Pueblan Milk Snake Sexing Tips

Video Transcript

"If you want to breed your Milk Snakes, of course, at first you have to sex them. Sexing a snake isn't the easiest thing, and please leave it to the professionals. If you try to sex a snake by yourself and you've never done it before, you could really injure your snake. If you need to sex your snake, have someone who knows how to do it teach you the proper way of doing it. To sex the snake, first you have to locate their cloacae. The cloacae is underneath the anal scale right here. Sometimes it's divided, but in Milk Snakes it kind of looks like your fingernail. So, now that we have the snake's cloacae, we have sexing probes. They come in all different sizes; you use the size that fits best for your snake. So, we are going to use the smallest one because Milk Snakes are small. I'm going to pull the tail back, gently go underneath the cloacae, and into it. Now, you can see that this goes pretty far into the cloacae. It goes that far in there that means it's a male. Males have hemipenes, there are two on each side and they are inverted. When a snake mates, it forces blood to the hemipene, and they only use one at a time, which will come out kind of like if your putting your hand inside a sock, grabbing it and pulling it out, it's inverted. When this probe goes into the hemipene, you know it's a male, obviously because it has the hemipene, it's going into the inverted hemipene. If it only goes in half that distance, you know it?s a female because she does not have those hemipenes. She has glands back there, but it will not go in as far as that. So now you know that you have a male."