Well you can see my current ball pythons in my sig, along with their names. Some names had inspirations, others didn't. The first two are the longest stories; they get simpler after that.

The numbers on the balls refer to the order in which I acquired them, with missing numbers representing animals that were numbered in sequence, but that I no longer own.

#1 BRYAN: I have kind of a policy where if I get a snake off another owner, I want it to keep its name. In 2005 I had to modify this as I found out I might get a name I can't respect. I got this snake from a guy who was bringing him in to a local pet store to sell. I asked about the snake while he was still in the parking lot and the guy offered him to me for $60, cage and all. Having recently lost my first and only BP to a URI, I couldn't resist this one. But when I asked if it had a name, the guy said that the snake had belonged to his little boy, who called him "Browny," which obviously I couldn't stick with because I needed a more respectable name. However, wanting to keep as much of the name's integrity as I could, I eventually decided to pull a Tom Riddle and anagram the name into "Bryon." That spelling would eventually evolve into "Bryan" and here we are.

#2 KAY: Much like Bryan, I got Kay back in 2006 from a guy who was looking to get rid of her. I got her for free, cage and all, and good thing because her husbandry was absolutely horrible. That's another story in itself, but again I asked if she had a name. He said he called her "Killer" and once again I was not satisfied with keeping that one. Over a few weeks, me and a family I was staying with at the time worked on renaming her as best we could while trying to keep something of her old name. We got down to keeping just the first letter, K, and jokingly began to refer to her as "Agent K", as we were kind of into Men in Black II at the time. At this point we also did not know the gender of the snake yet. For the first year I had her, she co-habitated with Bryan and her gender was revealed when she laid a surprise clutch of eggs in July of 2006, just six months after I got her. With her confirmed female, the name "Agent K" morphed into "Kay" and that's how she's been known ever since.

#3 BRIANNA: Brianna was the first snake I ever hatched. She was the first to emerge from a clutch of 3 eggs in which one of them died about halfway through incubation. Her pattern is almost identical to that of Bryan, the sire, and appropriately was dubbed "Brianna" to commemorate that.

#4 ACE: Ace is Brianna's brother, hatching a few hours later. I numbered the egs 1, 2, and 3 during incubation, and this guy emerged from egg #1. I'm a poker player by hobby, and since he was in egg #1, and a male, he was dubbed "Ace" in reference to the 1 card in a deck of cards being called the Ace.

#6 MOCHA: My pastel girl was named Mocha because she is a little on the brown side and her coloration resembles Mocha coffee.

#7 CLEO: She was named by a friend of mine. We were trying to think of names, and as soon as she suggested "Cleo", it stuck instantly - she just looked like a Cleo to me.

#9 XAVIER: It took me forever to name my bee. I wanted something to play off of his head stamp that looks like a snake skull, but eventually the name "Xavier" stuck simply because it sounded the coolest of anything else I had come up with.

#10 DIABLO: My fire spider was given the seemingly hellish name "Diablo" in reference to his two genes being named for two seemingly hellish things: fire and spiders.

#11 FIONA: My (hopefully) fire girl was already named Fiona by her previous owner,

#12 LESLIE: My lesser girl was bought as a tag-along with Fiona and also was named already. This name is probably going to be shortened to "Lex" though, because calling a lesser "Leslie" seems painfully un-original to me.


Outside of the balls there are 3 others:

LANCE: My emerald tree boa was so named because, well, have you ever seen the teeth on one of those things? The first few times I handled him, all I could think was "Careful, don't wanna get lanced by those teeth!" And it didn't take long for the name "Lance" to establish itself.

JADE and JAZ, a.k.a. THE GRUESOME TWOSOME: My brother-and-sister pair of jungle carpets, which I picked up in 2009, are a handful to say the least. Their individual names hearken back to when I worked at a preschool in 2004-06. We had a set of 3yo little girl twins who were constantly causing chaos. I often referred to them as the gruesome twosome and their names were Jade and Jazmine. Well when I started working with these two carpets, it didn't take me long to start referring to them as my gruesome twosome, reminding me of those two girls. So it seemed fitting to use the names of the twin terrors for these two snakes lol. It works since "Jade" is marginally OK as a boy name, and his masculinity is still, well, questionable. "Jazmine" would eventually be shortened to just "Jaz."


Well there you have it. All of my names for my current snakes, and their origins.