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Greg's Reptiles
Ball Pythons

Here is my adult female with her first clutch of eggs. She laid 5 perfect eggs that day but chose to lay them under the newspaper instead of in her next box. I pulled her out and her whole body was so thin! During the next six weeks I fed her two rats per week to get her back to normal again. She didn't fight with me about taking her eggs away, but after they were out she kept crawling around where she had laid them as if she was looking for them.

Here are the 5 eggs in vermiculite right before they went into the incubator. They had adhered together so I couldn't separate them before going in. This was my first time incubating snake eggs so I wasn't really counting on being successful. It's a good thing because there was an incubator mishap during the final two weeks and the eggs went bad.  T hese were big eggs by the way. I put my hand in the picture for scale.

This is my male and adult female breeding. I put the two together and gradually lowered the temperatures 6 or 8 degrees - day and night. They got the hint. There was lots of breeding activity during the next couple of months and it led to the successful laying of my females first 5 eggs.
This is a closeup shot of my adult female. Ball pythons have very cool heads!
Here's the adult female that I bought at a pet store back in January of 1998. She's a sweetheart and one of the only snakes that my wife never minds picking up. She eats pretty regularly - for a ball python - but lately she's only taken live rats. I don't know how I ever got her on the live ones.
This is my male ball python. Like the little female, he was given to me when his previous owner gave up trying to feed him. He's a pretty consistent eater. When he's "on" he'll eat 2 out of every 3 feedings. And fortunately he doesn't mind thawed rats. He's very dark obviously and I'm hoping that in the hysteria of ball python morphs someone will come along and tell me that he's some rare form of ball and offer me a huge amount of money. Doesn't he look like he might be one of those rare, "Black Licorice" morphs? :)
Here is my little female ball python. She hasn't been as consistent as I would like her to be. She seems to be intimidated by anything larger than a fuzzy or hopper rat. (sigh) She's going to be growing pretty slowly. When this photo was taken she had only gotten to 590 grams. Oh well. One day she'll do something besides curl up in a tight ball and hiss at me. :)
This is a female ball python that I got at the beginning of 2002. She had been a problem feeder before, but I have gotten her to consistently feed on small, live rats. She was 500 grams when this photo was taken.