Here's my $.02 for what it's worth ...

I use an incubator ... always have and always will.

With the husbandry of any animal when making decisions about their care, you have to ask yourself what the pros and cons are of any choice you make for that animal.

Assuming that any person can have equal success manually incubating a clutch of eggs or maternally incubating a clutch of eggs as far as hatch rate goes ... what are the benefits of taking the eggs vs. letting mom do it.

For manual incubation (taking the eggs), I can think of several benefits ...

1. Health of the female ... getting a female warm and eating again after a long season of breeding is paramount to their overall physical health. Even though many people have very healthy females after maternal incubation, if all other things are equal then why would you want to wait? Wouldn't you want the female to start eating again sooner rather than later?

2. Stress ... All captive ball pythons are under stress to some degree. It is also well known that stress in ball pythons has a direct influence over an animals health. Females that are sitting on a clutch of eggs are definitely under a higher state of stress than a female that has had her eggs taken. As a care giver, my goal is to reduce the animals stress as much as possible and I personally feel that taking a females eggs helps her to become "less stressed".

3. Cleanliness ... I am a NUT about cleaning cages. Every single cage in my shop gets washed every single week ... no exceptions. I could not imagine a cage that has gone through 60+ days of ball python urine. I would go nuts not being able to take the female and the eggs out to clean!!

As far as benefits for maternal incubation??? I can't think of a single one.

Of course this whole deal is assuming that any person would have equal success hatching a clutch of eggs with maternal or manual incubation. I guess if you were a cheap ba$tage and didn't want to fork out a couple of dollars for an incubator and some vermiculite ... or you were a total idiot that couldn't put a clutch of eggs in a box for 60 days without screwing things up then maternal incubation might be right for you .... but for me, the benefits to my precious females are far to great with manual incubation to ever change my mind.

-adam