Quote Originally Posted by T&C Exotics View Post
4 males and 1 female... ratio is flipped there... you should get quite a few females anf raise them up. Odds are you will not be breeding any females next year that you buy now
true.

you have 4 males, two of these are single-gene (nice pastel, spider), two of them are visual recessives (orange ghost = hypo, piebald). and one normal female. 4 males can easily breed 10 or more females. you wont need another male for a very long time, you will eventually replace them with your own holdback males.

people always say the males should be genetically more powerful / valuable than the females. in this case i would say forget about it, and use the males you have, until you produce males that are better. getting males from the egg up to breeding size does not take long.

for example, for piebald, you could get visual piebald with extra genes, or 100% het pied with extra genes. like, for example, a spider 100% het pied female and an enchi 100% het pied female. when you hatch out a male visual pied with enchi, you raise it up to take the place of your piebald male, to advance to enchi spider pied and super enchi pied.

the same with hypo. you need visual pied or 100% het pied females with extra genes for the pied project, and the same for the hypo project. since you have male visuals, you have no need to do het to het breedings, which is good.

the spider male and pastel male can work with almost any other codominant/dominant combo. the usual suspects are enchi, lesser/butter, pinstripe, mojave, yellowbelly, sugar/calico, cinnamon, black pastel, fire, and recently banana/coral glow are joining the club. you can get single-gene females or go right to double-gene females. endless choices. but you want to hold back nice double-gene and triple-gene males you produce to replace the single-gene males. you could get 5 female morphs or combos that work well with pastel as well as spider, and breed both males to all of them, one male serving as backup for the other.

everyone should already know it.... but ill post it anyway, forgive me if you have seen this link 100 times already:
http://ballpythonbreeder.com/2012/02...thon-breeders/

right now you only need females, the right ones, and then you can progress for quite a while by choosing the right holdbacks from your own production to raise up. right now you could breed your spider male and pastel male to your normal female, as a test run / for fun / to maybe get a nice female spider or female pastel. the normal will be more useful later on when you have double-gene or triple-gene males. but later you will also want to replace and upgrade your females.