starting to breed

[cwetzker]

What advice would you give to someone thinking of starting a small home-based cornsnake breeding program?

[HomeBreeder]

put someone else in charge of your bank account :)

Seriously, though - before you take a single step, get a good idea of what you really plan to acomplish. Then, think about what it's going to take to pull it off. You've already said "small, home-based" but that could mean wildly different things to different people.... Are you thinking of scope in regard to the number of "morphs" you'll be able to breed? or the number of breeders you'll keep on-hand?

I guess the smallest you can get, while seriously wanting to breed would be to have at a minimum 2.2 cornsnakes (2 males, and 2 females) If you want to keep it this small, but still have some "variety" in your offspring you still can; you'd want to get (for example) a pair of males that have caramel, amel, & motley genes (i.e. butter motleys) and a pair of females that were HET for those traits, or perhaps a caramel female het for amel and motley. In either case you'd get a wide variety of hatchlings. For example butter motley X het for butter motley would give you:

normals
motleys
caramels
caramel motleys
amels
amel motleys
butters
butter motleys

So having to be "small" doesn't mean you have to have boring offspring! With 8 types of offspring you might even be able to justify starting with 3.3 pair for real security that each season you'd have SOME good offspring!

Of course this is a narrow path, and all you can really do with selective breeding is hold-back the ones that appeal the most to you and refine the patterns and colors in your line over time. This MAY be thouroughly engaging for some, but others might prefer more "cutting edge" breeding programs, like integrating motley (or stripe) or even aztec or zigzaag into other morph lines.

So - what does "small" mean to you? Do you have a notion of how many snakes might be too many? What interests you most about breeding? What will it take to get you from here to there? Is it really conceivable? Is there a way you can start with 3 to 6 snakes to "get the gist" of it all? If you get 100, or 500 hatchlings in the course of a month, will you be able to manage them? Will you be able to handle the effort involved in finding buyers for the ones you don't want to holdback?

There's a 1001 questions to ask yourself - maybe we should work-up a FAQ for people that ask this question!

^Curtis

[cwetzker]

Wow!

Great reply. You've given me lots of things to think about.

I wouldn't want more than six snakes to start. And I like the darker normal corns. It seems like everyone is going toward lighter, yellower corns. If I went against the crowd and tried for a dark maroon normal with a great deal of contrast, would anyone even be interested in them? Or are there dark maroon normals all over the place and I'm just not looking in the right places?

So, when you started breeding, did you start with babies or proven breeders?

[LadyChaos]

babies....98% of my stock were either wee hatchlings or yearlings when I got them...only picked up a couple as 2 or 3 year olds. If you like the darker kids, go for miami corns...the burgundy that they develop is gorgeous, and with the silvery contrast you can't go wrong. Blood corns are also stunning, and charcoal corns also develop nicely as do the charcoal ghosts. As Curtis mentioned, breeding for pattern morphs is also a good choice....whether motley, striped, or zigzag.

and yes, lock up your credit cards, hide the checkbook...and set a budget...they're addictive.

cruise some of the sites...plenty of great stuff to choose from :)

www.serpenco.com

www.cornsnake.net

www.corn-utopia.com