My Snake Babies

As I reported in an earlier post www.oneyearcloser.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-have-snake-eggs.html that my corn snake eggs were hatching. Unfortunately egg hatching success was not very good, only 5 eggs hatched. This could have been for several reasons:

1. The parents are getting old
2. Her laying took me by surprise and I was not prepared
3. The eggs were not prepared for incubation right away
4. I do not have an incubator so I incubated them at room temperature

What I did once I noticed that she had laid eggs, was to use moistened vermiculite in a plastic whipped topping box. I put a few airholes in the lid and put a probe thermometer through the lid. I placed the eggs in the vermiculte as best I could, trying to keep the eggs in the same orientation as they were laid. Then I put the container in the top of a closet in a room that stays fairly warm. According to the thermometer, the tempeture remained pretty stable around 80F.

Even though I only had five eggs hatch, the hatchlings are beauties. I had 4 amelanistic, like the father and one that is close to the "normal phase" of corn snakes. To me the dark one is the most beautiful, it only has a small amount of red in btween the dark splotches and instead of splotches it has lengthwise stripes on its neck. I have not been keeping up with all the designer corns that have come out in the last few years, but if anyone knows if this is a known variant, please let me know.

I plan to keep the dark one but I will probably sell the others. Anyone interested in an amelenistic corn snake? They are hearty eaters, I have fed them twice and all of them quickly devoured their pinks both times. Wel, talk is cheap so I am going to post some photos of them. Also in the previous post http://www.oneyearcloser.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-have-snake-eggs.html the photos of the parents and the eggs are finally up, so make sure you go back and check them out.