly screws up and simply buys a snake that will outgrow his or her own ablities. But i think we see this more with even bigger snakes, or alligators, green iguanas, monitors, aquatic turtles. With BPs, it seems to be less of a problem, they stay quite small, i mean, you wont need to switch to rabbits or chickens and it wont grow into something you can no longer handle alone.