I also just realized today that our pinstripe girl snuck an ovulation by me!  I don't really have any sort of set schedule for palpating, so it had been a while since I checked her out.  She just shed this past weekend and I noticed she was hugging the back wall where the heat is in my adult racks.  So I pulled her out and palpated her, and sure enough she's got eight or nine eggs her!  I'll be looking forward to that clutch, she was bred to both our vanilla and our orange dream males.

RIP Speckles, 2006-2012

On to the good news!  We've had a couple more ovulations, one of which happens to be one of our 'superblack' sumatran short tailed pythons!  We had bought them as a male and female pair, but I guess this is definite proof that the 'male' is really a female... it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this girl.  Hopefully we'll end up with a male that looks as good as her to become one of our breeders.

The other ovulation is from one of our black pastel girls.  I've  been pairing her up with our albino spider male, so I'm hoping to get some black bee het albinos out of this clutch!

I'll leave you with a sneak peak at a pairing that I'm definitely excited about, and really hope leads to some hatchlings!

Here's what the three vanillas look like now... the two on the side are what I'm generally used to seeing vanillas look like on the forums, and the one in the middle is the big question mark for me.  Is she 'just' a really nice vanilla or something more?  They are all possible het hypo, could it just be that she landed with the het hypo gene and it's showing through a bit?

I'm not certain who I'm going to pair up this year, but it's a close tie between Jade and one of our super black girls. The only male we have (which is sad since our other male is possibly a female!) is our light headed male that came from the same litter as our black headed female Jade, so he should be compatible with the super blacks. BUT I might have to think about this pairing below a bit longer... Just imagine, pure black bloods!

This little guy died in the egg before he started absorbing any yolk, and he's probably the most normal looking of the clutch.

I've also pretty much got the breeding projects page all up to date for the moment, so you can get an idea of what we might have available later this year!

This girl weighs 363 grams.

This guy weighs 523 grams.

This one weighs 925 grams.

And this girl weighs 1664 grams.

Now I just have to hope that his genes beat out the lesser and kingpin males that have both locked up with her this week!

If anyone remembers this guy, I was hoping to get him up to size to breed back to his mother this year and find out if there's some het red axanthic floating around in there.  Unfortunately it's looking like she's going to ovulate in the next week or so and he's got no interest in breeding yet.  On the bright side, her being this close to ovulation seems to have been just what the kingpin needed to get things in gear!  Hopefully the results from this clutch will give us a better idea as far as if she's something special or not.

Black pastel yellowbelly -- produced by Tom Barnhart

Orange dream -- produced by Bob O'Brien

Vanilla -- produced by Luis Alonzo, also the only 2010 male that's started breeding for me at this point

Clown -- produced by Evan Stahl

Enchi het hypo -- produced here and the ONLY enchi in that clutch, hoping to get him breeding by the end of the season and produce an enchi hypo!

Lesser paradox -- produced here, hoping to breed him back to mom this year and see if anything might be going on there... this was the only picture I could snap before he took off and tried to jump off the table

Another oddball lesser produced here and hoping to breed him back to mom this year also...

Albino spider -- produced here... he's one of those snakes that will NOT sit still for a proper photo shoot... thought it was pretty cool how the white spider pattern when he hatched out has now turned orange

Kingpin -- produced here... another guy that won't sit still long enough to take a photo outside of his tub

I'll try to get a post up next week with some updated pictures of the girls we held back this past year, they're turning out to be smoking hot!

I've also got a good number of updated pictures to post up of some of the animals we produced last year that we held back, expect another post for that stuff in the near future!

Hit the picture to see more!

We also got our male enchi het hypo that I was hoping for from clutch bp10-8.  Of course it was the ONLY enchi in the clutch!

This little guy (yep, it's a male!) hatched out alongside three of what look like our 'normal' lessers that hatch.  He looks similar to a het red lesser, but everyone I've talked to says not quite the same.  You can bet he'll be going back to his mother as soon as he's breeding size to see if there really is something going on!

He just didn't want to be a normal, and he is anything but that. This guy is gorgeous, and we can't wait until he has his first shed. Clutch picture of his mates at the end of the post.

Cheers,

Now for the bad luck.  Our spider female laid her clutch last night, and it ended up being mostly slugs.  Two good eggs and nine slugs.  We'll be keeping our fingers crossed for a lesser bee or stinger bee out of one of those eggs!

We totally didn't expect any of our Sumatrans to go this year, especially our Hartwig animals as she only locked up once that we saw.  Fifteen nice big eggs, but a few looked like they might have been infertile when I candled them.  Few days in the incubator should be all it takes to find that out.