CapeFearConstrict
Wilmington, NC
Male, 32
I've been working with ball pythons for over ten years now. Two years ago I decided to breed them as a business. I run a small operation. Currently I have approximately 100 snakes in my breeding program and hope to produce over 200 babies in the 2013 breeding season. I've always been fascinated by reptiles, snakes in particular, and being able to work with them every day is very satisfying.
If a mutation is genetic, there's always a chance that it will be passed onto offspring. DNA comes in pairs. Each part of the DNA contributes something to the oganism. When a baby is created, half the DNA comes from the mom, half from the dad. Some mutations are only on half of the DNA pair, others are on both. When it's on half, there's a 50% chance it passes onto each offspring, when it's on both, there's 100% chance it passes on (but the resulting offspring may only end up with half the mutation, unless both parents pass on the mutation).
This is a very simplified explanation, but hopefully it gets the idea across. Any genetic mutation is passable. When the mutation is caused by environmental causes (usually due to temperature issues during development in the case of ball pythons), those mutations are not passed onto offspring.
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No, that's not possible. Like I mentioned in an earlier answer, snakes can't be trained in the same way dogs and cats can. They just don't have the intelligence required. It would also be difficult to teach them vocal commands because snakes don't have ears.
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Ball pythons got their name due to the fact that when they feel frightened or stressed, they ball themselves up. I've read that the reason ball pythons do this is because in their natural environment, the king cobra is their natural predator, and balling up makes them more difficult to swallow. I don't recall where I read that, so I can't verify if it's factual but it makes sense to me. As for other reasons why snakes might coil up, I think there might be a few different reasons. If they find a warm spot, like a rock that has been heated by the sun, coiling up over it makes sure their entire body gets the heat. It might also help to make them less visible to predators and to feel more secure. It could also put them in a better body posture to strike if they need to.
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There's no set rule that can be used to determine if a mutation (morph) will be valuable. It's all determined by how desirable the mutation is and how much supply there is of that mutation. As for making an individual snake valuable, you have some control over that. You would need to pair up a male and/or female that contain the gene or genes that you want in the baby, and then hope you hit the odds. The way the mutations work is that a baby is born that is different. The difference might be subtle or it might be blatantly obvious. Most of the morphs we have today came from wild caught animals from Africa. When these snakes are found, we don't know if the mutation is caused by a genetically passable trait, or if it's just some anomaly in the snake. A breeder will need to buy the snake and prove it out, which in some cases, can be very expensive. As an example, the viper ball mutation was bought for $70,000 and turned out not to be genetic. The GHI ball mutation was bought for $125 and now animals with that single gene are going for $10,000. It's a gamble that some of the big breeders take because the payoff can be enormous. A single new desirable gene can make a breeder hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few years. Can you create a valuable snake by breeding two normal or common snakes together? In extremely, extremely rare instances, yes, but normally no, that doesn't happen. The only way it could happens is if a random mutation occurs in one of the babies that turns out to be both genetic and desirable. There have been very few instances of this happening, but it does happen.
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Honestly, that's a tough question. An easier question would be "what's the worst thing about breeding snakes?" That would be cleaning up snake poop day after day. :) The best thing... It would have to be seeing baby snakes hatch out of their eggs. It takes anywhere from 4-8 months from the time you start pairing the male and female together until she lays eggs and those eggs are ready to hatch. Those babies are the culmination of months of anticipation, hoping, hard work and patience. It's a combination of seeing the miracle of new life, the feeling of accomplishment in knowing that you had a big hand in making it happen, and the hope you have for the future with the babies you just hatched. That would be the best thing about breeding snakes as far as I'm concerned.
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I feed most of my snakes rats of various sizes, depending on the size of the snake. The more picky eaters might get mice or African Soft Furs (ASFs), a more rare type of rat.
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As far as I know, there are no pythons that are cannibals. There are some other species of snakes, such as the king snake or the king cobra, that do eat other snakes.
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