Hi everybody, I'm new to the forum and ball pythons although not new to herps in general. As a youngster, I kept several different herps and had amassed quite a collection at one point but lost it due to placing my trust in the wrong person. Some of the reptiles and amphibians I kept in my youth included:

Corn Snakes
Rat Snakes
African House Snake
African Egg-Eating Snake
Columbian Boa (Red-Tail)
Savannah Monitor
Green Anolis
Thai House Geckos
Green Tree Frogs
Grey Tree Frogs
Argentinian Horned Frog
Brown Basilisk
Red-eared sliders

After losing my collection (which was rather disheartening), I became wrapped up enough in my junior and then high school social life that I never thought of keeping anything else until I reached university, when I it wasn't feasible to keep anything due to moving back and forth from home to school every year. Well, I finally graduated in May and am now just as ever fascinated by herps.

I had always wanted a Green Tree Python and there is a breeder not too far away from me, but having not kept anything substantial for almost a decade I decided I'd best spend a year or two rekindling my husbandry skills before making such a significant investment. I fell in love with the appearance of boids after the red-tail I used to have, but since I may move a few times due to employment as I am only just a fresh graduate, I decided to keep something that wouldn't demand quite as much space when full grown. The logical choice of course, was a ball python.

Although the animals I kept as a youngster always thrived, in retrospect I may not have taken as good care of them as I could have. I'm amazed at how much information I can find about herps on the Internet and as a result, I'll pay much more attention to detail this time around. For instance, where I would have just been content with a nice hot lamp before and a regular fish mercury thermometer I'm now using a human heatpad and a digital thermometer to monitor both ends of my ball python's temperature gradient. Also, I always fed live prey in the past but thanks to this forum and various other sources I won't be doing that anymore ;p I only received my ball python on Tuesday, and I learned from the breeder that he hasn't been able to switch him to prekilled yet so I'll feed live the first few times to get him well acclimatized, but I'm already looking into getting some carbon dioxide so I can humanely euthanize his prey a few meals down the road.

Anyway, I just wanted to say I really appreciate a great resource such as this, and I look forward to interacting with all of you as I learn about my new ball python.