Quote Originally Posted by starmom View Post
I would love to be informed of your hypothesis, experiment design, variables and outcomes. I think this is a very worthy experiment and have my own hunch. It is cool that you are willing to do this over time.
I don't think it will actually make much difference in the development of the babies other than maybe something digestive since snakes rely on surrounding heat to digest their food. One thing I think the RHP will require is a piece of tile put under it to simulate a rock under the sun. With that said I think it may be benificial to creating the environmental changes a snake sees during breeding season. With flex Watt you drop the temps 5 to 10 degrees and the tub reaches that within the hour! Not how it happens at night in the wild. The sun drops air temps cool, but the rocks all retain some warmth for a while. The act of looking for heat as the sun sets is something that could draw our boys and girls together in the evening as the sun sets. It might also help to trigger those natural urges! I see it as possibly a better way to simulate the breeding season and possibly get reluctant males to go after the girls and vice versa. The sooner we get our boys and girls to start locking up the sooner you may see eggs. The shorter the overall breeding cycle the sooner we can get our girls and boys that don't eat during breeding time back on food. The sooner and longer part of the year they are back on food the healthier and bigger the snake for the next breeding cycle.

Sorry Starmom, I'm not a scientist, biologist, or anything else that that ends in "ist"! I was trained as an electronics tech and work as an electrical engineer. As both I don't deal in hypothesis. I deal with law, rules, and application theory. I am good at taking notes and have a lot of work to do before I have all the controls in place to even attempt this. Plan on using a closet where the room temp changes and all other atmospheric (kids running around, cats pawing the front of the enclosure....) variables can be controlled as close as possible. Food will be as close to equal as possible and several other ideas have been formulated to keep variables to a minimum. Even with all that I don't think my experiments will be closely enough controlled nor include a large enough sample group to be put in the next science world magazine. It should be enough to help my wife and I know what works for us and possibly put the info out for those who are willing to work with this stuff on their own and see if they get similar results if I get any results worth mentioning at all.

First thing is first though my wife and I have wittnessed many locks between one of our big girls and the big proven breeder male we have. Now we just have to wait and see if we get our first batch of eggs! Once we are successful at breeding (Something other than rodents ), have a little extra income to devote to science, and have enough extra breeders we can let the fun stuff start.