Disadvantages to large females and large clutch sizes??

[RandyRemington]

The problem will be telling what is fat and what isn't. The two that looked beyond presently plump to me where the two that unexpectedly didn't breed but I don't have the best pictures to show how they compared to less fat looking girls that did breed.

As far as the plain big (but not over fat) girls I would tend to agree with you that I would like to have a few but it would be nice to hear some data to back up their lack of a downside. Do girls like Joan's 17 egg ones lay ever year? Of course it might be hard to sort out cause and effect. Are they big because they aren't bred every year and perhaps they also are big because they weren’t first bred as young. It would be had to get enough data to really tell if genetically big girls tend to take longer to mature or to skip years. Even if they do there could be advantages to one 17 egg clutch every other year over say a 9 egg clutch every year. I read on another forum that Joan in a recent year had one 10 egg clutch and two 17 egg clutch. Rent a high end male for one year and get 44 babies out of breeding him to 3 females (heck, time it really well and rent him for a week).

[Jeff_Favelle]

You can tell what's fat and what isn't in 2 seconds. Pick the snake up and see if has the muscle tone to double back on itself. If you're at the point of breeding snakes, I would say you've handled a few dozen and its really quite easy to tell if a Ball is either fat and lazy or healthy and plump. Pictures are hard, obviously. Pick it up? Night and day easy.

[RandyRemington]

Both big girls where muscular but noticeably fatter than the ones that actually produced. Not a big enough sample size to draw a very strong conclusion but I'm hopeful they might do better this year a little slimmer.

If one where really motivated to get to the bottom of it perhaps a ratio could be developed to calculate stockiness via a weight to length ratio (shouldn’t it increase with the square of the length?) so as to quantify the likelihood of being over fat. It still wouldn’t be perfect as some individuals might be muscular and stocky without being as fat as another of the same build. Maybe after years of careful record keeping we would know if it is common for female ball pythons to be too fat for good breeding results or not.