I have had people ask me over the years how I do one thing in particular. That is, how do I change the temps on one cage in a stack?

I have all my cage heater cords going up to the top of the stacks of cages except one bank that I have access to from the back of that wall of cages. This is a view of the back side of that wall.



Every singe cord is labeled so I know which cage each one goes to by simply looking at the tag that is attached to each cord. Those cords are labeled "1" for the bottom cage. "2" for the second cage up, etc. all the way up to "6" for the cage on the top of each stack. I run all the heaters on this wall with two Ranco thermostats. One thermostat is set at a good maintenance temperature. I run my room at 76 degrees and the 1X sized heaters at 87 degrees during the day time. I simply turn off the heat at night. The temps drop down to 80 or 81 overnight and only creep up to probably 84 or 85 before I turn them all off in early evening. This temperature works well for breeding and or any other time of the year for non-gravid males or females. Simple right? That's how I try to do things. Simply in a way that works and is both great for the animals and easy for me.

The second thermostat is my "GRAVID" thermostat. That thermostat is also set at 87 degrees year around until my first female ovulates and goes into a shed. I have one cage in the furthest stack in this picture, the fourth cage up, that is designated as the "GRAVID" cage. When I have the first female on this wall ovulate and go into a shed, I move her into this "GRAVID" cage. This is where she will remain at least until she gives birth. Once I have introduced that first gravid female into the "GRAVID" cage, I bump the temperature on the thermostat that is monitoring that cage, to 91 or 92 degrees. This allows that one cage to run warm enough for the proper gestation of those babies she is carrying. I use Aspen as a substraight. I also push all the Aspen off the heated area, so the female can have access to sit directly on top of the heat without any of the Aspen insulating the heat. This one cage temp being warmer does have a tiny bit of impact on both the cage above and the cage below, but not that much.

The image below shows the two power strips I have behind the stack with the "GRAVID" thermostat set up. The top strip is connected to the maintenance thermostat that is set always at 87 degrees. The lower power strip is connected to the "GRAVID" thermostat that is bumped up as soon as the first female ovulates. You can see there are two cords plugged into this strip. This is because I have it set up for two gravid girls in that stack.



This other pair of power strips shows all the cages are still plugged into the maintenance power strip indicating that nobody is yet gravid in that stack.



It's a very simple system that I have used for a long time to simply tweak each cage when the time is right. You can accomplish a lot using few thermostats with a bit of ingenuity. :-)

Here are some of the babies that were born on this wall of cages in 2011:

I acquired the Boa I call the "Tribal Boa" back in 2007. He is a captive bred Colombian that popped up in a litter of normal Colombian babies in 2006. Here are a couple shots of him taken back in the fall of 2007.



He has been the single most difficult Boa, of a relatively small size, that I have ever handled. He is feisty, squirrely, unfriendly, nasty, impatient, ferocious and did I mention, he hates my guts. He simply refused to pose for any pictures. No way. He is fluid movement like a saw scale Viper picking his moment to deal that death blow! A menace is he.



The nice folks I got him from, the Bob and Liz Shumaker, of The LB Reptile Experience fame, from Jacksonville Florida if I remember right, are the good folks who allowed me to pry this little fellow from there able hands. They are pretty much nuts, just like I am! Really nice people.



Anyhow, after I obtained the little fella... I am pretty sure it was after, they told me that the Boa I had been calling "The Tribal Boa" had a different name while they still had possession of him. "Mean Joe is his name", Liz told me one day! LOL Well that name fits him perfectly!



This is a picture the Shumakers took of him while they still had him:



Well, Mr Mean Joe AKA The Tribal Boa, so far had seen four consecutive breeding seasons in my hands as a large enough to breed boy. So far he has had a single season where he bred like a champ. Sadly the girl he bred did not produce any live babies. Just slugs. That was two seasons ago. This past season he took off entirely choosing the just sit in the corner daring me to get near him.

Mean Joe is alive and doing quite well. I decided in the off season this year that I would feed him more than I normally feed a male breeder Boa. As a result, he is a bit bigger and has more weight than I normally have on my males pre-breeding season. Still I have my fingers crossed this this year may be the year that we get to see if he is carrying any kind of a Dominant mutation in those genes of his. The nasty little bugger!



The picture I snapped of him today between strikes. LOL

Tick tock tick tock...



Two weeks ago I noticed a problem with this girl. I only had five cages still on gravid Boa temps. One that is the cage with the probe for the gravid temp thermostat. The monitor cage if you will. The other four cages are all in one stack where the last two gravid females were gestating. The extra warm cages were empty except for the two gravid girls. The four in one stack are two stacks removed from the monitoring cage. I was feeding when I realized the power strip that is supposed to be heating those cages, with the gravid girls, was OFF! Oh no! You gotta be kidding me! All the cages in this stink'in snake room and the only cages with zero heat have the last two gravid girls! Disaster! Or at least could be a disaster. I have absolutely no idea how long they had been without any heat. I have no way to know. Usually girls that are too cool, will crawl around a lot looking for a warmer place to rest. Neither of those two girls were doing that. I just do not know how long they were like that. The other female gave birth less than a week later to a perfect litter. So I am hoping it wasn't too awful terrible long. Time will tell...

This represents, I think the forth latest litter in the season I ever had a female ovulate and thus give birth. This litter will be five months past the first of the season for me. Crazy huh!?

Today is day 111 from the ovulation. Another week and I'd say we are out of the woods. I am guessing she will give birth to her little delights in nine days. September the 20th. 120 days after her ovulation and just 100 after the Post Ovulation Shed. Stay tuned...

I must admit I do love to tell a tale. Tales that I suppose are fundamentally self serving, but I continue to do it nonetheless. At least a few in the masses do admit to being mildly entertained by such, so I continue. It is after all one of our great freedoms!

It was about one year ago when I decided I would try to breed this unique and beautiful Sharp Albino girl.



She needed to be bred by some little male worthy of her beauty and charm. She is actually rather feisty if you ask me. So I decided to try one of my somewhat squirrelly 16 month old Key West Boas.

He seemed to take to her pretty much right away. She too is a youngster at just four years of age. After several months of protracted and amateurish courtship, she ovulated! I didn't know if he actually did any damage or not but I would find out soon enough.



BOOM! Nice ovulation!



Then the waiting began. She did everything according to the script that I wrote years ago now. Sitting the "Heat Conservation Position" directly on the heat every afternoon as I knew she would.



Even while gravid she remained simply radiant:



But the girlish figure had to eventually take a beating. That WAS the goal you know... here she is the morning after delivering her first brood of baby Boa puppies for me July 15, 2011.



A wonderful little litter of all Het Sharp babies of which several were the much sought after Key West Boas.





They really start to come into their own after you get a few meals into them.



Now the longer wait begins with the ultimate goal of making Sharp Albino Key West Boas... Oh I wonder... I wonder what those little guys will look like...

In 2010 we attempted to breed a Prodigy T-Positive Boa to a Sharp Albino without success. This is a Prodigy Boa:



We did produce two premature embryos that gave a gimps into what was to come in the summer of 2010.



One was clearly a "wild type" while the other was lacking almost all pigment in it's near snow white appearance.

This season we tried again in hopes that like the Boa Woman Caramel, that the Prodigy mutation would reside on the same allele as the Sharp Albino mutation. We were fortunate and delighted to see that they are both on the same allele and together make a brand new double Het Visual mutation known as the "Paradise Boa". Here is one in an image taken at nearly three months of age after the third shed. So far there is zero hint of browning out in any way so far, the colors are like cartoon type colors rather than the more typical earth tones you see in other Boas. Great fun!

Introducing the Paradise Boa!!!