Moderators, please forgive me. This is in my forum, but I would like to put it here too.
On a Saturday night back in March 2005, I went into the snakeroom to feed the snakes. Back then I only had 3 ball pythons and 8 cornsnakes. I thawed the mice and went to feed one of the ball pythons. My normally placid ball python was hissing and wildly striking at me the moment I opened the drawer. I jumped back and noticed a scorched smell and saw that the substrate was charred. I pulled the drawer all the way out of the rack, while dodging the strikes of the snake, put on my "wussy gloves" and transferred the snake into the large "critter keeper" that I used on cage-cleaning day.
The bottom of the drawer was actually melted. There was a fist-sized hole where the plastic was gone. I was horrified. I quickly unplugged the rack and waited for the snake to settle down. Thankfully, the snake was unhurt.
I ended up having to co-hab 2 of my ball pythons and 2 of my corns until the new rack came. Not a great situation as I had never been a fan of cohabbing in the first place. Snakes don't choose to socialize or travel in herds in the wild, but this was only going to be temporary. I put my 2 male ball pythons, and 2 of my male cornsnakes together. One of the cornsnakes was named Kelsey. He was a 7 year old amel stripe and one of the most beautiful snakes I had ever laid eyes on. I got him from a breeder that never learned how to pop or probe hatchlings, but said he could tell a snakes sex by its tail shape. I had put Kelsey in with females in the past, but he never showed any interest. I thought it was just bad timing on my part......
The new rack came about 2 weeks later. I settled everyone into their new digs, and thought things were fine. I was wrong. A few weeks later I noticed that Kelsey was starting to look "chunky". It NEVER EVER occured to me that "he" might be gravid. For 7 years I had thought of Kelsey as a male. I never provided a lay box. Why would you provide a lay box for a male snake?
One night in July I went to feed Kelsey and found "him" surrounded by 13 or 14 eggs. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that my boy was actually a girl. Initially, I was thrilled. I had wanted to breed that gorgeous snake from the beginning. I fed Kelsey a fuzzy and set the eggs up in vermiculite.
A couple of weeks went by, and Kelsey "seemed" to recover. She was eating and acting normally. I had not handled her since she laid her eggs. I took her out of the cage and noticed a huge lump near her cloaca, with several more behind it. My heart sank. I made a vet appointment the next day. The vet managed to get one egg out of her and gave her an injection designed to cause muscle contractions, in hopes of helping her expel the rest of the eggs. After a week of no progress I brought her back to the vet. She was given another injection. The next morning, Kelsey was dead.
It was very hard losing Kelsey that way. It was my fault for co-habbing and not seeing the signs of a gravid snake. But, I still had the eggs. That was something. I decided that it would be hard to give up ANY of Kelsey's babies, come hatch time. Even if they were a bunch of normals, I could breed them together and hopefully someday hatch a baby as beautiful as that girl was.....
But one by one I watched the eggs die. Soon I had only 9 good ones....then 8...And by October I was down to only 3 good eggs.
On October 12 a head poked out of one egg. I was elated. The baby had the same wonderful striped pattern as its mother!! On October 13, another head appeared, and again the same striped pattern emerged. The color was a bit darker on both those babies but that wonderful pattern was the same! (That meant the male was het for stripe too!) Then on October 14, the last baby hatched, the spitting image of Kelsey! They turned out to be all males, and they came at a horrible price. But I named them Kessler, Kato and Kismet and kept all 3. My avatar is a picture of Kato as a hatchling.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I will have to say that I am adamantly against co-habbing snakes. It cost one of mine her life. If my words seem strong in those kinds of threads, it just because I don't want someone else to go through what I did. The snakes are the ones who suffer for our poor decisions. Always remember that.
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