Was cleaning one of my “Volta” large type balls and figured I would share some pics and see if anyone breeds for their extraordinary size. She pretty plain jane pastel, is currently at 20mm, weighed in today at 5146g (over 11 pounds and she isn’t even full of eggs yet) and is about 5 1/2 feet long, 22 years young. I have a few of these but no males and never thought to try to breed for size and wondering if anyone does this or if it’s a thing. They demand respect when feeding and after taking a full on hit after dropping a rat I can tell you they hit like a hammer and feel like a pit bull and the bone ache after is real. (I now wear glasses when feeding just because I don’t think an eye would survive and they so darn quick). I don’t even know for a fact if this is a real “Volta”
, I just call her that because she is so large, is there a real way to tell?
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Volta isn’t a morph, it’s a locality. Unless you know the lineage of this animal and it can be traced back, it can’t be called a Volta.
@t_h_wyman & @ballornothing may be able to give you more information beyond that.
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Since I posted this I thought why not see if size can be a thing. Put in my very biggest male (who has been bred a lot this year and just got back on food) and is still 2000g. Male is a double super plus. Instant love. Now I gotta keep these babies to see how they grow 
@noodlehaus is correct about the Volta. But just because your BP is not a Volta, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a “giant” gene. Size might be a genetic trait that could be passed on in BPs. Two tall humans generally produce tall offspring. I know everything in mammals does not directly translate to reptiles. I don’t know of anyone that is breeding BPs for size. That would be an interesting dinker project. Breed two “giant”, non-Volta BPs, raise up the babies and see if they grow to be giants as well. You’d have to do this for multiple generations, only breeding the largest of the largest. That would be a LONG term project as you would have to raise the babies up to full-sized adults before hand picking the next breeding generation. With all the existing traits you pretty much know after the first shed which ones you’re going to hold back for future breeding. As with any dinker project it could not prove out, but in this case it’s worse because it would take way more time than a standard dinker project. This is basically line-breeding for size. That is how Ozzie developed the High Intensity OD.
I don’t know how much market demand there would be for “giant” BPs. One of the selling points that makes the BP hobby so freaking huge is that BPs don’t get huge.
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I’ve got a huge '00 male who I suspect could have been from a volta locality female. He has the reduced pattern look a lot seem to have and was sold as a captive hatched. But because I don’t know for certain, it’s not something I bring up or claim he has. His daughter so far is average sized at 1 year.
The selective breeding will be tedious for sure. The project itself could be pretty neat though.
If you do end up purchasing a volta locality for your project, I would treat it like the retic community treats dwarf and super dwarf localities. They keep a % based on how diluted the locality gets. It’s never referred to as ‘het’ because it’s not a guaranteed mutation to the offspring.
For example:
Volta x normal = 50% volta locality offspring.
50% volta x 50% volta = 50% volta locality
50% volta x 100% volta = 75% volta locality
The % of locality gets added up and divided by 2. Once it’s diluted it will never be 100% pure again. And even if the number is high, it’s not always accurate to size because polygenic traits don’t always fork out this way.
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There is no “might” about it, size is absolutely genetic but it is a polygenic trait so it is not something you can maintain with a morph-breeding mentality
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Generally larger animals = larger clutches so breeders would likely appreciate having that available to them
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I very much disagree with how (most of) the retic community tracks dwarf/superdwarf animals because it is absolute garbage in terms of determining eventual size of the animal. Garrett is about the only person doing it correctly and he has even skewed away from using percentages because he recognized the issue with them
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This is true. It’s why I waited and purchased my two at 7 years old so I had an idea on how small they would stay. I also get as much info on parent sizes as possible.
(32.5% is a ridiculous number for a locality but they’re still at 8 feet. Hahah)
Heck, my own dog is from a 4lb sire and 8lb Dam. She’s 12. Lol
I like it as a way to track the bloodline. You can still say ‘cross’. It’s just definitely not ‘het’ and I’ve actually reported someone for claiming ‘het’ volta in a sale description.
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So I will just do some side breeding the biggest to biggest and see what happens, maybe. Yes a female that lays 16 or 20 eggs does have value to me that I really hadn’t considered.
This begs the question, what weight would be considered large for a male? How big to male Voltas get? I don’t have any what I would consider large males my biggest being 2000g. I have 4 of these extra large headed females, 2 laid already this year, one soon and another just mated. Here is head shots of one just mated with 2000g male. In person the size difference seems so much more impressive.
I honestly never see anyone really posting male volta pics. typically all the fuss seems to be on Volta females. All I know is my boy is the largest ball python I own and I keep him lean. He weighs in around 2400 grams at the moment. I need to get an accurate length on him and a couple other snakes soon. He does have that thicker neck look to him like your female does though. And that kind of blushed look to him.
But again, since he wasn’t sold to me specifically as a Volta, I can’t guarantee anything on him and he’s just my captive hatched big boy 
This photo isn’t that recent, but he’s been confused as a female by quite a few people that have seen him in person. I honestly thought he was mistakenly sexed as a male as a hatchling because he started growing like a weed as a baby. He makes my hand look so small here and I’m 5’10".
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This is because breeders only focus on the females and how much production they can get from them. In the ultimate ironic twist to the commercialization mass-breeding mentality that the ball community has adopted, they tend to select for the smaller males because they can be kept in smaller space and require less food and therefore do not take the important space/food that big females require. And by constantly adding “small” genes into the breeding pool with the males they are inadvertently perpetually diluting the “big” genes the females are carrying
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It is pretty ironic how that plays out.
This big boy is the whole reason I fell in love with BPs and wanted to breed in the first place.
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