Posted by:
phwyvern
at Tue Apr 18 15:28:55 2006 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by phwyvern ]
I received a clutch of black rat snake eggs in late June of last year. Maintenance crew was using a front end loader to pick up a load of mulch from the big pile and eggs came tumbling down everywhere. They scooped up the eggs and stuck them in a bucket with some mulch and brought them to me. The eggs had tumbled hard enough to split the outer shells. The inner membranes appeared to hold firm - only 1 of the 10 eggs was leaking fluid.
I had no way of knowing which end was up or how long ago the eggs had been laid. I just took a chance and left them as they were in the bucket. I stuck the bucket in the green house and didn't bother setting up the incubator. Considering how badly tumbled they'd been, I figured the yolks were probably scrambled and the eggs would go bad soon enough. I did cover the upper portion of the eggs with some vermiculite leaving just the very tops uncovered for easy view.
I actually forgot about the bucket and the eggs and 3 weeks later remembered to check on them. To my surprise they were still going strong - even the one that was leaking fluid (the vermiculite I tucked around the eggs seemed to help plug the leak a bit). Seeing that the eggs had a chance now, I replaced all of the mulch with vermiculite and then continued a course of semi-ignoring them for the duration of the summer other than to occasionally re-wet the substrate down periodically. I also put a screen top on the bucket to keep out any mice and other pests.
Hatching began 9-1-05. Over a 4 day period, all 10 eggs sucessfully hatched. I wasn't keeping track of which snake hatched from which eggs, but out of the 10 there was one noticeably runty individual compared to the others. I think it's fair to say that was the one that probably came from the egg that leaked fluid. All of the hatchlings are doing quite well and eating like pigs though even after eating all winter long the runty one isn't gaining any noticable growth compared to the others. Their attitudes are very much more in line with corn snakes than black rat snakes (dunno if it's just the general attitude of their particular blood line/parents or because they'd been addled in the egg lol) --- no tail rattling, hissing, striking, snapping or displays one normally sees with wild baby black rats. Just a puppy dog like look to their faces as they peek out of the cage to watch what is going on around them....probably hoping for another meal.
This is a photo of one of the eggs when it started hatching. you can see the split in the egg shell (just to the right from center) from when they got tumbled.
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PHWyvern
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RE: Egg rotation and ill effects - phwyvern, Tue Apr 18 15:28:55 2006