My favorite snake (Shag) surprised me this morning!

Well, today was the day I was waiting for. Two pipped their eggs and one stuck his little head out to say 'hi'. What a wonderful day!



Then, later for no apparent reason, I find my breeding 7'+ Snow Boa female dead. This sucks!!

-Tim

Gratz on babys! Sorry for your loss!

Nice, congrats! Sorry to hear about your loss. Was she gravid? A male still in her cage?

My Tiger carpet dropped her clutch earlier this month, Im trying maternal incubation, hope all goes well!

Thanks, I get excited every time I check the incubator.

Here's a picture from this morning:


Not sure if the Snow was gravid or not, I did witness copulation once:


My Tiger Retic also laid recently (27MAR10) but I chose to toss them in the incubator; although we would have loved to have her maternally incubate them.

We started out with 23 that looked good but now we are down to about nine or so.

How do you keep the humidity up with maternally incubating?

-Tim

By the way, the male was still in her cage.

-Tim

With maternal incubation I just keep a good sized water bowl next to her so she can reach it without completely leaving her eggs. Basically she'll reach to her water bowl to drink/get herself a little moiste and then recoil her eggs again. She keeps the eggs at the correct humidity. The ambient humidity is around 50% in her cage. The water bowl is almost under her basking light too which will help out with keeping the ambient humidity at a decent level. Just be sure to change the water frequently. A thing I noticed is that she only coiled up on some of the eggs, some people say that the females can sense if the eggs are good or bad so they'll only incubate the ones that are good. Others say they'll just incubate the most they can and leave the others. However, out of the slugs she layed she never took any of them under her coil and she had a few eggs that looked good to me that she didnt want to put under her coil either, so I am artifically incubating the ones that looked good that she didnt want to incubate. Well, I'm pretty sure those were bad eggs considering they dont look too good in my incubator right now. So I honestly think they can sense the bad eggs from the good and only use their energy to the eggs they know are good.

If the male was still in with the snow, the male may have had something to do with it. I've heard cases with Carpets that the males kill the females and vice versa if they dont get along (very irritated by the other).

With my my boas on the other hand, when I first put my male in with my albino girl, she was very pissy for a few days. Your male may have been trying so much or have irritated your female so much that she died from it. Maybe an over amount of stress? Not sure if she would have actually died from that but maybe thats a possibility. Did you see any bite marks on her perhaps? Suffocation maybe? How long was the male in with her?

Sorry for the extra long post lol.

Thanks for that information, I just may try that if one of my other female Retics decide to lay. I find that cool that she would get herself moist and take that to the eggs; snakes are amazing animals.

Male and Female Snow Boas were very docile to each other and anybody who would reach in the cage. A very boring couple actually.

No bite marks at all, actually she looked perfect except the fact that she was dead and laid with her head funny.

I have to double check to make sure it was indeed the female who died. I'm almost positive it is the female but it was brought to my attention that I could be wrong.

I thank you for your long post!

-Tim

No prob!

For your pairing: If it was the male that died she could have killed him. Thats the more 'normal' situation occurring during breeding. If the female doesnt want the male she may act out in a very bad way (for my albino to het pairing, it was minor by her continuously shoving the male off and 'flicking' her head any time his head was next to hers). If that continued I would have had to pull the male out to insure she wouldnt get more aggressive towards him. If the female was the one that died, like I stated earlier, my only guess was she was very stressed out or felt dominated by him and caused her to have a problem. I'm not really sure. Maybe it was too small of an enclosure? Maybe the larger one suffocated the smaller one considering you said "she was dead and laid with her head funny"

Perhaps it could have just been an internal problem that you didnt know about and not even having to do with the breeding.

Originally Posted by Yaz23

If it was the male that died she could have killed him. Thats the more 'normal' situation occurring during breeding. If the female doesnt want the male she may act out in a very bad way (for my albino to het pairing, it was minor by her continuously shoving the male off and 'flicking' her head any time his head was next to hers).

That's every female bro!

I checked and it was the female that died.

There was absolutely no signs of fighting with those two, not even any shoving or domineering behavior by either of them. They were as calm to each other as if they were alone in there.

The cage is an RBI cage I believe, it is about 6' x 23" x 16".
There is plenty of room for them both in there.

She was stretched out when she died, head was laid on it's side and it had that 'dead' look. Nothing out of the ordinary for any animal that I've ever found dead, seems like the face never looks 'alive'. Bottom jaw was pushed to the side a bit, showing some of the inside of her mouth...nothing crazy at all, just that 'funny' dead look.

By the way, my Carpet laid 17 eggs. Out of which 17 looked good. So far 10 babies have came out of their eggs and the last 7 are pipped (by me) and doing great.
Not bad for a first clutch.

The surprising thing is that all these baby Carpets are as friendly as can be, not like the mean ass baby Corn Snakes that I got last summer; those things would snap at you just for walking by their enclosures.

-Tim