When Your Collection Becomes a Business
The transition from hobbyist keeper to active ball python breeder happens fast, and the record-keeping gap between those two states is enormous. At six snakes you can hold feeding dates in your head and weigh them on a kitchen scale without writing anything down. At twenty-five animals in production — females being paired, gravid females on laybox watch, clutches incubating, hatchlings being weighed and fed up — the mental model starts shedding critical details around the edges.
A female that went into shed two days after her last successful pairing changes your follicle development timeline. A clutch with four viable eggs and three slugs from a first-year female is different data than the same ratio from a proven adult. A hatchling you sold for $200 that came from parents you bought for $800 total isn't a profit story yet. None of this is information you can reconstruct after the fact.
The Record That Covers One Animal's Full Economic Life
Morph and sex are the identity fields — the combination that determines what a given animal is worth at any point in the market, both for sale and for pairing purposes. A 1.0 pastel (male pastel) has utility as a pairing partner and a definable market value. A 0.1 lesser enchi (female lesser enchi) has a different pairing value and a higher floor on resale. The morph field needs to be detailed enough to capture complex multi-gene animals without abbreviation that makes the record ambiguous six months later.
Last Shed and Last Ate as discrete date fields — not notes, actual date fields — create the husbandry timeline. The practical use case: a female who hasn't eaten in 17 days and last shed 8 days ago is in a different physiological state than a female who hasn't eaten in 17 days and last shed 45 days ago. The numbers tell you something specific. Without dated records per animal, you're guessing at her cycle based on behavior and ambient temperature, which is the amateur approach.
Weight with a Weigh Date captures growth rate and breeding readiness. Female ball pythons are typically not introduced to males for breeding until they've reached approximately 1,500 grams — a number that varies by breeder preference and female build, but that is always a weight-based decision, not an age-based one. Tracking weight against weigh date lets you see trajectory: is she gaining 15 grams a week or 40? That rate of gain shapes your pairing timeline.
Clutch Data and the Slug Problem
Clutch Size and Slugs as separate fields is the correct structure for serious breeders. Slug rate — the proportion of infertile eggs in a given clutch — is one of the variables you track across multiple pairings to evaluate pairing success relative to male fertility, female conditioning, and pairing timing.
A male that has produced three consecutive clutches with slug rates above 40% either has a fertility issue or is being paired before females are in optimal follicle development. The database, filtered by that male's "Paired To" entries and their corresponding clutch records, tells you which of those explanations is more likely. Without the data, you're making attribution errors that cost you production seasons.
Clutch hatch date paired with Clutch Date gives you incubation duration — which cross-referenced with your incubator temperature logs (maintained separately) tells you whether that clutch ran hot or cool and correlates with hatch rate. Breeders who track this across multiple seasons start to see their own incubator's quirks in a way that gut feel never surfaces.
The Status field — NFS, Available, Sold — is the operational triage layer. Filter for Available on the morning of a reptile expo when you're loading 30 animals into tubs to transport, and you've got an instant manifest of what's on the table. Filter for Sold with a date range and you have your sales record for the season. The serial number and barcode fields let you tag individual animals in your physical labeling system and link those labels back to the full record without any ambiguity.
Purchase Price versus Sell Price across the full collection, filtered by season, is the number that tells you whether you're running a profitable breeding operation or an expensive hobby with occasional income.