Ball python breeding

[pythontricker]

my teacher is offering to lend me her female ball python to breed to mine. the female is 5 yrs old but she is very small. smaller than my two 1/2 year old male. shes approximatly 1 lb. could this female be fertile and actually have babies? or would she just not know what to do?

[jdmls88]

WAYYYYY too small, need to be atleast 1500grams, if its really only one lb then your talking 450 grams! If anything that snake needs to be rescued she should be in the 2000+ range

[Lucero87]

Wow, i agree...i've never bred before but i know that that's WAY too small

[pythontricker]

its just that she feeds on adult live mice. and is really small. but she is not too skinny. she looks to be the appropriate weight for a bp of that size. she is 5 yrs of age though.

[bcampos]

There are some excellent books on BP breeding, and lots of information available through the search engine of this site. Please do some research before diving into this.

[jdmls88]

i dunno whats up but she "should" be on small-med rats

[Purrrfect9]

There are quite a few members on here that feed their adult BP's mice for one reason or another. So the fact that the BP eats mice in general is not a bad thing, as long as it's 1-2 adult mice once a week. A BP should experience the same growth rate as it would if it were being fed 1 small adult rat per week.

Before you decide to breed your BP's, I would definately see if you could get an exact weight on her, because if the female really is 1 lb, there is something majorly wrong. Has this BP been in your teachers care for all 5 years, or did they recently get it and was told that it was 5 years old? Have fecals been done on both animals to check for any parasites that they could pass to each other? How are you going to house the babies once they hatch? Who are you going to sell the hatchlings to, and how will you market them? Those are just a few things to keep in mind while you are still considering breeding BP's.

[rabernet]

Do NOT breed a 1 lb female - you could kill her!

Now, I think you need to get a digital scale and get an appropriate weight on her first. You also need to determine who's paying for her vet care while you have her. How you plan to reimburse your teacher if she dies in your care, etc.

How do you plan to incubate the eggs? Do you know how to get hatchlings started? Breeding snakes is more than putting two snakes together, and I think you need to put a lot more thought and research into it.

[pythontricker]

http://www.ballpython.ca/gallery/breeding.html yeah ive been studying this.

[Enve]

http://www.ballpython.ca/gallery/breeding.html yeah ive been studying this.

As great of a guide that may be you should REALLY read lots of different reputable articles to get a nice broad spectrum of information. Even though they are animals they are still lives and if you jump into breeding and your not 100% sure on what your doing you will loose them.