FAQ

Is blvck as good looking in person as he is in the pictures.

no, im gorgeous like a fine wine mixed with orange juice and strawberry syrup with a side of doritos. you'tr lying to me lisa

How do I get my ball python to eat?

Ball pythons are notoriously difficult eaters when there is the slightest change in their environment or if they are attached to a particular type of prey and you try and switch it. The very first thing you should check is that their temperatures and humidity are correct. They should have a heat gradient so they can choose to move to a different spot if they are wanting cooler or warmer temps. They should have somewhere like a hide that they feel safe in at both sides. If they are new or were just changed to a new environment, it can take them a little while to start eating again. Watch carefully for signs of illness, as that can be a reason they stop eating. Males will sometimes go off feed during breeding season, or if they can smell females being housed too near them. Heat of the prey is important as well, as that is part of how your snake decides something is food. Make sure your prey item is about 100 degrees F. If all these things are being accounted for and your snake still won't eat, here are some things you can try:

  • Scenting prey with fish or ASF juice
  • Braining the prey item
  • Trying smaller than usual prey item
  • Feeding at night
  • Covering their enclosure so it's dark and leaving a frozen/thawed prey item with them for a few hours
  • Trying different colored prey, some animals only like white, or only like brown, etc
  • Trying different prey like mice or ASF- but be prepared, they may always want that after trying it

If all else fails, just be patient. It takes a snake a very long time to starve. Watch for signs of kidneys being overly taxed or your snake getting too skinny and intervene if needed with assist feeding very small prey items as a last resort.

What do I need to keep a Ball Python?

  • Enclosure that has some type of mechanism to stay shut. Plastic holds heat better than glass.
  • Thermostat
  • Heat pad, heat tape, or radiant heat lamp. Lamps should be kept where snakes cannot touch them or have a protective cage over them.
  • 2 Thermometers (one for each end) and Hygrometer
  • Water Dish, preferably big enough for the whole snake to fit in but not filled up enough for the snake to have to swim.
  • Substrate to absorb any spilled water or snake waste. I prefer paper towel for young or breeding animals and cocopeat for subadult to adults that are not currently mating. Be sure to use something meant for reptiles or sterilize before use.
  • Tongs or Hemostats to feed with
  • Snake Hook to handle if dealing with particularly defensive adult animals. Very rarely needed for cbb Ball Pythons unless trying to remove eggs.

What will I get if I breed X Ball Python to Y Ball Python?

WorldofBallPythons has an excellent calculator you can test out pairings in, but it's always good to learn how to do punnet's squares. First you need to know if the genes you are working with are recessive, dominant, or co-dominant (technically incomplete dominant but most Ball Python people refer to them as co-dom). You can also find out that information at WorldofBallPythons usually by checking the morph list. Dominant and incomplete dominant genes are denoted with capital letters, while recessive genes are denoted by lower case letters. As far as I know, nobody has found the actual loci that Ball Python morphs are located on, so I will be using letters that I am making up.

Let's see what happens when we breed a Pied (pp) to a Normal het Pied (Pp):

You make a table with the genes of one animal on the top, and the other animal on the left, and then in each square, combine the two genes.

Here you see we will get %50 Pied (pp) and %50 Normal het Pied (Pp) because only the animals with two lowercase will display the recessive gene Pied.

Now let's try with Cinnamon (Cc) and Normal (cc), notice this time that the capital C is in the animal that has the gene displayed because Cinnamon is incomplete dominant.

In this pairing we would get %50 Cinnamon and %50 Normal.

So what if you are breeding animals with more than one morph? Then the easiest thing to do is to figure out each morph separately and then do some math. So let's pretend the examples we used earlier we from the same two animals, a pied and a cinnamon het pied.

We would take the 50/50 figure and then split that by the other morphs options, in this case also 50/50, and we would get %25 Pied Cinnamon, %25 Pied, %25 Cinnamon het Pied, and %25 Normal het Pied. This is because 50 percent chance/2 options is 25. If you add a third morph, you would take the 25 and divide that by how many options the third morph provides. That wraps up the basics, but there are a few special circumstances like acts-like-special (ALS) genes, and sex-linked genes (such as Banana).

ALS are morphs that are different, but are located in the same allele, so when you have one copy of one, and one copy of another, it creates a super form. One example of this is YellowBelly and Asphalt. I am going to denote these as Yy y for YellowBelly snake and Ya y for Asphalt snake because we want to use the same base letter as they share the allele.

So what we get this time is %25 Freeway, %25 YellowBelly, %25 Asphalt, and %25 Normal.

Sex linked genes normally operate a little differently than what we notice in the Banana and CoralGlow snakes, because they usually stay linked to the same gene. Because Banana and CoralGlow change linkage about %5 of the time, we have what we call Male-makers and Female-makers. What this means is, that the Banana morph is linked to the y-chromosome in a Male-maker, or linked to the x-chromosome in a Female-maker. If we use Bb to denote a Banana female and by to denote a Normal male, we would get:


Both males and females are %50 Banana and %50 Normals. All animals with y are male, and all animals without are females. Remember, there is a 5% chance the genes moves, in which case it would move from the x to y chromosome in a male.

Now let's look at what happens with a male Banana for both Male Maker and Female Maker:

In these situations, all males are Banana (for male-maker) and all females are Normal, or all males are Normal and all females are Banana, except the %5 chance the linkage changes. So if you get a female Banana from a male-maker, your gene linkage changed and that new female has the Banana gene on the X chromosome. If you get a male Banana from a female-maker, that male is now a female-maker because the linkage changed from the X to Y chromosome. To get a Super Banana Male, you have to have a male with linkage on the Y chromosome and one animal with linkage on the X, because no amount of breeding from one or the other, no matter how many generations, will ever get you to a super unless it hops chromosomes, which could take a lot of tries.

Hopefully I was able to explain sufficiently in a simple way, but if not, give some videos or articles a shot that explain Mendelian genetics. There are lots out there, and they teach in many different ways, so eventually one will make sense.