Well i've been looking to get a new snake and orginally I planed on getting some species of colubrid but then I started checking out this forum and decided that I may want a ball python instead, still not sure however. how ever while thinking bout a ball I remembered that all the morph I know of are atleast $1500, and that just for an albino the other ones cost thousands of dollars more! however none of these more seem to be in low supply, infact I used to see many of them at expos all the time. i definately don't plan on buying a BP morph (unless I hit the lottery lol) but my question is why are they so expensive?

There just aren't enough people breeding them yet to drop the price. As more people breed them, and they become more available, the prices will drop.

There is also the factor of bloodlines. Some bloodlines, which are known, are worth more then just you or me breeding and selling the offspring.

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Yup its all about the gentics and the time it took for them to make the morph. I still know theres alot of them for 50,000.00 Mostly big names have those. Pastles and Albinos seem to be on the drop though. Males anyway.

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Its also in part because with Something like a boa, you breed two hets, you have a 25% (I beleive) chance of it coming up as a morph, And boas can have up to what, 30+ Babies at a time. Theres a pretty good chance breeding two hets, you'll get some morphs out. Correct me if im wrong, but ball pythons have like 3-6 eggs maybe, so producing morphs is a bit more up to chance.

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"Nobody can do Everything, but Everybody can do Something."

o I can see that. i used to breed leopard geckos and african fat tails and they only lay 2 eggs at a time, so that was a pain. especialy one pair of AFT, i had a het. albino male and an albino female and out of the whole time I was breeding them (two years) they only produced 1 albino lol figures, my father gets me a $900 gecko and het. male for $100 and it ony produces 1 albino. but ya I got your points, all of you. i guess between on special lines, not a lot, and how hard it is 2 get morphs cause of low number of offspring, its all makes some since now. thank you all for you help!

i was on NERDs site the other day and they had one that was $100,000.00!!!

Its is largely the law of supply and demand. When a morph is first developed, there are only a few of them and the "Investment quality" snake breeders want to snatch them up and get busy so they can make money on them. So the price is high.
As more are bred and more become available the price drops. I remember when the albino burmese appeared, they were worth thousands of dollars each. Now they are everywhere and cheap.
Ryan hit it with ball pythons. Their reproductive rate just isn't high enough to flood the market with morphs so the price stays up.

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Merlin,
What's Life Without A Little Magic!

I have friend that picked up an axanthic female for 200 bucks. check craigs list. a lot of the time local breeders put ads on there

besides the supply and demand stuff mentioned above, theres also the fact that they are expensive because people are willing to pay a lot for them. if it wasn't possible to sell a snake for more then a few hundred dollars, then people wouldn't try to.

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i'd be better off opening my own small zoo.