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Originally Posted by Ed Clark
Emily, we did a trade deal about a year ago with some baby ball pythons, for some of your crested geckos.
Did you do fecal exams on these babies at that time when you recieved them? I know you added other balls to your collection after you recieved those babies from me...did you do fecals on them?
I have a very good herp vet that I use and we do random fecals on my adult breeders and have not had any positive results yet for internal parasites...all negative!
Dont you think these parasites would have shown up in these Ball Pythons before this. its been about a year since I shipped these to you?
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Ed, they weren't babies. You told me that they were captive bred 2005 females--I received them on November 1, 2006 so they should have been at least a year old or close to it.
I already stated that I did not do fecals on the snakes when I received them as you had assured me that your snakes were clean. I trusted you.
Tapeworms do not normally expel themselves from ball pythons and can live in their intestines indefinitely. They do not come out unless there is some kind of irritation that causes them to do so. Perhaps the tapeworm in this female started to cause a decline in her health which caused elevated levels of the coccidia--enough for the tapeworms to come out. So no, I do not think that the parasites should have shown up before now, I'm just lucky that they did now rather than later.
Can you post the results of the tests from your herp vet? Why do you only test your adult breeders and not any of the hundreds of other animals (many of which are ch) that come through your facility? Negative results from only your adults breeders, which are probably housed completely separately from the stock that you sell, doesn't mean a whole lot.