Breeding is starting early this year.....

Got a few females who have already had three breedings already. This is pretty early for around here. I just noticed a lot of females going through sheds early and decided to give them a go with a male.

Kind of strange how it seems that only certain parts of a room will have much activity, and others not much at all. Must be something to do with temperature differences from one side of the room to another.

Be nice to be able to control that so I could pace the breeding so not everything happens at once. It's pretty mind numbing to one day take stock of what is going on and realize that you have 200 clutches that need to have the newly hatched babies set up or shipped out NOW........ :eek1:

Wow Im glad I dont have that problem...wait no I'm not. Anytime you want to lighten your load up, I can send you my address. :grin01:

*lol* I don't have one tenth of what Rich has, and I can't seem to sell them off.. I am glad I don't make my living from Corns.. Dang Rich, would it not have been easier to have got a regular job? :shrugs: :cheers:

Regards.. Tim of T and J

TandJ said:

*lol* I don't have one tenth of what Rich has, and I can't seem to sell them off.. I am glad I don't make my living from Corns.. Dang Rich, would it not have been easier to have got a regular job? :shrugs: :cheers:

Regards.. Tim of T and J

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Sometimes I do think that....... But then again, I don't have to fight traffic to and from work every day. :grin01:

Sometimes I do think that....... But then again, I don't have to fight traffic to and from work every day.

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That is the positive side Rich.. You have no traffic to deal with, except for the race to the coffee pot in the morning.. * really makes me think I should keep looking towards the more northern states once again... *

Regards.. Tim of T and J

Breeding is in full swing right now. I gave the guys and gals the night off tonight to recharge their batteries. Mine, too, actually. Trying to work on taxes at the same time.........

It's funny how some cultivar combos seem to breed later than others. Blizzards always seem to be the first to go at it. Hypo Blood Reds and my Ultra/Hypo Lavenders always the last. Yet Hypo Lavs are breeding, as are the GoldDust project corns and the Hypo Lavender Blood Red lines. You can really tell that temps play a big part of the stimulus as well, as some parts of the rooms will kick in before other parts. In one rack I'll get maybe 75 percent hits, but in the one right next to it, maybe 20 percent...... :shrugs:

Off and On I have noticed.. The males will be ready then the females shoot them down.. Then the females are flagging like crazy and the males most wanted to breed to that girl is not intrested.. Damn, we can't seem to win.. At least this year I am not expecting a lot of clutchs and nothing spectacular.. :shrugs: Next year should be a different story, I hope.. Gees, my two or three clutchs this year would be so relaxing for you Rich.. *lol* Anyways, good luck fending off the tax man..

Regards.. Tim of T and J

Yeah...... Been trying a different breeding method this year by concentrating on all of the females immediately receptive, get them bred with multiple males, and then move on to the next group of females who finally weaken their resistance. So if a female doesn't immediately take to a male, she may have to wait for a couple of weeks before I will try her again. Give her some time to think about it a bit..... Seems like a LOT of work this way and I am getting a lot of breeding activity, but sheesh, I still have an entire ROOM I haven't even introduced males to females yet! :eek1: But fortunately it's a SMALL room.... Maybe less than 100 females in there........... I did do a test breeding with about a half dozen females, but NONE of them were interested, so they can all just wait till I get around to them again.

The reason I am doing it this way is because in years prior, I found that any females I short changed with multiple males (maybe only a SINGLE breeding) would often let me down in fertility. So I'm giving this a try to see what sort of difference it makes. Of course, I feel like I am playing beat the clock to get everything done before the window of opportunity closes on those later females. It's possible I may miss some females completely, unless they cycle in again later on, though. But if there is dramatically increased fertility with all the earlier breedings, then it probably won't matter at all.

Since I'm the only one who can do this here, it puts me under the gun to get a LOT done each day. And unfortunately I haven't even TOUCHED the tax stuff for two days now......... :bang:

But dang I'm tired.........

Rich mentioned the following...

And unfortunately I haven't even TOUCHED the tax stuff for two days now.........

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Thats what your accountant is for.. :shrugs: :sidestep:

I don't think I qualify as a breeder really, with the few clutchs this year.. I noticed something though, that after breeding a pair in their own seperate container, I put the next pair into the "used" container.. Needless to say I had a hook up with the second pairing too.. In both cases it seemed that the males were chasing the females around with no result ( or the one pair anyways ), but they got busy after being put into the used breeding tub.. Maybe smell got them excited? I don't know.. I somehow think though, after a 100 females have been through the tub Rich your going to have a nasty ole mess with a tub being sent to the garden to be washed out with the garden hose first.. *lol*

Regards.. Tim of T and J

Interesting that you mention activity in different parts of a room and then various morphs that are early or late.

I have just one room full of adults and the various morphs had been in their own sections for several years. I always noticed that the south side of the building always breeds before the north side. But I never knew if it was because of temps, lighting, or just the bloodlines that were in various parts of the building.

This year I have thinned down the collection and no longer use the north side of the building. In addition, I mixed up the order of the various morphs so that some of the latest breeders are now next to some of the earliest breeders. I always noticed that the earliest breeders were usually okeetees and blizzards, often follwed by caramels, and that the latest breeders were bloodreds and ghosts. Now that they are all on the same side of the room, and the order is mixed up, I find that the order in which they breed has remained pretty much the same.

Nothing too earth shattering in importance, just an interesting observation.

Yeah, it may even be an individual thing as well. I have one female Hypo Blood Red who is ALWAYS the last one to breed. She has it down pat to have her eggs hatch about two weeks after Expo.......

It would be curious to pay attention to this to try to figure out what sort of factors DO influence the breeding cycle. One would think that the geographical source of the stock might certainly do so. Would animals originating from the keys breed sooner or later than those coming from New Jersey?

A while back when I used to keep daily records of the day/night temps (yeah I used to have that kind of time....), I noticed that it appeared to be the overnight temps that seemed to have a big influence. In other words, breeding never commenced until the overnight lows went ABOVE a certain point, regardless of what the daytime highs were. But maybe there were other factors involved as well.... :shrugs: I'm sure there are a lot of things that have minor effects, but realistically it would be foolish of mother nature to have such things completely hinging on factors without quite a bit of leeway.

But here's another thing I have noticed. It seems that every year I will hit a couple of periods of time where several clutches have a higher proportion of infertiles than at other times. Is there an environmental factor behind this? If there a particular time of the month (based on what? Cycles of the moon?) when breeding should NOT occur? I know some people who religiously believe in the Almanac for such things, so perhaps there really is something behind this....

Just interesting speculation, I guess....

Rich Z said:

But here's another thing I have noticed. It seems that every year I will hit a couple of periods of time where several clutches have a higher proportion of infertiles than at other times. Is there an environmental factor behind this? If there a particular time of the month (based on what? Cycles of the moon?) when breeding should NOT occur? I know some people who religiously believe in the Almanac for such things, so perhaps there really is something behind this....

Just interesting speculation, I guess....

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Do you know if those infertilities where in clutches from snakes that were taken out of brumation at the same time?

I would tend to think that it might be related more to some sort of cycle related to length of time out of brumation rather than certain environmetnal cues. But maybe not...
For instance (and this is completely hypothetical), if sperm cells had a certain lifespan inside the body and there weren't continuous generation of new cells. You could be catching the males on the cusp of when the first cells are dying and they haven't begun to produce more yet. Or somehow related to the levels of testosterone in the males, which might peak at certain times depending on when they came out of brumation...

Everything here comes out of brumation at exactly the same time. And I breed multiple males to the females. It seems that the date they are laid is more significant, as I will have a day here or there when I just hit a rough time with infertiles. Heck, of course it will likely have nothing at all to do with when they breed, since the period between breeding and laying is not a constant value. You would think that infertile clutches would just be evenly spaced throughout the entire laying season. :shrugs:

Beats me, just one of those odd coincidences that I notice every year.

Well unfortunatley, I know from experience that heat spikes during certain times of breeding will cause a lot of infertiles. I wonder if it's due to some unusually warm days during a certain point of a breeding cycle. :shrugs:

I have also noticed some weeks when the infertiles seem higher than usual. I always chalked it up to coincidence. I doubt that I will ever get around to going through old records and looking for interesting correlations, but it could be interesting for some student who wanted to do a paper on it. They could look back through a bunch of old breeding records and see if there was any statistical correlation between dates bred, dates laid, females from one year to the next, or even weather info, if they wanted to dig that far.

carol said:

Well unfortunatley, I know from experience that heat spikes during certain times of breeding will cause a lot of infertiles. I wonder if it's due to some unusually warm days during a certain point of a breeding cycle. :shrugs:

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Just out of curiosity, how high did those spikes get to, Carol? And at what point in the breeding cycle did they take place?

I had two spikes in the low 90's. That really mucked up the whole season for me with very few clutches being fertile after the spikes unless they had laid eggs before or ovulated after the spikes. I was so devestated I didn't document breeding times and cluch losses, it was just too much to look at especially since the two spikes were about 3 weeks apart. Three females that were all layed around the same time and were early in their ovulation during the heat spikes actually laid "slug soup" a disgusting mass of liquified slugs. Others laid normal slugs but I got so many dud clutches from proven breeders it was heartbreaking. Thank goodness it wasn't perminant and the same breeders are giving me wonderful fertility this year. My case is a little extreme but I think it's pretty reasonable to believe that lower spikes could do damage to males and females during certian points of the breeding phase.

Ouch! Man sorry to hear that. I have failsafes in place to keep temps from never going over 85 degrees. But actually you're not really out of the woods until the eggs actually hatch. Heat spikes can still screw things up with the developing babies. Not as badly as killing off sperm before the eggs are fertilized or the developing embryos, but still clutches of kinked up snakes will hit just as hard.

Several years ago I bought an 20kw automatic generator for both the reptile building and the mouse building, For peace of mind sake, it is probably the best money I have ever spent. My wife actually talked me into this. She looked at the price of the generator and said "You know, if the power went out and killed off just all the mice, you would spend that much money in just a couple of month's time buying mice to feed everything and getting the mouse colony started up again." I couldn't argue with that logic.....

And I had actually had a close call a while back where that ALMOST happened....... :eek1:

Got the first female in the process of laying eggs right now. And so another season begins.............. :sidestep:

So you'll be starting work on your 2007 pricelist any day now, right? :sidestep: