Sorry, I'd typed out a reply days ago, but it didn't post for some reason

Quote Originally Posted by HannahLou View Post
One of my pied females will only be her first breeding year so debating putting my coral glow pied and mahogany pied with her.
No matter what you end up doing . . . Best of luck! Pieds for the win!! lol

Quote Originally Posted by bcr229 View Post
For dual-sired clutches I put the male in with the female on alternating weeks. So, week 1 male A goes in, week 2 male B, week 3 male A, etc.
I like the alternating weeks idea. If I ever try a dual-sired clutched again, I'm going to try that.

I hadn't heard about the "passive choice" thing. That's interesting.
Quote Originally Posted by Albert Clark View Post
. Nice deduction Alicia, I have been breeding garter snakes for the past 5 years and the "passive choice" phenomenon is something new to me. It does sound plausible in any case. I don't know how effective the time of pairing is since all the sperm is stored until ovulation when the follicles leave the ovaries and travel downwards to be fertilized in the oviducts. However stranger things have happened.
It would depend on the female having either some way of destroying sperm in the oviducts, possibly competition between sperm, or sorting at the ova-level. Weirdly, the Barkers suggested in Pythons of the World vol 2 that the female ball python's immune system may attack late-arriving material -- although I don' t know what their source was. As some populations of garters have such a wildly different reproductive strategy than BPs, I don't know if it's the kind of thing we would see in a who's yer daddy clutch . . . But any time there's a precedent, I don't think it hurts to toss something out there.