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what's a good male/female ratio?

texomareptiles

New member
Between current adults, subadults, and hatchlings that I have bought or held back I currently have 24 females and 9 males (9.24). Between carrying multiple traits (ex. butter motly) and het traits these 9 males cover all of the genetic traits I need for the morphs I am working with. However I was wondering if 9 males is enough and what male to female ratio other breeders keep. thanks, dave
 
9 males for 24 females is a good ratio. If I had a large number of snakes I would probably use a 1.2 or 1.3 ratio like you've got.
 
Not bad as long as your males don't end up being bad breeders or possibly die or possibly being infertile. That could push your breeding plans back a few years....

2.2 if you are serious about a morph
 
it really depends on your ambitions....

keep in mind that you'll need to replace some of your beeders now and then, not for the least of reasons that you'll probably have the occasional "hold-back" that you have to breed, but of course also because some snakes are infertile or just wont breed with each other, or (they all do it eventually) die.

So a single male het for amel, anery, & hypo, and one other single male het caramel, lavender, & motley can potentially produce a huge variety of corns if brerd to the correct 10 or more females, but it's no sure thing that you'd have good fertility rates; furthermore if a male dies it sets you WAY back.

Does that matter to you? Maybe not... If that's the case (that you don't care) then I'm guessing the average healthy full adult male can fertilize 5-10 females a season....? Anyone have any statistical or circumstantial evidence on that?

On the other hand, if you don't want low fertility rates, and you also want to have some "insurance" you'd want NO LESS than 2 males of whatever geneotype, and probably would NOT want to mate any male more than 5 times a season.... Again, I'm putting a lot of "guess" into the answer. There isn't a massive amount of formal research into such matters, so I think you'd get a lot of conjecture.

Maybe Rich will say how many times he'll let a male get it on each season....

^Curtis
 
I think there is a thread on the Serpenco forum about this topic that was excellent.


Just thought of it when I read this, hope it helps


Colleen
 
Another thing to consider is using your males in more than one manner so as to get the full potential out of your males and your females each breeding season. For example, let's say you have a snow female het motley and an amel male and a motley male. Now, you plan to breed your males to amel and motley females, but you should also breed both them to your snow female as well.

The introduction of two males will increase the fertility rate of your female, the competition between the two males will increase their willingness to breed, and the babies produced (because you chose to breed males that will produced readily identifiable offspring) will be identifiable from one another.

I bought an amel motley female that had supposedly been introduced to three males: a normal, and amel, and a sunglow motley. The hatchlings could thereby be identified as to their parentage based on what they were. The motleys came fromt he sunglow, the regular amels het motley were from the amel, and the normals het amel and motley would have been from the normal male. Of course, this assumes that the three male had no hidden hets, but it would be fairly accurate overall.

The key to all of this is to get the biggest bang for your buck. So, when you breed hypo bloodreds, through a bloodred in there too. I'd make sure the hypo male had first shot at her, but the second should added soon after. You'll likely get some hypos and some bloods, but that is better than having fewer hatchlings or even risking no babies at all!
 
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