2005 Season Results

Okay, this clutch of eggs contains "morons".... these snakes just don't seem to be doing the hatching thing right!

* First one out of the egg leaves his yolk sac behind even though he wasn't being disturbed or threatened.

* Second out out seems pretty smart, waits until the tummy is full of yolk, so he's fine.

* Third one to pip apparantly pipped right through his yolk. He's poking his head out of his egg wearing a little "turtleneck" of yolk.

* Fourth one to pip slashes the egg right at the yolk also, so the only thing oozing out of the egg is yolk, no snake. I went ahead and pipped that one on the opposite side so it will have a chance.

Three more were waiting to pip but I went ahead and slit them (have horrible issues with patience!).

The remaining ones who haven't shown noses yet are all "normal" not an albino in the bunch (disappointing) but from what I can see the first two to get out of the eggs appear to be the darkest, it looks like the rest of the babies are going to be high-whites which is cool. Could be a very nice bunch of babies in spite of not having any albinos. Next year the female who laid this clutch is slated to be crossed to my Jurassic Milk male, so if she'll have him (and NOT for dinner) I will have WEIRD babies next year. But for this year looks like I'll have 7 slightly hatching-challenged babies.

Pictures a little later. Got landed with a bombshell at work today (just popped in for a moment, as I am not due back until Friday), so am a little behind my original plans.

The babies are REALLY cool so far so it will be worth the wait!

Bad news for baby #3... it didn't fully absorb it's yolk and as it's slithered around it's delicup it's dragged out a three or four inch length of either yolk stuff or innards.... Not sure it's going to make it. A few moments ago it was lying with it's belly up (but it just right itself as I was typing this)... The other four still haven't hatched, and the clutch due to pip today hasn't yet pipped.

Baby #3 is REALLY pretty too.... white with a bunch of black spots. *fingers crossed... hoping it lives*

Update...

My latest clutch is almost done hatching... the last baby is still in the egg, very reluctant to come out... and apparantly slow to absorb the yolk, so I'm going to leave that one be and see what happens. But I now have six out of seven out.

Here's baby #1, he left his yolk behind and is quite skinny. He's got something like 50 bands! A little zebra!


Baby #2 is the "dark horse" of the babies in this clutch, very dark, aberrant banded and striped. VERY fat. This is the only one that resembles the mama snake (if she wasn't an albino that is)


BAby #3 is the prettiest baby, but alas, is on the 50/50 list as perhaps having a 50% chance of survival. It was loosing it's yolk (or innards?) ... unraveling from it's belly. That appears to be stopping, what had unraveled sort of dried up, including the little blood vessel, so I snipped it off as it appeared dead. (Yes, if it was innards, I doomed the poor thing, but with them dead and attached I didn't see any better prognosis). It has about a half inch of stuff still hanging but it's drying up. Hopefully it will get through this and survive because it's VERY pretty:


BAby #4 is a nice high white just like its daddy!


Baby #5 is another nice high white:


Baby #6 is a beautiful double striped baby:


Oh, and it seems unlikely that Bishop is het for albino.
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My last two cal king clutches due this month ... one is a clutch of two survivor eggs (the other five died half way through incubation) so I have two eggs ... they were supposed to begin hatching yesterday. There is a lot of doubt surrounding this pair of eggs, so we will see!

The next clutch is due to hatch starting today. This clutch is my third clutch from my female cal king who has bred three years in a row. Her first year she gave me eight eggs, and they all hatched. One was scared too early out of the egg by me and dragged out its innards. The second clutch she laid was 12 eggs. Two of those eggs died and one was dead in the egg at hatching, so I got 9 beautiful babies from her that year. This year there are 11 eggs, and they all look great! She had a different mate this year, so we'll see what these babies look like. She's a possible het for albino, and her new mate is also a possible het for albino. So if they both are then there's a chance the babies will have some albinos. That would be COOL.

*Update*

The last baby from my clutch #6 finally crawled out of it's egg, sans yolk. It's very tiny, skinny, and weak, and I'm not sure if it will live. Today after I'm done cleaning my mouse house, I'm going to bring in some newborn pink mice and offer one up to each of the kings that have recently hatched while leaving their yolks behind, plus my first hatched cal kings who have all started to shed.

Baby #3 from clutch #6 was finally euthanized. I think that the umbilical area got infected. It was writhing around in agony, flaccid and yellowish orange inside. It was clearly dying. I did the only thing I could, popped it in the freezer before heading to work yesterday.

Clutch #7 (which is the one that is in question anyway) still hasn't hatched. The eggs continue to look good and are on day 65. My other cal king clutches have been hatching on day 62 and 63. I will continue to incubate them for a while. Perhaps all the way to day 80 if I can have that kind of patience, before I will open them up to see what's what inside the eggshell. Could be they perished back with the others but the eggshells are just a little more durable and able to keep in the "goobers".... but they are starting to indent and they SMELL like eggs do when they are getting ready to hatch, so I just will let them be for the moment.

Clutch #8 (last planned clutch of the year) had three out of 11 eggs slit while I was at work yesterday. Overnight 2 more have slit. It's interesting to me that all the eggs in one of the egg boxes hatched already, but none of the eggs in the second egg box have begun to hatch?! Perhaps there is something about the material from which the two kinds of egg boxes are constructed. The hatching eggs are in a glad sandwich container, and the eggs that haven't hatched are in a rubbermaid container. This clutch could have albinos, and judgeing from the little translucent "windows" on the ends of about five of the eggs, perhaps I do have an albino. Four out of five are black, and sometimes you can see that it's the actual snake because it will move and you'll see the outline of its pattern. But one of those eggs looks pinkish at the opaque parts, so perhaps it's an albino? We'll see.

Okay, another update.

I took a picture of the last baby from Pegasus' clutch. Things are looking grim for this skinny little critter, but I do hope it will pull through, as it has some of the most interesting head markings I've seen. Poor little thing has no yolk in it's body. Once it sheds it's getting offered a cornsnake to tempt it the quickest. I want it to eat and grow, but we'll see.

Here's #7 from Pegasus and Bishop.


Queenie's eggs are doing so-so.... she has five babies out of the egg, two babies dead in the egg, and 4 more that have pipped, one with a nose. The two babies that didn't make it were #2 and #7. They looked much like the other babies, and I did not take pictures of them.

All of the babies are very much like the parent snakes. The mother is from Newport and those cal kings are fast-growing, large bodied animals. She was ready to breed at 18 months and has bred every year since then. She's a very dark animal with a broken stripe, resulting in some spots that are like dots and others that are like dashes, so I call her a dot-dash. She has the "white-sided" look that her offspring have all inherited. It's not a true-white-sided gene or anything like that. The papa snake, Jester, is an aberrant king with white markings like bones on his body. Some of his influence can be seen in these beautiful babies. You can see the yolk-bellies these babies have. It will be a week or two after they shed before they will really be hungry. I try not to try to feed them until they are skinny, because I hate wasting pinky mice and little snakes that aren't yet hungry.

#1:


#3:


#4 - Look what the yolk does to this one's colors!:


#5:


#6:


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Euphrates eggs still haven't hatched. One started to get the "dead in egg" look, so I opened it up. It was obvious the baby had been dead for a while. It still hadn't acheived it's full color. I couldn't figure out why it had died, but for whatever reason, this entire clutch of babies seems doomed. The last egg still SHOWS very strong veins, but I'm going to put it on the shelf and pretty much ignore it until day 100 and then open it up (unless it shows signs of decay before then.) I'm not sure what it was that dooomed this clutch, but it appears to have been doomed from the start! Makes me wonder what I can expect from the second clutch from this female.

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And that's about it except for Euphrates second clutch that is going to hatch in late september, and the four remaining eggs from Queenie's clutch.

Wow. I really like Pegasus X Bishop #1 banded baby. That is gonna be a screamer. It doesn't look like the bands go all the way to his underbelly.

Wow, cool news...

okay, I've shared in this thread the events surrounding Euphrates' clutch. The eggs were all huge, five of them much larger than the others. On day 50 they started to sweat. I ended up opening up 5 of the seven eggs after they appeared to have fully died. I found 3/4 term babies in the eggs. Dead. *sigh* But there were two eggs that hadn't started to sweat. I had hope for them.

A couple of days ago one of the two remaining eggs appeared to be dead/dying too and since I expected the eggs to be full term, I opened it up in hopes of saving the baby. Alas, I found a baby who must have died within three or four days of opening up the previous eggs. It was slightly more developed, looked like a "ghost" in that only half the final level of pigment had come in. The first five babies had only the slightest trace of their final patterns/pigment.

Well when I came home from work today I looked in on the final egg (which I had decided to NOT open until it started to sweat/mold/appear finally dead). It was starting to look like it would be sweating any time soon. I put the lid back on the egg box and did half a dozen other things, and then a few moments ago I looked in on the egg-box and saw that the egg was half collapsed and sweating up a storm. I went ahead and slit it fully open and saw a fully pigmented baby inside the egg. What I usually do when I open up an egg is close my tiny pair of scissors and give the baby a gentle prod with the scissors. This time I was already convinced the baby was dead, so I slid the scissors under a loop of the baby and went to lift the (as I suppposed) corpse out... well darned if the loop of baby snake didn't slide right off. Odd, I thought, and I tried again, and it again slid off. That's when it hit me... this baby wasn't dead!!! It was alive! I'd saved it? Maybe? Hopefully! Pretty baby! I sure hope I did save the baby! Of course I immediately left it alone so it could come out of the egg in its own time. It's got it's head poking out and is flicking it's tongue like any normal baby.

Anyway, I thought I would share.

My other clutch that has been hatching out a bit at a time is down to two more babies left to crawl out of the egg!

You'll have to give that one survivor a special name. Maybe Will for his will to survive or lucky because he's lucky to survive.

I thought I would give an update since I got home today from work and found my very last clutch hatching!

I've sold a few of the babies I produced this year, given a few away. Had one that never ate for the person I gave it to, they brought it back and it ate for me, and then promptly died? Very weird.

One of the kingsnake babies ended up kinked and I thought to myself that I would offer it to another kingsnake but before I could it passed on.

The last clutch, a surprise second clutch from my girl "Euphrates" whose first clutch (monster goose eggs) died halfway through incubation, and one made it to hatching but that one also died. But of the 7 eggs, 6 made it full term and today (day 54) they started to hatch. I'm thinking they are hatching early because we had AC failure and I was dubious about the viability of the eggs so did not worry about them too much. I was far more concerned about my hatchlings than my two surprise second clutches.

So far of the six eggs, two slit and have beautiful heads poking out. Four more to hatch. We'll see how that goes.

Oh and I have had two escapees.... both quite bizarre. I think there must be a renegade miniature black hole wandering around our house or something. I was cleaning the hatchling containers and one of my more "bitey" babies lunged at me and made it completely out of its container and into midair. Well I tried to catch it but was not successful, and by the time I looked at the ground (a microsecond later?) it had disappeared into thin air! Weird! Found it the next day in a box across the room. (cats found it, we rescued it). Then yesterday I was cleaning cages again, and I got to the bottom of a stack of the large delicups I use for my hatchlings and open up the bottom one, only to find substrate, water dish, shed skin, and no snake! These are very tight fitting delicups with a very strong safe seal. No way it got out and resealed the delicup, from the bottom of a stack of eight similar delicups.

Anyway, it's fun having more hatchlings.

Anyone in AZ want a natural desert banded cal king? Pure white and black? IF you want to come pick it up, you're welcome to one or two. (I don't know how many of the naturals I have left to give away.)

~Sasheena

Well I thought I would give an update on my snakes hatching...

I have four that are out so far.... the first one out was a normal banded baby, the second one is interesting... pure white bellow, black and white "racing stripes" along the side, black back with white spots and squiggles. The third was mostly striped with a few spots near the head, and the fourth was a "squiggly stripe" .... one continuous stripe from head to tail, but it's not a straight stripe, it's got bends and crooks and is an interesting pattern. There are two more waiting to hatch. They're all very nice!