So if any of you remember my hatchling thread from last year, you may recall two boob eggs in one clutch. The smallest hatchling was a Spotnose Red Stripe Fire Clown that was only 30 grams. Well he has more than tripled his size, which is to say he is all the way up to over 90 grams after just 8 months.
Needless to say, it will be a little while before this boy is ready to breed. But now that he can take full size rat fuzzies, I hope he will really start taking off. Here is a picture from when he first hatched and you can see he is barely bigger than my fingers when coiled. The next three are pics I took today. Now he covers most of my hand. He’s huge!
Thanks Hilary. I am kind of fond of his scepter and tusks. He has come a long way but it’s a little weird that after 8 months he is the size of some hatchlings when they pip.
So cute!
I had a super tiny one hatch out last year as well! She’s not quite as well off as this handsome boy, but she’s getting there! She’s got like… a sausage body going on that I’m hoping she hits a growth spurt with and gets some lankiness again XD;
Yes, when they are that small it is hard to get them going. I literally had to start with mouse pinkies to get him started. The smallest rat baby is about 9 or 10 grams which was still way too big for a 30 gram animal.
oh yeah. Mine hatched at 27g but from what looked like an absolutely normal egg. I was assist feeding her until at 4 months she finally took one on her own. Which was wen I went and told everyone who knew about her, “She ate!” lol. Same thing, had to start with fresh mouse pinks and slowly move up. She eventually took the smallest mouse hopper I could find before actually taking pinky rats on her own though.
I know someone who was lucky and hatched a 35g-ish baby who had no problems eating pinkies on his own, unassisted.
He is a cuteness overload! If you look at his little head in the second picture, the marking looks like an ancient carving you would see in the Mayan ruins. Or the Incas. The top of the marking looks like a bird’s head……
He is beautiful. I just purchased a female that was born in Sep 22 and she only weighs 103 grams. I am hoping that I can get some weight on her. I wasn’t going to get her but I felt so bad for the little girl I wanted to give her a chance. Enjoy your beautiful boy I’m sure he will make an awesome breeder.
There was some discussion on another thread about this boy perhaps having another gene present. I am bringing it over here so I can post pictures of the parents and individual pictures of some clutch mates as well as another clutch the Dame produced. I’ll start with the parents.
Sire = 1.0 Fire Red Stripe het Clown (Baby and Adult)
Here are pictures of the other clutch this female produced. The pairing was a 1.0 Leopard Lesser Het Clown to the same 0.1 Spotnose Clown. The clutch produced 2 Batmans, 2 Lesser Batmans, a Leopard Clown, a Normal Het Clown, a Lesser Het Clown, A Spotnose Het Clown, and a Leopard Spotnose Het Clown.
Clown Combos (2 Batman - 2 Lesser Batman - Leopard Clown)
Forgive me because I haven’t had a chance to look at the pics of the other clutches, nor have I 100% fully read this or had my morning coffee…
If I remember correctly this baby was really small out of the egg? Is it possible it’s got some “jungle”-like pattern influence due to some potential development issues? Could explain why he looks so wonky.
Regardless, I love sir fang. He’s an awesome looking snake and I 100% would’ve held him back too!
Nathan,
You are correct that he was small, 30 grams. However, he came from a boob egg so I believe his size was just a result of having less embryonic matter to work with. I don’t believe it was underdevelopment persay. Here is a pic of the whole clutch where you can see how little of the egg had calcified correctly, egg middle left. The second pic is of him still in the egg. You can see how much smaller the egg was compared to the others, as well as the size of his head in relation to the others.
My guess is it’s coming from dad. To me the mom looks pretty classic Spotnose Clown. He looks pretty bright and blushed compared to Fire Red Stripe pictures I’ve seen. (Of course it’s always difficult to get colors right in pictures) I’d guess he’s the same as the brighter hatchling.
I asked about YB because it can definitely hide in some combos, and with my experience with Pastel Red Stripes the YB has a huge effect in making the snakes even brighter and orange. I assume it is probably similar with other brightening genes.
Here’s a Pastel GHI Red Stripe vs Pastel GHI RS YB:
What you are describing in the Dad is what inspired my purchase of him. I too, thought he looked brighter than what is typical for that combo. At the same time, there can be a bit of variation even among equivalent morph combos from the same clutch, i.e. looked at how different the two Lesser Batman babies look in the female’s previous clutch. One is significantly more yellow and considerably less patterned than the other, yet the same combo. I love the variety.
Definitely possible it’s not a simple morph and is some polygenic variability. But I also personally believe the opposite thing is also true - that there’s tons of unidentified morph genes floating around in the hobby. (Like if a snake might be low expression Vanilla or not, I just sell it as “not” and move on, and who knows what those got bred to and the bright ones get held back and bred again.) And then these rogue genes get attributed to “normal variations” because without the knowledge or proof we can’t claim it’s there.
I think it’s smart to consider and balance both of those possibilities with our observations. Definitely just one clutch isn’t enough to say one way or another. I’d just be keeping my eye on this one.
Well, Sir Fang is now a year old. He is also now all the way up to 150 grams. I’m sure there are people who will read that a 1 year old ball python is 150 grams and think, what is he starving it? But, he has grown by a multiplier of 5 from his original birth weight. When he hatched he was 30 grams. He started off feeding on about 6 to 7 gram mouse pinkies. It takes a lot of those to get him up just to a regular hatchling weight of 50 to 60 grams. Anyways, here is a pic of him as hatchling and then today just for comparison. The journey continues.
