gemmaedwardsuk

SNAKE POST!

Do not read if you don't like snakes! People keep asking me how they are, so I thought I'd do a little blog post on the new babies. We now have 9 Royal Pythons, a couple different morphs as well as 2 reticulated pythons. But this blog post is about the royals! They are my faves

Firstly, this is how snakes have sex. They stick their bums together like this and twist up, this can take foreverrrrr.



This is Pastel Pete. We thought he was a man but turns out he is now a pregnant lady. He didn't seem to want to mate with our female so we put a second male in to hopefully spur some instinctive competition...Then we notice the two 'males' we're locked up together. OOPS! Pete is a girl but I will always refer to him as male, so get used to being very confused!

Anyway, this is an early sign of pregnancy. You can see he's a bit bumpy building up eggs/follicles and cuddling the water bowl like that because it's cooling him down.



They then have a pre-lay shed, and then within a month, EGGS! Here is Pete and his clutch, he laid 4 eggs and one little slug that wasn't quite an egg. It's his first clutch, since he's always been thought to be male, so we weren't expecting a massive load. Usually they should lay around 6-8.




Then off to the incubator! For nearly 2 months. My boyfriend made ours from a beer fridge with heat mats in etc, it has been on for a couple months before this ensuring that nothing goes wrong with the temperature settings over a period of time. The daddy snake was a Pinstripe, so this clutch is referred to as Pastel to Pin - there are 4 different babies we could get: Lemon Blasts, Pastels, Pinstripes, Normals...we have to wait and see!



Gross photo for ya - We then got Pete straight back on his food as to be honest he was a little too small to lay really, fine for a male but as he is actually female he's a bit on the small side so after the weightloss from producing eggs we wanted to start bulking him back up right away - and he took it! Which is good because royals can be super fussy and not eat for months just to be annoying.




Once they had been cooking for long enough, we cut the eggs to make sure theyre okay. You dont HAVE to do this, you can wait for them to pip through themselves as they will have a little egg tooth but on very rare occasions they might not have this and effectively could end up drowning. When breeding, you don't want that one amazing snake in the clutch of normals to be the one that drowns! You can tell by dimpling in the egg when theyre running out of oxygen and before this you can also shine a torch against the eggs to check there are veins so you know it contains something living! Once checked, you leave them in there though to absorb their yolks and come out when theyre ready. At this point, the babies are still inside their embiotic sack.



Then, eventually, they will poke their heads out like this! At this point they are still absorbing their yolk but have broken through the sack and are breathing oxygen from outside the egg for the first time



...And here he is! Our first ever royal python hatchling Normal, but still cute. They are so soft when they come out they feel like gummy sweets!



We had another normal (middle) as well as a Pinstripe baby:



And finally, our favourite, the little Pastel! He was last to come out at 47g, the rest are 53/54g so he's the tiniest and very pretty.



This is a crap picture, but here they are next to eachother so you can see the different patterns:



We are now waiting for Bruce (another female!) to lay any day now

I am not a snake expert and these are our first hatchlings, I hope i've explained it okay, I dont know everything but Ive tried to make the steps simple to understand

BABY SNAKES!!!

xxx