So, we might be expecting baby BRBs. Or not. I'm not sure.
Last year, as some of you know, we got a pair of adult BRBs from our friend that had already done the deed, and in our care, the female (Ember) ovulated and gave me many months of eager anticipation until she delivered nothing but slugs and stillborns and ended up having to be put down after a massive infection was discovered in her reproductive organs. We attempted surgery when her bloodwork came back good, but once the vet had her on the operating table and saw how bad the infection truly was, it was a lost cause.
Luckily, the infection was not at all contagious, and our male was unaffected.
Fast forward to late last year, we were lucky enough to get a 5 year old adult female BRB (Fiesta) from somebody locally who did not want her anymore. After a good quarantine period as well as a thorough vet check to make sure she was healthy and that her body condition was alright (My male is kind of a porker, so her slender frame threw us for a loop at first.) we put them together in the male's cage to see if any sparks would fly.
We got nothing, but we expected it. Neither had been cooled, but then again, BRBs are notorious for breeding readily at the drop of a hat, regardless of seasons or cooling. Our male, Fuego, has even been seen attempting to breed with his own tale in the past.
Which is a heck of a thing to walk in on...
A few weeks later, I noticed that Fiesta was lying on her side, like maybe she had some follicle development happening...
I thought "bingo!" and put her back in with Fuego to see if anything would happen. Over the next 48 hours, we saw Fuego MAYBE courting her back a little bit. Or he could have just been sitting with his tail on top of her. No real movement, no wiggling, nothing other than position and proximity, so I figured maybe, maybe not.
Caught her sitting on her side a few more times, and they went to their separate corners, never to cuddle again. We waited a week or two for any other clues, and when she went into a shed, we put her back in her cage.
She spent about a week solid in her water tub. No mites or anything, adequate other hides in various temperature ranges, but she did NOT want to come out of her water. I don't think that it was an inordinately long shed, but it's so hard to tell with rainbows, you know? They cloud over for so long before they finally part with their skin as it is.
About a month ago, our vet got himself a shiny new ultrasound machine, so he told us we should bring all the females that had been with males this year down so we could play with it. SUPER cool to see the insides of your snakes for free!
I only brought Fiesta along on a whim, I REALLY didn't think that there had been any real action, especially because the only real "courtship" I'd seen (if it was even courtship at all) lasted all of a day. But I brought her along anyway, just because.
Our JCP was not gravid, neither were any of our ball pythons, but it was first times all around, and their follicle development was right on schedule for NEXT season, so that's always a good thing. The ultrasound on Oolong, our BCI, was inconclusive, and by the end of the day, we weren't even going to do Fiesta.
But then, on that same whim, we did. And BINGO, we saw... something. I wish I WISH we had gotten a printout, but you know, beggers can't be choosers, and it was so nice of him to ultrasound everyone just for fun, so we didn't get a picture of it, but there, after her stomach, was a series of uniformly shaped goodies. Our vet said "Those are either very promising, or the weirdest fat bodies I've ever seen." Lol!
But it wasn't exactly conclusive. It was promising, but none of us were really ready to call her gravid, yet.
So long story short (yeah right, I type forever.) we've been watching her carefully. But she's just acting like a weirdo. She LIVES absolutely LIVES in her 12-pack Sprite box. We always have soda boxes around, so we rotate them through, once they get destroyed, we remove them and put a new one in. And she won't leave hers, so I can't get a good look at her body! Even in the middle of the night, when she's usually active, she's in that darn box, poking her head out and staring at me like "What? You got rats?"
She's still an eating machine, though. Appetite like you wouldn't believe. She'll poke her head out of the box on feeding nights and snatch her prize off the tongs, then set it down next to her box while waiting to see if I'll give her more. When she realizes that yes, indeed, it's still just one per customer, she'll drag it into her box and there she'll stay.
*sigh*
So this is where I'm at. Promising ultrasound, weird behavior, nothing conclusive. I'll just have to sit and wait, but at least I got to vent that all out. Cathartic, at least!
The Fiesta Conundrum (tl;dr)
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