Hognose Snake Sexing Tips & Advice

Video Transcript

"If you want to breed your snakes, of course, you're going to have to sex them and sexing snakes is not the easiest thing. The number one thing is that you're going to want a professional do it. You sexing a snake, if you're not use to it, you can injure your snake. So, definitely have someone who knows how to do it show you how to do it. Now, you're going to need some instruments here, these are sexing probes. They come in all different sizes for all different sized snakes. And, what you're going to do, for this little one, I'm going to use this smallest probe and I've already dipped it in some lubricant. I'm just using a little Vaseline right there. Now, you have to locate the snake's cloacae. The protective scale right here is called the anal scale. In some snakes it's divided, in Hognose Snakes you can see it's a divided scale. In some snakes, it's not divided; it just looks like a fingernail or another ventral scale. What we're going to do is bring the snake's tail back and go gently underneath its cloacae, which it's not going to like. Be very, very gentle with it. We're going to put that probe in there. On some snakes it's easier to do than on others, obviously. The smaller the snake, it's not easy to do. Here it goes. You can see that this probe is going some distance inside the cloacae. Which means it's going into a Hemipene. There it goes. So this is how far it's going in. It's going into an inverted Hemipene, which means that this is a male. If was going half that distance it would mean that it's a female. In male snakes the Hemipenes are inside the tail and they're inverted. When the snake uses them to mate, to copulate, it pushes blood through them and it's kind of the equivalent of us putting our hand inside a tube sock, grabbing it, and pulling it out. They have two Hemipenes, they only use one at a time, but when the probe goes into a Hemipene, goes in some distance, you know it's a male. If it only goes in half the distance, of course, it's a female because she does not have those Hemipenes."