2005 Season Results

Well two of the babies are out of the egg, and I can now post photos of those two. One has a little bit of umbilicus dangling so I have him on wet paper towels so it doesn't stick to the paper towel and drag his innards out. Hopefully it dries up and falls off! The results are quite interesting. I bred my high white to an aberrant banded and was surprised at the results ... a wavy banded and an aztec striped! The third one is hanging out in its egg but the little bit that is sticking out looks aberrant. Below the pictures of the two babies I'm also going to post a picture of the little "oddball" from the fourth egg, the egg that was laid after the snake was eggbound. Just a curiousity.

Here's the Wavy Banded:


Here's the Aztec Striped:


And here's the .... ?Daisy Snake? poor thing.


I'll post pictures later of the last baby.

I also took a moment and checked in on the rest of my kingsnakes in their containers to make sure all is well. All the eggs look great and most of them are starting to look ready to start hatching. I think it will be nonstop hatchlings from this point on!

Originally Posted by Sasheena

My "sweating clutch" (which I've been informed over on kingsnake.com is due to my being "dumb" and keeping my clutch too moist?) is looking pretty bad. Two eggs aren't sweating, but the rest look doomed. I opened up one more egg and while I didn't take pictures, I found the same thing. I was told over on kingsnake that the pictures of my last egg I opened had red blood vessels which indicated that the animal was alive when I killed it by opening up the egg, however I do not quite agree.

If you're keeping those eggs too moist, then ALL the eggs would be sweating and going bad, not just some of the eggs.

That baby you took pics of died a long time ago and in no way was alive when you opened the egg. How can one egg be that far behind in develoment when it is 11 days pre hatch? Methinks the kids over at KS do not know what they're talking about.

Thanks Karen, I needed that reassurance. To me they would all go bad if my methods were THAT off. I just think that the egg died, but until barometric pressures changed there was no change in the egg...with teh change in outside pressures the egg/s just started to come apart at the seams or pores. Two eggs in the one clutch haven't started to sweat yet, so I am hopeful.

Meantime my first king clutch to hatch has finished up. The latest baby is HUGE and really good looking. I'll take a picture a little later... just got back from the dentist and don't feel like doing anything other than taking a nap!

Here's the picture of the last hatchling from clutch #4



(The picture is kind of bad because the paper towel is littered with vermiculite and "egg goobers"... but I wanted to get a good measure of the snake so I used the distance from one piece of vermiculite to another for measuring the snake)

This girl (I think it's a girl based on tail length, will pop them all after the first shed).... she is HUGE! 15 inches!

I'm glad to have 3 beautiful babies from the three eggs laid before this girl went eggbound. The one egg that went full term but didn't produce a live baby is about what I expected. These babies are gorgeous. Of course this is the third year in a row I've produced wonderful kingsnake babies, which always leads me to wonder what I'm doing wrong that makes it hard to produce decent cornsnake babies!

Ah well.

Next two clutches up for hatching: Licorice x Jester and Pegasus x Bishop. I expect them to start pipping in the next five days!

This is my LAST NON-Update for a while!

Okay, progress on this year's clutches...

Clutch #4 babies have hatched already, I haven't fed them yet (they're very fat) they should be shedding soon. That clutch yielded 3 beautiful babies!

Clutches #5 and #6 were laid sometime between the early hours of May 28 and the evening of the 30th. We were away, so it is hard to say when they were laid. I tend to believe that Clutch #5 was laid shortly after we departed on vacation, and #6 was laid shortly before we returned. This would put one clutch at day 61 and one at day 59. My last clutch of kings hatched on day 62 and I expect the rest of my kings to hatch between days 60 and 62. THIS means that I'm predicting my clutch #5 will hatch before 24 hours are up.

I got a new spiffy penlight so I went ahead and candled some of the eggs, and saw great veins.

Here's a picture of the clutch I am predicting will start pipping in the next 24 hours:



In this picture you can see the dark raisin-like lumps that were the two eggs that went bad. I didn't want to try to separate them from the clump, so I covered them with vermiculite, and it turned out to be a very good plan, as I didn't have to watch them decompose and the surrounding eggs were not effected. The eggs are all deflating, but the container is plenty humid. I looked at them and saw beautiful veins on all 14 eggs. This clutch will be an interesting one.... the papa is Jester, who is a beautiful desert phase aberrant, and the mama is a desert phase banded. Chances are that most the babies will just be banded, but they should be very WHITE. Both parent snakes have NO yellowing of their bands. I HAD planned on crossing my high white with this female, but hubby started the snake breeding this year without regards to my plans. But my two males are both clutch mates so I am thinking it's not that big of a deal! Last year I bred this female to my high white, and her first clutch died and her second clutch was laid while she was AWOL. These eggs look great and I'm VERY excited to see how they look. All the babies from this clutch that are normal banded will be given away $free$

Clutch #6 is looking very good also. One of the eggs has a funny bulge on the side, but all of the eggs have very strong veins, and I'm so looking forward to these eggs. The father snake, my high white cal king, is supposed to be a possible het for albino. Since the momma snake is albino, I should get three or four albinos if the papa is albino. She's aberrant banded. I actually bought her mostly to cross to my jurassic milk, but he was just a little too little to do the job this year. Next year maybe. And if it is too much work (they don't like each other) then I'll put her to my other male cal king to see if he is het for albino. These were laid while we were gone and should hatch within 48 hours of the previous clutch.



Clutch #7 has given me some trouble, as I've mentioned. The seven eggs were absolutely enormous when laid. They started to sweat at day 50 and I opened up the sweating eggs, posted pictures of one. I found the same results in all five of the sweating eggs. Perished babies who were perhaps at day 40 or so of incubation. (I don't know the development stages of a snake embryo, does anyone know this?). The first one I opened up loooked like the baby had a faint pattern developing ... banded. The other four had interesting patterns. Another banded or two, one looked like it was a "50-50" with wide white bands and thin black bands. Another looked like a classic stripe. That's all I remember, but of course they all died, so it's rather immaterial. I just got done candling the two remaining eggs pictured below and they still have a strong network of veins so I am hoping they will at least produce a couple of viable babies. This snake laid a second clutch with 7 eggs and one slug, making a total of 15 eggs. The new eggs look MUCH better and I caught them within approximately 6 hours of being laid. If they hatch, they should hatch in 4 to 6 days.



Clutch #8 is my last planned clutch of eggs, and this is Queenie by Jester. She's produced beautiful babies the last two years in a row. What is interesting about her two years of breeding before this one is that she was bred to my high white both years. The first year she produced a lot of babies that had a LOT of white. The second year she produced a lot of babies that had not very much white. So it's anyone's guess if the babies will look like the parents (both with a lot of black) or if they will have some high whites since it is in both animals' lineage. She laid 11 eggs and the last I checked, they are doing great. Those eggs are due in 5 to 7 days from today.

So basically ALL my babies are due to hatch in the next week or so, which is VERY exciting. I am so looking forward to this onrush of babies.

Other than kingsnakes my luck has been lousy.... three corn clutches, and I've gotten ONE perfect baby, and 11 kinked babies, and a large number of dead-in-egg babies. Had one cornsnake baby crawl out of it's egg last night, and immediately expire! WHY are cornsnakes harder than kingsnakes?

Anyway thanks for listening to my pain-killer-induced ramblings. I expect to be adding a LOT more to this thread over the next week, but thought everyone deserved one more non-update before the real stuff starts to fly!

it is a real shame the corns did not fare as well for you. How much difference is there between raising corn eggs vs king eggs? I am fortunate, I suppose, in being in the natural corn climate (florida) and my eggs developed just fine with minimal care. I wonder if the AZ environment, something there, could be making this more of a challenge for you? Do king eggs need significantly different temps/humidity than corns? (I will be doing that research shortly since I may be expecting to have milksnake or king hybrid eggs next year.)

I have 1 deformed baby, nothing like the ones you show here Shasheena, but it is odd. The baby is sort of "folded" over on itself in the middle. I hope it eats.

I wish you better luck in the future, Shasheena. Corns are just the coolest snakes, and the babies are so cute! (Kings are cute too . )

You know, i read your post and said to myself... The method of incubation of the two snakes is THE SAME.. I know it is. Then I said to myself: Read the corn snake manual, so instead of responding right away, I took the time to read through the entire section on incubating eggs in the corn snake manual. The result...?

Incubating corn eggs is THE SAME as kingsnake eggs. In fact I incubate mine a little lower in temperature than what is recommended in the book, but from what I hear lower incubation temps tend to result in longer incubation times, and that is about it.

I believe that they are the same, but next year I intend to change my practices for incubating both kinds of eggs. (though part of me says: it WORKS for the kingsnakes, so why change it?) .... I may just choose to change the way I incubate the cornsnake eggs. I plan on putting a thin plastic grid at the bottom of the egg container.. and putting a quarter inch of water in the bottom. Then on top of the grid, an inch or so layer of moist sphagnum moss. Then I'll place the eggs on top of this layer, covering them up with more moist sphagnum moss, and then placing a paper towel over that in order to judge moisture. This will work well, I think, and eliminate Vermiculite from the mix to make sure that is not the reason for my problems.

COOLL


I was just about to say: "Meantime, my eggs still haven't pipped" however when I opened the box to check.... PIPPIES!!!

More updates coming soon!

Well so far 4 of the babies have pipped. They're so cute. I love kingnsnakes! 10 more to go!

Just thought I would post a pic of the first baby that ventured out. He hid back in his egg just after I snapped this photo, but I thought that I would share. Looks like he'll be one of the "give away" babies. Depends on the rest of his pattern.



All the eggs have slit, and I have 7 noses poking out.

Well DARN....

That first baby finally finished crawling out of the egg. (I left the egg-box completely alone for a couple of hours to give him some time to crawl out on his own) ... and when I opened up the egg-box.... he is lying on his side, mouth open, looks dead! What the heck? I picked him up and he started writhing around as if he's in agony, and then he expired.

Poor little guy, and so pretty too! My only thought is that there was something wrong inside and while he was in the egg he was fine, but he was missing one of the essential ingredients for living outside on his own. Poor thing. He seemed to have a curious depression just in back of his jaw across his neck.... so perhaps something essential was wrong there. I hope this is not an indication for the whole clutch. He was very beautiful though:



Two of the other babies are looking ready to leave the egg and have ventured out a little. One looks like it has very thin white bands with very broad black bands, and another looks like it's going to be striped.