Alfredo

2012

Hypo Pastel (Ghost)

Alien

2015

Albino Black Pastel

Cheesecake

2014

Albino

Firefly

2015

Fire Pastel

I happen to love ball pythons. Not sure why some breeders feel the need to bash on the species. Yes, ball pythons dominate reptile shows but people who are new to the reptile hobby also dominate reptile shows and ball pythons make great pets for most new keepers. As far as handling goes, some of mine will sit still for an hour without moving, so after wrangling one of my feisty animals it can be really nice to pull out a ball python and not worry about losing my life in the process. And it's always nice to have animals that you can safely hand off to guests.

Back in the early 2000's I owned 3 ball pythons. Of course at the time the only genetic morph that was available for a reasonable price was "normal" so all of mine were normals, or "wild-types". I remember in the late 90's and early 00's when albino and piebald ball pythons sold for $5,000 each and it was way cool to be able to buy animals like that for just a few hundred dollars a decade or so later.

I got my first ball python - a female - from a pet store, and I was given a male from someone who wasn't able to get it to eat. The snake had gone 9 or 10 months without food but I put it in a homemade rack and made sure it had a secure place to hide and heat and sure enough it started eating right away. I also had another, smaller female but I don't remember her story.

I was successful at getting the larger female to breed with the male but I was not able to incubate the eggs correctly and they all perished. But it was very exciting to see the first part of the snake reproductive lifecycle taking place right in our home.

Fast-forward to 2013 and I was at the Wasatch Reptile Expo in Salt Lake City when I saw some beautiful ball pythons on The Snake Keeper's table. I bought a male hypo pastel (Alfredo) and a female spider pastel (Fettucine) and planned to breed them when they got big enough. Unfortunately, when I put them together a few years later I witnessed combat between the two, and that's when I found that I actually had two males. Also, I was not aware of the neurological issues caused by the spider gene but I never witnessed any symptoms of that in Fettucine.

Getting those ball pythons sparked life into my reptile-keeping passion again and soon I added other species to the mix in addition to a couple new ball pythons. I bought the albino ball that I always wanted and gave it to my son for his 10th birthday. I also bought an albino black pastel, and a vanilla mojave. There wasn't much of a plan obviously.

I've bred the balls a few times and our family enjoys seeing the offspring. One of the things about reptile breeding that other people are good at is being able to detect if your snake is gravid (pregnant). I am not one of those people. The best way that I've found of detecting that a snake is gravid is when I open her cage and she's wrapped around a clutch of eggs. That seems to happen a lot for me. One time I still had the male in the cage when the female dropped her eggs haha. Poor guy.

It's hard to admit that I've had a snake escape, but it did happen one time. Alien, our albino black pastel ball python, got out and I knew he was somewhere in the room. Because I worked for a home security company at the time I had a security camera in the snake room. Every now and then while I was at work I would check the camera to see if Alien happened to be on the crawl. I got lucky. When I saw the image below, I called my wife from work and she ran down to the room to capture him.

See if you can spot the escapee in this picture

2017, and everyone has a ball python