I'm sorry; I haven’t been online for a few days. I don't have any new news at this point. I have been having a really tough winter with my snakes this year and that is hard to understand because my husbandry conditions have never been better.

About 5 months ago I lost an adult male pastel with no warning at all. I just opened his cage one day and he was stargazing and then died in my hands within one hour. I never could find out why. One day he was fine and the next day, dead. In the middle of December I bought an adult Bell line Lemon Pastel male to replace the one that died. Starting out, he looked great and was eating. I noticed a small wrinkle across each of his eyes. I just thought it was a retained eye cap. He never did lose the wrinkle. On the 6th of January I noticed some excess moisture in his mouth with some bubbles. I immediately took him to the vet for some Baytryl. If there was an infection it seemed like it went away after the treatment. Last Thursday the 15th, I was doing some cage maintenance about 6:00pm and he was fine. My wife and I went out to eat with some friends and when we returned, he was DEAD! I don't know what it is about pastels, but I lost two of them now.

About two weeks ago, one of my adult normal females developed mouth rot. With treatment she is doing much better now. A different adult female was just fine on Thursday (the day the pastel died) but Friday morning was extremely bloated, making gurgling noises, and stargazing. I figured she only had a couple hours of life left in her so I rushed her to the vet immediately. The vet was not very optimistic and said I had to make a choice to treat her or have her euthanized. Well, she is still hanging in there with some treatment I guess to say that she is "good" or "better" would be a relative term but I hope that I made the right choice and she does not suffer too much.

I have seen where people will scream IBD whenever anything happens but I really can't rule out the possibility. I was reading about it on Melissa Kaplan's herp info page and the situation they had is very similar in how the virus took out this person's collection. The situation has me worried about my other snakes which include five het pieds and my spider female. I also have several different boas also. So far the rest of the collection has been doing very well and eating great. I know in this post I didn't cover all the details about my situation, but this is it in a nut shell. Please ask me anything that you need to know to help. Thanks for reading and God bless.



-Allan


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Open to any ideas on how I can convince my wife to allow me to buy another herp.

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