Who likes big girls?

[Jeff B]

Unfortunately my experience is that they won't all pan out. Some just get fat and throw jelly beans and some, throw stills. None the less, hoping for lots of big healthy babies.

[Dan72]

Congrats Jeff, hope you get many babies to keep you busy.

[Selkielass]

Unfortunately my experience is that they won't all pan out. Some just get fat and throw jelly beans and some, throw stills. None the less, hoping for lots of big healthy babies.

Thanks for mentioning this- much is made of garters being 'easy' snakes that 'breed like rabbits' but my experience has been that it's a nowhere near that easy.
Good luck with all your gals.

[Jeff B]

Yeah your welcome, just keeping it real. Anything over 50% of my girls actually have babies and I am happy, also of what comes out of them, if 50% is alive and perfect condition with no defects or kinks I am happy as well. Slugs or jelly beans or unfertilized eggs, and stillbornes and deformaties are a harsh reality and part of the breeding equation sooner or later. Sure anyone can get lucky and have a perfect litter here and there, but that's not how the bigger numbers over time pan out, at least that's been my experience anyway.

[ConcinusMan]

Some just get fat and throw jelly beans and some, throw stills.

Odd. In 25+ years I've never had that happen and 2010 was the first time I had ever got an unfertilized egg and even that was part of a large healthy litter. Stills have happened, yes, but just a few in a normal live litter.

But of course, I've never bred snakes that were result of generations of selective breeding/inbreeding either. Just seems to me that the tendency in captivity is to breed snakes anyway when they have these problems,(just for the sake of preserving the morph even though you're also passing on fertility problems) and especially if you get very few surviving offspring, they get bred whereas in the wild, a snake with fertility problems is not likely to have any of her very few live offspring survive long enough to breed because her numbers are low which greatly reduces or eliminates the chances that any will still be around as adults.