• Hello!

    Either you have not registered on this site yet, or you are registered but have not logged in. In either case, you will not be able to use the full functionality of this site until you have registered, and then logged in after your registration has been approved.

    Registration is FREE, so please register so you can participate instead of remaining a lurker....

    Please be certain that the location field is correctly filled out when you register. All registrations that appear to be bogus will be rejected. Which means that if your location field does NOT match the actual location of your registration IP address, then your registration will be rejected.

    Sorry about the strictness of this requirement, but it is necessary to block spammers and scammers at the door as much as possible.

Hello from Texas

L

lannvouivre

New member
I just got a "male" lavender corn snake last week. Supposedly my BF knows someone whose husband breeds corns, so hopefully I will be able to verify sex soon. He's also supposedly 10 months old.

I'm not 100% sure on his coloration as I am a "cat person" and so snake patterning is new to me, plus apparently he's just about to shed. I did attempt to feed him a fuzzy last night, and he seemed interested in it, but ended up ignoring it all day. I have another thawing for him (I threw the other out) and will try again later, this time I'll try making cuts along the back and maybe the smell will help but since he's about to shed, I'll try not to get my hopes too high.

He was being fed two pinkies per week, so I decided he needed something larger and picked up fuzzies from Petsmart in the interest of making sure they were humanely killed. At first, when I examined the mice again when I had just handled him, I started feeling kind of nervous that they might be TOO big, but then looked at some other feeding pictures and wow.

When I picked him up, I noticed he still had dead skin clinging to him and used advice from here to clear that up, only to find out that skin had actually been on him for a long time. :shrugs: Poor guy.

Anyway, he's pretty docile and has only struck once...at the baseboard he was slithering by. He seems a little scared when you first pick him up, and he is a little cranky right now from the foggy eye caps, but doesn't seem to mind being handled.

My cats love watching him, so now I have three heavy books in a stack on top of the tank's heavy mesh screen. In fact, my youngest girl has been watching him do nothing for the past two hours straight, while the other two girls are napping and looking outside. My mom isn't happy that I have him even though I don't live with her anymore. :) I think that's a win. My aunt, great aunt, and grandmother all love snakes (and most other animals) so this is very amusing to me.

I'll try to post pictures of my set-up later when I have my cellphone at hand. I don't want to stress him out too much, so. I hope no one will be offended at my use of dried out, dead rubber plant leaves as additional hides; I feel pretty confident he will never get tempted to taste them but I do need to find something else that won't make me lose sleep. I think I'll end up having to make another hide because he doesn't like the one from All Living Things and I can't even find out what it's made of besides obviously not cedar. My reading says that if it were pine, it should be toxic to any non-mammalian vertebrate and it seems no one has come to complain about it yet on Petsmart besides for about mold, crickets pooping on it, and "my lizard doesn't like it boohoo".

Here are my cats:
Sherry (grey) and Potter
941329_652935991399883_1043120934_n.jpg

Alice and a real human femur:
400769_652935994733216_670425763_n.jpg

Potter and Flower (smaller, has blue eyes, cuter)
10288767_866484180045062_991912832996356457_n.jpg


Here's my car:
11016733_1057647247595420_7985994560073464863_n.jpg

11009924_1057649777595167_2050520508643108118_n.jpg


I just finished all my classes for automotive technology. I recently overhauled my car's engine to bring the compression up on cylinders 1 and 4 because they were 30 psi lower than the other two (max acceptable is 15 PSI) and because it was very, very sluggish. Most of the work was done by me completely alone, I pulled it with the help of my BF's grandfather, dropped it in with Dad's help, and then had to pull the transmission with my BF's gdad again when I majorly messed up marrying the the engine and trans. Luckily, the transmission was only $200 used :)

I can list the mods on my car if anyone wants, but I have a feeling everyone here would rather I not :p
 
Hello and a belated welcome! Very pretty cats!
On another note, snakes will often refuse to eat while in shed, so if yours is still refusing to eat, wait until he has shed and then offer again.
 
He shed his skin in one whole piece. I made a moist hide and had to use damp toilet paper with some of the dried rubber leaves inside for him to hide under. It was the ugliest creation I ever have made, but apparently he loved it.

Phew! Finally got some pinkies. He was refusing the fuzzies even after he shed, so I had to go find some pinkies. The local Petsmart had none for three days so I just drove to Midland for some instead. He took them instantly (two) after I cut their craniums. Unfortunately, my cats stole my forceps so I ended up holding them with my bare hand, by the tail. Luckily, he just slowly took them in his mouth instead of striking. I was concerned because it had already been at least a week since he'd eaten when I got him.

The cats are obsessed with him and the F/T mice. I had to feed him with all three of my girls crowding around me. Flower is still watching him even thought it's been two hours since I fed him and he's been in his hide with the entrance hidden by a leaf.

I still don't have any good pictures of him. He has one zigzag similar to the "Aztec" patterning on his tail, and I have done some studying of pictures of the various morphs and confirmed that he's just a plain lavender (as far as phenotype goes). After a couple of days, I'll see if my BF can photograph him with a good camera.

He seems very docile but a bit nervous. He hasn't even so much as trembled his tail at me since a couple of days after we got him. I think I need a nice table for him, because he also doesn't leave his hide and I think that he may be able to sometimes see the cats.
 
Welcome! Yes, most new or young corns are nervous to show themselves so let him be, he will come out when he is ready.

Get a good digital kitchen scale that measures in grams. Keep a journal, weighing him before every meal. THIS is a good guide to feed him, within a few grams or so when he is younger.

HERE is a page I wrote for another newbie, it has a lot of good info in it, but no matter what I would buy the books recommended. Kathy and Don are two of the best when it comes to corn snakes!

And never be afraid to ask questions here. The only dumb question is the one not asked.
 
It looks like he should actually be eating weanlings at this point, which is fun because ...I have to order them! I did get him to take a fuzzy last night, which was about the size of a hopper. Previously he was not interested in them at all for whatever reason. It's very hard to feed him with all my cats pressing in wanting both the snake and the thawed mice. I need to remember to start locking them up.

He weighs 99 grams.
 
Here's an update, as I'm not sure where else to post.

I had been feeding him two fuzzies (I don't have access to weanlings here, so I weighed fuzzies and found two fuzzies match the weight of one weanling), but those are often not there when I get to Petsmart. I no longer have a kitchen scale and just barely got a new job about two weeks ago, so I have no idea how much Snakey weighs. I took a chance yesterday and picked up a small mouse, and he ate it no problem.

This is great, because they always seem to have loads of small mice stocked at PM.
 
Reptile shows are a great place to stock up on food. Pinkies have been described as Fat and Water. So it's nice to get them off when you can, but better safe then sorry. You don't want to do it too early.
 
PetsMart sells the "Arctic Mice" brand of frozen mice. (At least the store in my area does.) I am able to buy "Small" frozen mice, that's what is stamped on the box. That is basically the size of a Hopper or Weanling. They are about 1-1/2 to 2 inches long overall on the body and weigh an average of 8 grams each. I think these would be perfect for your snake. A snake can easily swallow a mouse slightly bigger than it's body diameter. If your snake is eating 2 fuzzies at a time he can easily handle these.
 
There weren't even any pinkies at the store and I'm not sure we have any shows within 2 hours of my town. It was either the small mouse or go hungry for another two days. I weighed him three months ago at 98 grams and won't know his real weight until I can find the scale again. The scale is either at my BF's house or in the storage unit. The feeders at PM also were undersized by weight vs. the weights on the Munson chart, but the site I was using is frozen now.

My new reference is here:
http://www.bhbreptiles.com/main.aspx?Page=feedchart
 
He weighs 174 grams now! Jeez! 74 grams in about two or three months?! I hope this scale is right, we picked it up for $4 and I verified that it at least gives consistent readings and correctly zeroes out without "wandering."

I weighed a "small mouse" (Arctic Mice brand) and it is 11 grams. The chart I linked earlier says he can eat 20-30g mice. I will probably have to just bring the scale with me to the store and hope they actually have stock.
 
They grow really fast when young. His growing will slow as he ages.

Contrary to what some folks around here would have you believe, if your snake should be eating 20 to 30 grams per feeding, then 2 of those 11 gram mice would be perfectly fine at 22 grams total. If you can't find a 22 gram mouse in the store, but you do have 2 that weigh 11 grams each it's the same thing.
 
Karl_Mcknight said:
Contrary to what some folks around here would have you believe, if your snake should be eating 20 to 30 grams per feeding, then 2 of those 11 gram mice would be perfectly fine at 22 grams total. If you can't find a 22 gram mouse in the store, but you do have 2 that weigh 11 grams each it's the same thing.
Click to expand...

There are minor differences, but essentially this is true. Two 11g mice probably have more skin surface, possibly more fur, and other low-nutrient/hard-to-digest bits than one 22g mouse might. I think newbies especially are often swayed from this idea of equivalency because many might take it a step further, believing they can just feed 20g worth of pinkies.
 
You can get an idea if your scale is accurate by weighing room temperature water. Use the tare function if you have one or just subtract the weight of your container so that it is not a factor.

http://m.wikihow.com/Convert-Milliliters-(mL)-to-Grams-(g)

I checked mine with just an old fashioned measuring cup and filled it to 200 ml. I must have great eyeballs because my scale weighed it as exactly 200 grams.

This definitely depends on the accuracy of your measuring your water, but it will give you a reasonable idea. If you have trouble eyeballing the lines on a measuring cup, you can always use a medicine spoon or syringe and measure your water into your container that way. It just takes longer is all.

This should assure you that your scale is not wildly off, though it is not foolproof nor guaranteed 100% accurate.

Congrats on your beautiful, growing snake!
 
At Petco/PetSmart the 'small mouse' is the next step up. That is the weight is usually equivalent of a weanling on average. (sometimes it might be of by a gram or two but not by much)
 
QEmQ2Xw.jpg

Here he is on my desk, probably dreaming of pooping on me again.

ZssymMd.jpg

Here's my newer snake. I don't believe in co-habbing, but he kept jumping back in the tank while I was trying to put Snakey up.
 
To get an edit button you need to be a contributor. Don't worry, you're not the first or the last to post a large picture.

Your snake is really pretty and from the picture I think 174 grams sounds about right. That's an interesting cat accessory you have for your Viv! :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top