From the article:
facultative parthenogenesis in pythons and boas leads to exclusively female progeny
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Ok, so now I’m really wanting to know the answer to the question: How young can a female ball python start storing sperm for future use?
Cause that might answer the question.
Otherwise, I don’t see how there could be males in the clutch. Right? Am I still missing something?
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If a mature female is bred she could start storing sperm (possibly younger, I’m not sure). However this isn’t the case with this female as she wasn’t introduced to a male and 3 clutches of partho were produced. @chesterhf Is genetic testing possible and reasonable to figure out the chromosome count?
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Yes, Warren has done this countless times
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In that case, I would think it would be best to have the original snake genetically tested to see how many and which chromosomes it has.
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Okay, this is just a thought but I figured I’d share it. From research I’ve found it seems that @squidman is right that females are heterozygous and males are homozygous. It seems that 99% of the time only females are produced from parthenogenesis (female’s passed on allele is dominant?) but it would explain how the female had the male’s genes (the allele has to originally be present to show up in offspring, not including mutations). From this thread there’s this qote:
I have a few ideas what this could conclude but what are your thoughts on how this correlates with this case? I also found the terminology “androgenesis”, I know what it is but I don’t understand it. I don’t know if this could apply to this case.
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This is not correct for “primitive” snake lineages like the entire Boidae group. Warren Booth has shown that both boas and pythons are XX female and XY male. So a female python can only produce female parthenogenetic offspring
In more advanced species, colubrids and vipers, the females are WZ and the males are WW. In those cases, a female can make WW or ZZ parthenogenetic offspring. But classically, the ZZ genotype is lethal.
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Andro is most easily thought of a male partho. You get a half-clone of the father. So it would not apply here
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I spoke with Warren and asked him to hop over here. Seems he has not made it yet but in our conversation he said that either this animal has been paired or that the offspring are not being sexed properly. You cannot get males form a partho event
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Does andro occur after the male breeds and the females genes aren’t passed on (a “faulty” embryo)?
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From what’s been said here, I think it’s clear that Mom must have been exposed to a male at some point and is producing clutches with retained sperm. I would be interested to know how long a female can retain sperm, and how many clutches she can produce with one “sample.” So far she has produced three, each one diminishing in size.
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Last year, the St Louis zoo claimed to have a 62-year old ball python (yeah, I’m kinda dubious too, but this is a proper zoo saying so) lay eggs using stored sperm after supposedly being without a male for decades.
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Riley, I hope he answers this 
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This is a really interesting discussion.
I’ve heard of Lepidodactylus lugubris which to my knowledge is an exclusively partho species occasionally throwing random males.
I also remember reading a paper that concluded that komodo dragons asexual reproduction results in male offspring.
Mostly this is just a follow dot to continue watching this conversation and any new developments with it 
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One important thing I think some should be reminded of about ball pythons being males XY and female XX, is the genetic behavior with the banana morph in particular.
That is the only way to explain how you can have banana males that are either male maker or female maker, and why banana females can potentially produce male or female banana offspring… as the banana morph is sex linked.
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I’ve heard of males escaping and finding breeding sized females, is there any chance that might have happened?
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Is the Coral Glow morph also sex linked? Since it is similar to the Banana morph.
Coral glow is the same as banana. 2 names for the same gene.
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I thought it was just two different strains of the same morph, thank you. I haven’t bred any banana or coral glow morphs yet, but I will be breeding coral glow soon.
Correct. The animals produced by andro are basically half-clones of the male
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I may be misremembering but I read a paper some time ago and I think they were able to document it out to seventeen years. But do not quote me on that as it has been a while since I read that paper
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Komodos are Z/W
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Sorry it took me a while to get here. I have been fairly busy with the start of the semester, and totally forgot about this thread. So, a female that repeatedly produced mixed sex clutches but has not been in contact with a male. What are the possibilities. Well, as pointed out here, with pythons, they have XX (female) and XY (male) sex chromosomes. So, the production of males is not possible. For males to be produced, a Y chromosome is required, and that can only come from a male. I am not aware of work describing the mutational processes required for an X to mutate to a Y, however, if that did happen, I cannot see it happening repeatedly. In all of the instances of parthenogenesis we have worked on (more than you can imagine), we have never seen a male parthenogenesis in the pythons, and never a female parthenogenesis in the advanced snakes (pit vipers, corns, kings, Thamnophis, Cobras, etc. The reason being, is that all pythons to our understanding are XX/XY. Same with Boas, with the exception of those from Madagascar. Advances snakes in contrast, to our knowledge, are all ZW (female) and ZZ (male).
So, the only way for this to happen is either incorrect sexing (not uncommon), or a male has been introduced to the female once, and sperm was stored, or yearly. I would say its the latter. Snakes can store sperm, (we have several papers on that on my website - www.booth-lab.org). Pythons seem to be able to do that over a year or two, but fertility drops dramatically. Its not uncommon for people to put animals together, even temporarily while cleaning, and for them to breed and produce offspring. I no longer offer genetic testing of parthenogenesis (of the species we already have reported it in), but Ben Morrill might still run a company that will.
Regarding androgenesis, we have a paper almost ready to submit about that. The offspring from that, from our work on androgenesis in boas and pythons, always produces females. It appears that YY is not viable.
Hope that helps clear up some things. It appear that most of it was covered above anyway.
Warren
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Thank you Warren! Greatly appreciate your time and input
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