My CP hatchling

Did any of you guys ever think of starting up a registry for lineage, distribution, disease etc...or is this a stupid idea??? Just came to mind with some of the questions I read.

Yep yours is a male Buddy. Thats cool you're both happy enough and didn't pay over the odds. I hate to see people hookwinked and also hate to see animals - especially Aussie pythons - sold as something they aren't.

I'd breed a Jag sib to one of two things - either another Jag sibling or to a Jaguar. The reasons for this list being relatively limited is because breeding to anything else produces offspring whose identity becomes confusing and would be impossible to establish without specific, traceable lineage info.

I'm also a great believer in breeding to produce the nicest animals possible rather than producing hatchlings just for the sake of it, this is especially important among the Morelia pythons as there are lots of breeding combos that produce muddy, insignificant-looking animals. There are always a few magic combos though which are tried and tested that will yield great results......two combos in the case of Jag sibs.

Two Jag sibs bred together would produce very nice offspring with nice contrast and colours; breeding to a Jaguar would equally produce very nice Jags and sibs among the offspring.

Both of these breedings also keep the subspecies - the Coastal carpet - pure which is important in establishing identity of the hatchlings. As soon as you start to mix in Jungle, Irian Jaya etc. in various percentages it becomes very muddy and confusing.

Cheers Karl...
going to concentrate on breeding with the caramel jungle diamond and the caramel jag males but may throw this young guy into the mix at some stage.
Shame it wasn't female as only one female jag sib coming so far so need to hunt out a couple of girls soon then I guess, or even one real good one

Sorry for the thread jack pit viper !!

Ps...if you hear of any nice young jag females popping up give me a shout !!

Tan, you took the words out of my mouth

Reptile registry systems, good and reliable ones that is, seem to be hard to come by the world-over....
A good registry system of sorts exists in the U.S. for Green Tree pythons, called the 'Chondro Alliance', and its members are able to vouch for all animals registered under their membership; not surprisingly though its members might be classed as 'hardcore' Chondro keepers and they take their lineage stuff seriously....so if you wanted a good Chondro with verifiable lineage, you go to these guys. I think this is great!

A similar system - dubbed the 'Carpet Alliance' - tried to get off the ground a while ago in the States but to the best of my knowledge it never really did. What started its conception was that several years ago, when Jaguars were just starting to take off in the U.S., a lot of the breeders there were concerned that Jag sibs might be sold off as Jungles as a money-making scam (Jag sibs would sell for around 50-75% the value of Jungles) and so ways of preventing this were discussed. Purists in particular, i.e. those wanting to keep the subspecies and localities pure, were especially keen for something to happen.

The end result was basically a good discussion with nothing formal put in place. A small handful of breeders instigated their own forms of registry that would allow them (and others in the know) to trace their animals such as ventral scale clipping, however some of these methods proved more reliable over the long-term than others and had varied success.

As the complete carpet python anorak that I am, and wanting to be able to trace my own animals, I decided to keep myself right and started my own form of non-invasive registration system with my own animals so that I could trace where they all ended up if / once they leave here - and some the benefits are evident in this thread. This involves making photographic records; lineage and parentage details are also noted along with a feeding, shedding and health history for each animal. I do this with every animal I own or breed and its been of immense use over the years. Noteworthy animals are also microchipped. It can sometimes be a nightmare to trace the lineage of parents back to source and a good bit of persistent digging is sometimes needed.

Something more widespread i.e. beyond the individual keeper / breeder would be very difficult to do right as all it would take would be one person to lie and set the whole credibility of the registry off - this is basically why nothing has happened in the U.S. to date.

No need to be sorry for tread jacking mate. Some great reading and info being posted here. Would not mind a male Jaguar myself at some point. keep in mind i have a female sibling Budd, would be interesting to see what the offspring would be like breeding these two sibs together.

It's a problem with any registry but one thing you could do is microchip as in make it a requirement. I personally think it's a great idea and have two lizards chipped as well as a number of other animals. That way all you need to do is scan the snake and it's unique number will match the data base. With a reg I think area sub bases are needed as in US, Canada, Ireland etc...as it is a massive task to undertake but a rewarding one when not abused but as you pointed out Karl, people can and do lie but chipping is something you cannot fake.

I think this is an super thread guys full of info

Microchipping is a great idea IMO - the only problem I can see with it would be inserting the chip into the snakes as hatchlings.....it would work with snakes that hatch out / give birth to relatively good-sized babies like Dumeril's boas and Royals, but carpet pythons hatch out so small that inserting a chip at birth to register the new animals in the system would be impossible.

A friend of mine recently got trained-up on microchipping and she was keen to chip all my animals and babies each year - but when she realised how small carpet python hatchlings are she decided to just chip my adults!

How about detailed photographic identification for the small ones untill they can reach a size suitable for chipping? Do they each have their own little quirks when it comes to markings making this a viable identification system or would that not work? Although hypothetical, I think you could be onto something Karl.

I agree Tan - the photographic records seem to work for me - and its free to do which always helps. As patterns change little with age (or if they do they change in a predictable way), it seems a viable way of keeping track of individual animals. That said, my experience with this lies mostly with the Aussie pythons and little else so my ideas and methods are perhaps very skewed in that direction.

In the carpet python group there are several areas which always have highly variable markings such as the head and neck, and these have so far proved to be a very useful means of identifying snakes of any age - rather like a fingerprint. For other snakes with a tendency for less pattern variation, such as many BCI boas, it would be more difficult to find visual markers for every single animal IMO.....although all my adult boas (past and present) had their own distinctive markings that I could pick out, when I bred Sonoran boas last year it was very hard to ID all of the neonates based on the individual patterning system and so I didn't bother. I'm sure someone who specialised a bit more in their boas (or any other snake) could possibly do it however.

I'd say for carpet pythons the photographic records work very well; for other snakes, other methods would be more ideal. For those species with good-sized young such as Royals, many boas, Retics etc. a microchip implant at birth is the way to go for definitive identification IMO.

tidy carpet mate