New Snake

I just purchased this 08 male het albino possible super salmon boa from Rich and John at salmonboa.com. He looks great in the pics they sent and I can't wait to introduce him to my 04 albino female. They should be shipping him on Tuesday so I will have an update with unpacking pics some time in the middle of next week. I had mentioned in a few posts that I was a little torn on wether or not to try to resume breeding. I finally decided that with the drop in prices in the boa market it was a minimal investment to pick up another male and try again. I actually sold some extra cages I had to pay for this male so there is really no new money going in to it. If this breeding goes well I can recoup most of my initial investment the first season. Even in this poor economy it looks like I can make a few dollars on the side doing something I really enjoy.

One Year Later...

Thought I would give this whole blog thing another go around. So here is the depressingly short update on the past year.

I am in snake limbo, I am undecided as to whether or not I will continue trying to breed boas. I still have the big female and could grab a male and give it another go but something about that idea sits funny with me. The psychoanalyst in me says that since my male died and the female gave birth to stillborn babies around the time my grandfather was passing I have balled the whole lot up into one big mess in my head. I truly have no desire to breed or even keep snakes right now.

I am however embarking on another business venture, this time with Steve. Well, really it is more like building a really expensive club house for grown men... but don't tell my wife. Steve, pending the arrival of his 2nd child, needed to relocate some super sweet recording gear. So, we are converting my detached 2.5 car garage into a studio. I plan on posting build pics once the construction gets interesting. I am also planing on going back to school for audio engineering sometime in the Fall.

I am still employed as a Network Systems Engineer but now I actually give a rats ass so I have been bringing my certifications up to speed. I am currently working on my Linux+ exam and finishing off my exams for my MCSA. And again I plan on returning to school to get at least my A.A.S. in IT with a programing option. My hope is to sharpen my now extremely dull VB and C programing skills while building my network certifications.

Stuff not pertaining to me, my wife is kicking butt in culinary school and now working for the Brass Elephant downtown. My little brothers are playing little league, one sister is barreling into teenagedom and the other is now working and has her learners.

So that's my year in four paragraphs. I promise future posts will be more interesting.

Breeding Update: End of Season

It looks like I will not be having any viable young this year. My female dropped the rest of her litter last Saturday and they were all stillborns with one last slug. She is now in shed and has taken a meal, so at least she is recovering nicely. I have tried to find solace in the fact that she is in good health and should be ready to try again this year. But cleaning up dead babies is just no fun.

Breeding Update

My albino female had her pre-birth waxy stool yesterday and with it came 2 unfertilized eggs, 5 still born babies and some regular stool. It is not uncommon for a female to deliver premature babies with a defecation within the last month but to have her drop such a mess right around the time she is supposed to deliver makes me less than optimistic. She has thinned out a lot after all this but is still acting like a pre-parturition female as opposed to one who just delivered. I am going to give her a week and she how she behaves but this may be the end of my season this year. I am disappointed and a little mad. This season has been rife with problems and set backs that do not seem to trace back to any problems in my husbandry. Just lots of bad luck.

In other snake news, my male Fredward is still not doing very well. He developed a mystery sickness around the holidays and has not responded to any form of treatment. I helped him shed for the third time now. He cannot control his head movement enough to shed properly and he has to be assisted. I think he may be at the end of the line. I will try to feed him one last time this week and if he still cannot swallow then he will have to be put down.

Funny how easily we forget that we are working with wild animals and abiding by nature's laws. I thought I would have produced ten times my current collection this year and instead it looks like I am losing half of it.

Breeding Update

It has been 5 months since the beginning of the breeding season for my boas and a lot has changed. In late November I noticed my male acting odd. He could not keep his head held up for more than a few seconds and was not tongue flicking. He is still not recovered despite months of antibiotics and veterinary care. It looks like there is some damage neurologically caused by an infection or possible trauma while in with my female. He will be finishing his last round of antibiotics this week and after that only time will tell. Fortunately, it looks as though he got the job done before I separated him and the female. She has been coiled tightly on her hot spot for weeks now and is getting quite large in her lower half. She is refusing food and has not shed since ovulation. I have calculated her due date to sometime in early March and we are preparing for the possibility of baby boas. We ordered a Iris 375 rack from Animal Plastics which should be arriving in the next week or so. Now all we can do is wait. Wait and see if our male improves in health. Wait and see if our female is gravid. Wait, wait, wait... I will post more updates as anything exciting happens and hopefully I will be posting some baby pictures come March.

Breeding Update: Sheds All Around

The past week or so has been light on courting for the snakes. Both animals have been in shed until tonight. I found it interesting that both snakes shed on the same night and that it is the first rain we've had in a while. Hopefully they like each other's fancy new skin and resume heavy courting in the next few days.

How Fredward Met Abigail

Since last night I have observed my boas courting heavily. The male was introduced into the female's cage on Wednesday and they both showed immediate interest in one another. Lots of tongue flicking and crawling on top of one another. Within 24 hours the male was on top of the female forming a zig zag pattern over the lower half of her body. He will squeeze her in regular intervals and ride her around for the next several weeks. All this leads up to copulation and helps stimulate the female for breeding. Right now they are under the paper in their cage but I will try to get some pictures soon. Needless to say I am super stoked to see good signs of courtship. It's still early in the season but I am feeling pretty confident.

Come On Little Miss And Do The Twist

My '04 Albino female boa was doing the twist this morning. The "pre-ovulation twist" as some breeders call it. This is the development of ovarian follicles before they move into the oviducts to be fertilized. She had the typical swelling over about 30% of her body. She was stretched out with tight curves and seemed to be uncomfortable and tense. I guess this is something like boa PMS. I am very excited to see the first signs of breeding interest in her. My '05 Hypo het Albino male has been off food since the last week in August and this is the second week the female has refused to eat. Now with signs of pre-ovulation and the male searching his cage all night long I am ready to introduce the two. I plan on cleaning the female's cage tonight and placing the male in with her tonight or tomorrow at the latest. With any luck I will see courtship between them by the weekend.

The Reptile Mecca

The National Reptile Breeder's Expo was a couple of weeks ago in Daytona, Fl. This is the largest reptile show in the world, it typically sells out the majority of the hotels in Daytona. Not bad considering that just 30 years ago herpeticulture was still in it's infancy. While I did not attend, I do take a special interest in the aftermath of the show. I feel that this show can help gauge the health of the reptile industry and hobby. Some years are great, some years are terrible, and some years are mixed between breeders or even species. I keep in contact with a few of the larger breeders that attend and the reptile forums and message boards are normally packed with posts about the event. Knowing how well breeders did in sales and seeing the type of purchases made can give a good snapshot of how the show went and where the hobby is moving. These things are incredibly important in the reptile trade. One year a snake morph could go for $3,500 and the next year some people are selling them for less than $1,000. How is a new breeder supposed to read a market that can change so quick and buyers who can be so fickle?

The best way to try and predict the future is by looking at what everyone is buying now. A few years ago people were snatching up albino boas and hypomelanistic het albino boas. When breed together these two morphs will produce a designer morph known as a Sunglow boa. So no surprise when about two to three years, it takes about three years for female boas to reach sexual maturity, after this big increase in albino and hypo het albino sales we see tons of Sunglows for sale. This flood of Sunglows and their albino, hypo, and hypo het albino siblings drove down the price for all three morphs. This year's sales are not quite as clear. There are a few newer morphs on the market Blood boas, Caramel albinos, and Squaretails being a few that really excite me. But the big sellers seem to be the Co-Dominant mixes. Without going into genetics Co-Dom morphs will produce two appearances one that shows some of the new trait and some of the normal color and pattern, called hets, and one that shows nothing but the new trait, a homo or super. The spectacular nature of the super forms and the ability to see the trait in first generation offspring make these high dollar and high demand morphs. Mix these with Recessive traits like albino, anerythristic, or even other Co-Dom morphs and you have a snake that is very desirable. While this leaves a lot of possibilities for mixing new morph combinations it does little to shed any light on the future market. The strong sales of this year's shows and the newer Recessive morphs are good clues that the market will stay healthy but beyond this I am at a loss. I will have to look to other markets to see how to handle this unclear future but for now all I can think is diversity. Instead of branching out into some other species I will need to focus on building a strong diverse collection of boas. This should allow me to better adapt to any trends that might pop up in the future and at the very least give me an excuse to get more snakes.

Charm City Snakes

I recently decided to start formally preparing my business plan for Charm City Snakes, a commercial snake breeder of course! Yes, you can make money breeding snakes. No, it's not easy money. But hey it's about time I stepped up to a real challenge in life. I am a huge over planner in all things and this is no exception. I am currently using the Small Business Administration's website along with startupnation.com. The SBA's site is pretty basic and really kind of discouraging. They have a number of little quizzes that help you determine your business style and if you are cut out for the task of starting your own business. I took a few of these quizzes twice, first answering honestly and then giving answers I thought the quiz wanted. Both times I was given less than stellar results and found the advice to be very critical. Then I slid on over to startupnation.com and what a difference this site made. I found a lot of the same information but the presentation was better and the advice while still realistic was much less depressing. The site is more of a community for people who are starting and running their own businesses. The site is ran by the Sloan brothers who also host a radio program by the same name. The whole site is free except for individual classes and is chock-a-block full of information. I am currently using their 10 step program to help prepare for starting your own business. So far so good, it's free and as such is a little light on the specifics but does give a good start to the whole process. Once I am done this program I will begin working with the book Start Your Own Business by Rieva Lesonsky. At 700+ pages I expect to fill in a lot of details with this book. And to top it all of I have my dad who runs his own successful auto body repair shop and Pete Kahl one of the big names in snake breeding. After all of that if I should be ready to start running things like a business. Right now I am trying to expand my collection and finalize my caging and supply needs. I am specializing in Boa Constrictors to start and the name of the boa game is morphs! Morphs, morphs, and more morphs!! Morphs is the slang word we snake guys use to cover the many genetic mutations that visually affect color, pattern, and sometimes form. Morphs like albino, hypomelanism, piebald, and axanthic are scientific terms that describe a mutation across many species. Whereas jungle, motley, and sunglow describe mutations or combinations of mutations found by a breeder in a specific species. These are kind of catch phrases and can be rather confusing with everyone trying to pitch their new morph to the herp community. Herp being short for herpetological, herpeticulture, or herpetiles (reptiles and amphibians). Nomenclature aside, morphs are where the money is. It's with this money that I will be able to start, grow, and expand my business to the point where I can get into some of the more interesting work. My goal is to always stay in the boa family but to expand into some tree boas as well as locality boas. All in due time I suppose. For now I will continue my work on the business plan and start preparing the snake room for more snakes. With my wife leaving her job in the next couple of months and the breeding season approaching fast I plan on a few updates a week.