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sanity check on sexing, please!

SirenSanJose

SirenSanJose

aka: dheideman
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I need a sanity check. This does, indeed, look like a female, correct? 1200g pastel animal, I bought it as a male from a breeder, weighed about 1050g at the time, and just never checked the gender (I didn't know how to pop nor probe at the time, and relied on the breeder to do it for me.)

Last night, I found my albino male locked with this animal! (I'm actually mildly concerned, because I went to pick the albino up to handle him, not realizing they were locked, and disturbed the lock. He disengaged as I lifted him and his hemipenes popped back in just fine, so I think everything's OK, but it gave me a good scare!)

I don't have a set of probes, and I know adults can be tough to pop, but seeing the two "horns"... looks like a girl to me? Am I crazy?

I went back and checked every snake in my collection after this, including males bigger than this animal, and was able to "pop" even the big guys, but there's nothing coming out of the vent of this one.
 
It looks female to me. Were you trying to breed her with your albino?

It doesn't sound like it, just from what you posted, so I'm wondering why they were housed together?
 
Why wouldn't they be housed together, it doesn't hurt to have two males together. Yeah that definitely looks like a she. Oh well maybe you'll get pastels het albino, she's should be plenty big enough.
 
dustinNMpythons said:
Why wouldn't they be housed together, it doesn't hurt to have two males together. Yeah that definitely looks like a she. Oh well maybe you'll get pastels het albino, she's should be plenty big enough.
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It's pretty well accepted with ball pythons, one snake per enclosure. And at the very least, quarantine should be practiced when you get a new animal. Two mature males will stress each other out and battle each other.
 
Looks female to me. I am curious, though, as to why they were housed together. Like Robin says, two sexually mature males will battle (and housing individually is generally less stressful anyway - they aren't social other than when they are breeding).
 
Yes I know about quarentine as should every one else who breeds any type of animal but there's no date of when she bought this snake so why jump to conclusions that she didn't quarantine. I keep all mine in different containers but I've never heard of males battling and I've even put two males in with one female to get each other fired up for breeding before. I've heard of retics, collubrids, and some others battling to death if two males go at it but never heard of this or experienced it in ball pythons.
 
Not that it has never happened, but I have never seen two males battle and I have put a breeding male in with a non-breeder male and female to entice him to breed. There's a lot of things that can go wrong with keeping and breeding snakes. If we were to try to prevent them all, no one would be able to keep them. Live rats, heat panels, tape, mite treatment, etc are all hazards we settle with. And yes, even a male and female can battle, at least the boas I saw one time.
 
Well you learn something new every day I've never had that happen but I guess the only time they would get the chance is when I have two in with a female which I rarely do but it would be a winner gets the spoils situation lol.
 
rabernet said:
It looks female to me. Were you trying to breed her with your albino?

It doesn't sound like it, just from what you posted, so I'm wondering why they were housed together?
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I'd had both animals for some months, they were individually QT'ed, but I was short on rack space with new hatchlings, so yes, I had been keeping the two "boys" together in one bin to save space in the short term, although both were removed to feed individually. They'd been living together for about 2 months, got along perfectly (still are getting along fine), and I didn't think twice about it until I found them locked.
 
It's definitely better to house them individually but if one insisted on housing a same gender duo, it would be safer with the girls. Males will spar when they're sexually mature. I have put males together to entice breeding when I had a reluctant male and watched them hiss, rear up to subdue one another, and then the one who managed to keep his head towered over the other then proceeded to lock with the other. All of this in the span of about 10-15 minutes. I separated them quickly and reintroduced the female and the reluctant male was more than willing to court and lock with her at that point. I couldn't imagine how stressful this situation could be for males left together for longer periods of time.
 
Kingofspades said:
Well...unless you really wanted a male pastel...I'd be stoked that I got a female for the cost of a male. :)
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Oh I'm *totally* happy about the outcome. I'd been looking into buying a pastel girl in the near future, and this animal is actually WAY more useful to me as a girl than a boy. It was just tremendously unexpected, and I feel awfully silly that it was the one animal in my collection I'd never personally checked the sex on :)
 
Quiet Tempest said:
It's definitely better to house them individually but if one insisted on housing a same gender duo, it would be safer with the girls. Males will spar when they're sexually mature. I have put males together to entice breeding when I had a reluctant male and watched them hiss, rear up to subdue one another, and then the one who managed to keep his head towered over the other then proceeded to lock with the other. All of this in the span of about 10-15 minutes. I separated them quickly and reintroduced the female and the reluctant male was more than willing to court and lock with her at that point. I couldn't imagine how stressful this situation could be for males left together for longer periods of time.
Click to expand...

Well, in this particular case, it turned out that it wasn't two males cohabiting after all -_- I have one drawer where I had doubled up two girls, who got along fine, and one drawer where I doubled up these two "boys", as a short term solution until I moved a few animals out to make more space. And yes, I realize it's not ideal, but I had been watching all the doubled up animals closely and never saw any signs of aggression, nor damage to one another. Of course, it's quite possible that's because it never was two boys to begin with. I don't intend the sharing tubs to be permanent, by any means, though -- some of my plans for expanding things just got temporarily off track.
 
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