Not-Really-Colubrids: African House Snakes! Discussion and Show-off

A few pictures of individual babies now that they’re all out and settled! They’re adorably feisty and I’m excited to start handling them to get them to calm down, but I’m going to leave them alone for a few weeks until they shed and I can start feeding them.





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Too cute! :heart_eyes:
The third one pictured is definitely giving you the eye.

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They’re beautiful. You have some amazingly smooth colouration there – that third baby (giving you the hairy eyeball lol) looks almost entirely patternless.

The parentage of this clutch is all T- KZN reds, right? Is that the same for Spitfire as well?

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Thank you! I’m curious to see how much the pattern will come out after they shed for the first time, but indeed, a couple look almost completely patternless. I really like the pattern, so any super high pattern will probably end up being holdbacks.

Yep! All three of my adults are KZN red and visual T- albino, so these are all KZN red T- albino and all of the remaining house snake babies through the rest of the year will be as well. I’m really excited to see the subtle differences in color. I can already see a couple of these that are a bit more saturated than others.

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Ahh congrats they’re gorgeous!

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Do you have pics of your guys to share? I know I’ve seen this clutch’s dam upthread, but I’d love to see how three different KZN T- adults compare. I’ve seen a bunch on MM but mostly they’re hatchlings. (That said if you want a higher-pattern KZN to add to your bloodline I know Bushveldt has a bunch up right now. I spend way too long looking at housie listings on MM.)

I find it fascinating how variable the pattern expression seems to be between stripes, spots, gravel, and patternless. I know some people really dig the patternless look, too, but I’m with you on loving a busy housie. I’m a sucker for those really round, blotchy sides you see on some capensis, too.

Do you have a long-term breeding project goal for these guys?

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I love patternless ones! My goodness, I do :face_with_hand_over_mouth:. That orange without pattern…man, one day.

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Sure, I can share pics of the adults! (The two females at least - let me see if I can find one of the male). Persimmon is the mom to this first clutch, and she’s relatively low pattern with just a nice line down her side:

And Spitfire is the second female, her eggs will hatch around the same time as Persimmon’s second clutch. She’s higher pattern and I’m REALLY excited to see how her babies turn out:

Another good one that shows off Spitfire’s pattern:

And then this is the best picture I have of my male, Ares. He’s more of a granite phenotype and I would say his pattern is in between the two girls:

In terms of plans, I really like the T- and the KZN reds (I’d actually like to add a non-visual het to my breeders so I get some normal colored red babies as well) and I want to work with the high patterned animals, so high granite phenotypes or high spotty phenotypes will be the holdbacks. Aside from that, I really just want to establish them in the pet trade - do a bunch of education and introduce people to them, they’re such cool snakes.

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They’re so pretty! I browse house snakes a lot. I just love their little faces.

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Me too! I don’t know if a house snake is ever in my future, but a solid orange one would be my top pic!

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Haha I actually like the strongly spotted ones best. Isn’t it fun that they come in patterns for different tastes?

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All three of them are gorgeous! I love Spitfire’s pattern. The creamy yellow base sets off the orange of her pattern so gorgeously, I’m in love.

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All babies had their first shed, all have been TENTATIVELY tail sexed, and all were offered their first meal! 3/6 took frozen thawed pinkies on the first attempt, which is awesome. I’ll work on the remaining three.

Here’s one of the babies who took its first meal making use of the $1.64 PVC elbow I bought as a hide from Home Depot!

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Congrats on the clutch of beautiful babies, @inspirationexotics!!! They are absolutely precious. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Look at that tube baby, wow!! What a handsome little worm. I always have a hard time getting my head around how tiny housie babies are, lmao

Congrats on the feed rate, that’s downright impressive. How did you go about sourcing pinkies small enough?

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Looks so cute in its little tube! Congrats on a good start for feeding, that’s fantastic!

I get a kickout out of the different reactions from different corners of the hobby. So many people think the baby housies are tiny. To me, as a corn snake breeder, these hatchlings look like they’re a totally normal size! :joy: :joy: :heart_eyes:

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Both my blood python and BI seemed tiny to me when I got them as babies. So things like baby house snakes and baby colubrids seem impossibly small to me!

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You should see little Pat O’Butter! He’s growing of course but he’s still pretty tiny! :heart:

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I ended up buying red hot pinkies (also sometimes called micro pinkies) from Layne Labs, the only place I could find that had them available small enough!

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I can imagine that as a corn breeder, these babies look normal sized to you, lol! As a ball python breeder, I’m used to babies hatching out at 50-60g. 5-6g is absurdly tiny to me.

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