house snakes info needed

I understand what you are saying John, but I dont think it si the same with house snake species, although ones found in drier climates are more conditioned to eat lizards then rodents because of what is available in their habitat, but I think we are refering to the size of the babies being the problem, auroras are being born just way to small to accept a pinky.

Breeding house snakes as we have learned is not a problem. But producing viable young and the health of the female is a great concern. I do not think I can agree enough with the other poster on the size and but even more so the age of the females.

As a general rule we do not breed our females till they are a full three years old, whatever type they are. By then they have the size and the physical developement (maturity) they need to produce better quality offspring, without hurting the female in the process.

There will still be feeding problems with some of the sub-species, but it can be directly improved/affected by using only physically mature females in your breeding program.

John, Perhaps thats why I have never had problems with baby auroras feeding on pinkies, I have seen other people's clutches and their babies were half the size of mine,and they were force to start them on gecko tails, but this must correlate to the condition of the female prior to breeding, just like you noted! Their females were younge under 2 years of age, while mine were like 4 and 5 years of age.

Mike

As far as the Auroras are concerned, I have not hatched out but about 65 or 70 of them, so I have a small group to refer to. But with that said we were sucessful getting a small percentage of them to take newborn pinks that were scented with med. gecko's. It was in the 20% range or so, I would have to check my records to know exactly. We also had some luck getting a few of them to take deer mice pinks, which are much smaller and smell completely different than a regular mouse. The balance required the normal force feeding and./or lizard routine, which is why we stopped breeding them even though they are really cool little animals.



John Cherry
Cherryville Farms

wow thats interesting only 20% of your aurora new borns took pinkies, thats not a good number, I only had 3 clutchs, so my experience is much less then yours but all the baies accepted pinkies and I never once scented them. Maybe perhaps it is a genetic thing, do you know which area of south africa your originated from? Mine came from Johannisburg area
perhaps your came from the cape where there is a larger number of lizard and gecko and skink species and perhaps depending on the area where they originated from there are pre-disposed to eat a certain prey item.
JHB auroras are more pre-disposed to eat rodents because that is the main food item so perhaps they evolved to have larger babies so they will be able to feed on rodents?

it would be interesting to research more into this since little research has been done on the Genus.

animals from the same species have evolved to specialize on specific prey items.
the ferial dogs on the galopogas island as an example, they have only been there for like a 100 years or so, but there are 3 known groups and each have evolved certain traits so they can hunt a specific prey item. so perhaps we see this with Aurora's. Perhaps since JHB area has huge human population, lizards and geckos are more scarce while as we know where there is a dense human population rats and mice populations are huge, and we do know that the Aurora house snake is one of most common species of snakes found in the JHB area, so perhaps over time, they have evolved to specialized in a specific food source and rodents are their main food item, while other species found in more rural areas where rodent populations are less and lizard and gecko populations are more then those ones will feed mostly on cold blooded prey.
Maybe this is the key to the theory about how perhaps certain snakes are genetically more proned to accept one food item over another.

I don't know where the original auroras we had came from, I bought them for a dealer who got them out of a fresh shipment that went to an imprter named Strickly Reptiles out of Florida.

What you are saying though makes sense from the genetics standpoint. I can assure you that even though a lot of folks do not believe in it. It does work, everytime I deal with a new clutch of the thayeri I think about Dave telling me this many years ago and how right he was.

What hapened just for informations sake, was he had two lines of childrens, one was more expensive than the other. I ask why and he told me the genetics deal and that 85 - 90% of the hatchlings from this one line would eat pinks. I didn't really believe it, but had known Dave for many years and trusted him. I bought 3 pairs of the rodent feeders and 1 pair of the normals. Sure enough when they grew up and turned out neonates they followed suit with what he had said. Since that time I have been working on different strains of the hard to feed animals and have really been pleased with the results. I would be interested in getting some of your rodent feeding line when you have some for sale.




John Cherry
Cherryville Farms

Thank you gentleman for the discussion and contribution. It really is needed and beneficial.
Mike, you are going to have to add me to that list as well. I'm glad I asked the question. Again, I enjoyed your thread. Informative and the pictures were a bonuses.