We are starting off 2023 with a focus on in-house captive breeding, continuing on from all of our work on our captive breeding projects in 2022. We still believe it is of the most importance to supply good quality captive bred livestock to our customers. Post-brexit with the difficulty to get hold of certain animals without import and shipping costs mounting up, it is more important now than ever before to make more quality livestock available and captive bred within the UK.

Our first breeding to hatch this year is our Genetic Stripe clutch. With the desire for smaller snakes becoming more prevalent, we have focused our efforts on producing quality dwarf and super dwarf morphs.

In our GS clutch, we were happy to prove out our breeder male as ‘het albino’ when the babies hatched and we produced lavender albinos. Lavender albinos are the most desirable for breeders wanting to work with one of the clark strains of albino (purple/white) as when bred to another lavender reticulated python, all 3 colour phases can be produced. For keepers, the choice is yours! Purple, white and lavender are all beautiful snakes.

We hit the odds quite well on this clutch as we were working with 2 recessive genes (genetic stripe & albino). With producing lavenders in the clutch, we know that one of the parents is het for white albino and one of the parents is het for purple albino which are allelic. Lavender is a visual representation of white and purple albino crossed. Babies produced are all 100% het genetic stripe (if not visual) and 66% het albino (if not visual).

Genetic stripe is a dwarf gene which is not seen as commonly as it was 5-10 years ago. This could be down to it being a recessive gene, many breeders like to work with dominant or co-dominant genetics as they results are instant when breeding. Recessive genes just take a bit longer and a one year project can become a 4 year project to get what you want to make. We are happy to have invested the time on our adults for 5.5 years to make this clutch.

Babies will be for sale once they are feeding and shedding as normal. More dwarf, superdwarf and mainland reticulated pythons coming soon!