My new pet lizards!

[Crow]

This is Bella, and she will be arriving sometime next week. She's what is called a green pastel, which is a dark brown snake.

Bella.jpg

[Jedidiah]

Attachment 85619

4/27/13. Clutch of eight eggs and no slugs from Miss Maenad. Mom and clutch are doing fine.

Give her my best and tell her I am glad to finally get the news.

[mossrose]

She looks a proper protective mom.

[DesertBerean]

Hm yeah. How did you count them if you found her like that? Or were you there for the blessed event?

[Jedidiah]

Now that we have the egg pics, how long do I have to wait for "baby pictures?"

[Crow]

It will take about 2 months for the eggs to hatch, plus 2-3 days for the umbilical cord to separate from the baby so they will actually crawl out of the hole that either they or I will cut in each egg.

Ball pythons are fiercely protective mothers, but Miss Maenad is a pet snake and she trusts me, even with her eggs. I took the eggs, counted them, then put them into the incubator and let her see where they were. I doubt she understands that the incubator will do her job for her, but all the same it is unusual and kind of humbling to me when a mother python will trust me enough to let me take her clutch and not even strike at me.

Maenie ate a couple of very small rats a bit after I took the eggs, and I'm going to wait a few days before I start taking her out and letting her hang out with me. She has a spot in the living room where the sun hits the floor that she likes to bask on, which is weird because her species is strictly nocturnal.

[Crow]

This is a pic of one of Miss Maenad's eggs. I'm candling them, using an LED light to illuminate the structures so that I can determine if the eggs are healthy or not.

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The strong network of blood vessels shows that this particular egg is healthy at this point in it's development, although much can go wrong in the next two months untill this snake is due to hatch. You can see the form of the baby snake indistinctly. Here is a picture of another python at the same stage of development to give you an idea of what the babies look like at this time in their life.

python embryo freshly laid egg.jpg

If you look closely you can see the limb bud for the snake's hind leg. This bud will not develop into a limb in the baby snake, a snake's legs are present only in the very early stages of embryonic development. It will develop in a ball python more so than in colubrid snakes. There is a single vestigial toe on the either side of a ball python's vent--as with birds the snake has a single opening for the reproductive and urinary and digestive tracts. Here is a picture of a ball python's vestigial toes with toenails, AKA spurs. Although vestigial they are not totally useless, the male tickles the female with his spurs when courting her.

spurs1.jpg

[Crow]

The new kids:

First up, Bella, a green pastel. This is an uncommon ball python, not many of them out there yet. As you can see, green pastels are brown.

bella and russos 016.JPG

Next up is a Russo, heterozygous for the white diamond gene. I have a male/female pair of them but one is in shed. I'm going to wait a bit before I check to see who is who. I think this is the girl, but could be mistaken.

bella and russos 009.JPG

When you breed two Russos, you get about 1/4 normals, 1/2 Russos (look like the parents) and 1/4 white diamonds. This is the type of snake I'm going to be breeding for in a couple of years when the Russos mature.

White diamond.jpg

[Jedidiah]

How do the whites do in the wild, do you know? I would suspect that the coloration would be a disadvantage as is the case with most albinos. But, some do quite well.

[Crow]

The bright white would be a disadvantage in the wild, but adult wild albinos and other white snakes have been caught. This "morph" or form is not an albino, it's the homozygous expression of a codominant gene. One copy lightens the animal considerably. Two copies makes a white animal with blue eyes.

Many snake genes are neither dominant nor recessive but codominant. Pastel makes a very bright yellow snake, yellowbelly makes an off white snake, cinnamon makes a snake that is dark brown and looks like a turd with eyes.

Pied is a recessive--you need two pied snakes or normal appearing snakes with the pied gene to make them.

[Crow]

Minnie the Mean Snake looks as if she's getting ready to lay a clutch within the next few days.

Lumpy 001.JPG

Minnie carries one copy of the recessive gene for piebald and she is bred to a piebald, so there is an excellent chance that part of her clutch with hatch out brown and white like their father.