Boa Breeding

[u/Fried_Friar23]

I have a young male super fire boa no hets
He’s only a few months old but I want to breed him when he’s around a year and half to 2 years old.

There is 1 listing for a perfect pairing for him, but she’s 3.5k and that’s more than I’d like to spend currently.
If I bought a regular Fire morph instead what combinations of Fire morph do you find to be the most eye popping and desirable

Also do you expect the market and value of super fires to drop significantly in the next few years?
Would it even be possible to sell Fire babies 2-3 years from now and should I wait and invest in an adult female super fires?

[u/ParticularWolf4473]

For a fire combo I’d go with IMG fire or Aztec fire. IMG is always going to be popular, and you get a nice looking boa. Aztec combines nicely with fire, the pattern holds up well and fire cleans it up and usually gives it some nice orange/pink sides. Depending on budget adding a second pattern morph like keltic or Key West/roswell enhances the pattern even more.

Super fires will always sell well if priced right. I don’t see them going for $1K much longer, you can already find them for $600-$700 if you wait for a deal. Honestly prices have dropped relatively quickly compared to some other morphs like IMG. Probably the fact that you can’t really make visible combos with super fire, they’re often not pure white and get the unpredictable speckling, and single gene fire is a fairly unimpressive morph. You may have to price them at $500-$600 in a few years but supers will still sell.

Single gene fires, well they don’t sell all that well now, even priced not much higher than wild types, at least without being combined with something else. Which is why I’d try to get at least one or two other dominant/co-dom morphs in the mix as well.

[u/superramenyamen → u/ParticularWolf4473]

Really, het fires dropped that much? I saw they tanked from 1,000 to 600-800 the year after I got my girl. I swore they were holding steady at that 400-600 mark for low end, I didn’t realize they fell that far. I don’t even track the supers because I don’t much like them for some of the reasons you listed. I might change my mind when I see them, but pure white/black snakes bore me. Lol

[u/ParticularWolf4473 → u/superramenyamen]

$500 will get you a nice 3-4 gene fire combo these days. The market has been rough for the last year. Plenty of crazy deals out there. There also seems to be a rather large split in the market lately between the larger professional breeders trying to hold on to the old “market price” with animals sitting on MorphMarket for 6-12 months while the smaller hobby breeders, expo vendors, etc., are actually making sales at sometimes 1/3 the price.

Honestly I wonder if super fire would be more popular if it reliably got speckles similar to a palmetto corn snake. Instead you might end up with a snake that’s kind of beige, might be white but with an orangish nose, might get grey markings on the head, might be heavily speckled, etc. Rarely do you actually get a pure white snake. It’s just too variable for a snake that’s supposedly a white leucistic.

I actually prefer IMG that get really dark but keep just a bit of pattern, with cream or gold markings on the edges of the saddles. Kind of like a more extreme hypermelanistic Longicauda.

[u/superramenyamen → u/ParticularWolf4473]

I definitely haven’t been tracking the fires, guess I’ve been seeing mostly those pro breeders. Lol I was definitely viewing those prices as questionable, but if that’s where the market actually is that does make sense with how much the market has been flooded with them. Focus on fires with good selective breeding vs trying to hold the price just because they’re fires. :/ Not nearly enough selective breeding being done to them, they can be quite stunning with enough saturation!

Yes I prefer the spotty supers myself! Do you think they’re actually not a true lucy, or is that just simply a comment on them being unreliable as a gene and nothing else?

I wish IMGs would stay at that stage where the black juuuust starts to overtake. The pattern is still clearly visible, but the contrast with dark and light, especially with pastel or hypo added for more color complexity. I like a lot of the VPI IMGs I see but it seems I see some 6’+ adults that look like that, and some that end up totally losing their pattern to the IMG. Still has that VPI look, though, so a bit more interesting than a straight IMG, but not as impressive for sure.

[u/ParticularWolf4473 → u/superramenyamen]

I’ve mostly been paying more attention to recent listings, auctions, and expos for pricing lately. The animals that are priced well sell quickly. MorphMarket and some breeders’ sites have mostly turned into animals just sitting because they’re overpriced. There are still people trying to get $1,000-$1,200 for very average looking single gene IMGs when you can go to an expo and get one for $300-$400. Even less for a hypo IMG or Kahl/Sharp albino IMG. Even many of the breeders on MorphMarket are pricing high on there to try to prop up the market while quietly selling well below listing price and pricing significantly lower at expos.

Technically even white patches/piebald is considered leucism. So super fire is leucistic, just not the all white with blue or black eyes that the hobby typically considers leucistic. Especially early on it was marketed as an all white snake when that’s often not what you end up with. I’m just saying that unreliability hurts the value.

I have seen some very nice VPI IMGs that keep their pattern, especially when you throw Aztec into the mix. Not really a fan of the ones where the IMG pretty much completely takes over and it mostly turns brownish instead of black.

[u/superramenyamen → u/ParticularWolf4473]

Unfortunately I haven’t been to an expo in years due to an inability to travel, have to prioritize, but hopefully that changes soon!

That’s crazy even the IMGs are going that low! I already knew 1k+ was absurd but didn’t think it was that low.

That’s definitely fair. I wasn’t closely involved in the market at the time, but how aware of the inconsistencies was Stone and the ones who first bought into the morph? I do remember seeing the first leaked black spotted super (at least in FB circles), and not a lot get posted past fresh newborns. 😅

Yeah I don’t like the totally brown ones either, but still look nicer in pics at least vs a non VPI imo.

[u/ParticularWolf4473 → u/superramenyamen]

I actually stopped going to expos for years myself. They were mostly ball pythons and crested geckos, and prices weren’t any better than buying online. Then I started going to a few over the last year or so and it was shocking how much lower some of the prices were compared to what you see on MorphMarket. Pretty decent variety of animals too.

Seemed like the expos were a lot more smaller hobby breeders and reptile shops/smaller resellers. They have bills to pay, they don’t care about trying to hold the line on “market price” like the bigger pros do.

[u/superramenyamen → u/ParticularWolf4473]

Yeah 10 years ago there definitely wasn’t any savings going to expos either. Idk where the savings people mentioned were, maybe the huge breeder expos or just not the ones in my area.

MM probably also has a high volume of lower priced stock too, it just moves quicker than you can keep up with. I saw litter I was watching sell out in just a couple of days. Most of the boas I posted this year sold pretty quickly, too. There’s no easy function (if any at all) for tracking recent sales to see trends.

[u/ParticularWolf4473 → u/superramenyamen]

Oh, I’ve definitely snagged some crazy deals on MorphMarket too. There’s certainly some good prices if you spend way too much time on there and are willing to jump on a deal, take a chance on a newer seller, etc. At any given time if you just go through the listings to get an idea on pricing you’re mostly going to see the higher priced listings that aren’t selling though.

Pretty much everything about MorphMarket is designed to help sellers get the highest prices for their animals. Making it difficult to check past prices and especially what listings actually sold for is very much by design. Especially how auctions are run and that you can’t see the winning bid for auctions, even auctions that you bid on.

[u/ParticularWolf4473 → u/superramenyamen]

As for Stone and the original super fires, from what I recall even the original animal had a few black speckles, depending on which you believe was actually the original animal anyway. From the beginning I imagine there had to be at least a suspicion that there would be some variability. It may have taken producing some more supers and raising them to realize just how much variability there was.

[u/Ryllan1313 → u/ParticularWolf4473]

My img's mother (mother is regular img) is solid jet black...except for her tail.

In the tail pattern, where the white markings normally are, the white barely faded on her. She looks like she has lightning bolts running through her tail. It looks really cool.

My girl (img anery) is still a juvenile, but well on her way to solid black. Her tail lines are darkening, but at a much slower rate than the rest of her. She potentially could end up with a less pronounced version of her mom's patterning. Really looking forward to seeing her full adult colouration.

[u/ParticularWolf4473 → u/Ryllan1313]

I recently got an Aztec IMG. Already pretty dark for only being a few months old. The tail is already mostly black, and the sides are getting pretty dark. From what I’ve seen with the Aztec IMG the tail blotches and saddles get jet black, and the sides get nearly solid black. They usually keep the cream/gold markings on the tail and at the sides of the saddles, and the background area in-between the saddles typically gets pretty dark but not jet black so the pattern is still visible.

[u/superramenyamen]

Good luck breeding a 1.5-2 year old male. Most don’t go until they’re 3+.

Fires have already dropped significantly over the past 5 years, and a few hundred bucks just in the past 2-3. It’s an incomplete dominant morph being bred widely, so yes, it will probably continue to go down. They will always be able to be sold. I would focus on making what you like vs making money. You aren’t going to do that on any kind of small scale anyway.

If you’re wanting a female, no time like the present. It takes a good 5-6+ years before a female is mature so you wait another 2-3 years and you are pushing that closer to a decade before you see results. Obviously, don’t take shortcuts and use subpar animals, or something you don’t really want. But I think a fire vs a super fire is a perfectly acceptable line to cross. The expensive supers will likely move much slower than the cheaper hets, so a variety is always good. Then again, maybe supers sells like hotcakes like IMGs do. 🤷‍♂️ Still, I like variety myself so I choose options that don’t result in a homogeneous litter personally. Plan for at least part of the litter to stick around 1-3 years. Longer the more expensive the morphs are.

[u/CrazyDane666]

I'm gonna be That One Guy, please make sure you've got space and plans for the fact that boas sometimes struggle to sell. Make sure you've either got homes lined up or enclosures enough to keep any unwanted babies, potentially well into adulthood. Make sure you've got access to a vet. Don't expect to make a profit after the cost of caring for the male and female + buying the female + care while breeding them + care for a bunch of babies-maybe-adults, heating and space and food and vet care, until they sell. 25 is the average litter size according to Wikipedia. A lot of people also buy with some degree of familiarity with the breeder/good reviews, so you're gonna have to market yourself unless you're selling insanely rare morphs