Posted by:
Darin Chappell
at Fri Sep 28 10:18:18 2007 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Darin Chappell ]
There's no good reason to house corns together, except that the keeper wants to do so for some reason (space, ease, "it's cool," or whatever). There is no reason for the corns...they are solitary animals that do not enjoy one another's company except during mating.
Reasons not to house them together:
1. Cannibalism. Though relatively rare, corns do eat each other from time to time. Usually, this is due to an SFE (stupid feeding error), but there are instances in which corns seem to prefer to eat their tank mates. Granted, I have never seen this happen except in the case of hatchlings (and almost always a problem feeder is the culprit, by the way), but I have learned never to say never among corn issues.
2. Stress. Reptiles are extremely susceptible to stress related illnesses. If you take an animal that is solitay by nature and force it to share a space with another solitary animal...yes, you may never have a problem, but why take that chance?
3. Problem identification. If you have multiple animals in a tank, and one of them is sick (i.e. regurging a few days after feeding, when both "lumps" have gone down in the two corns), how can you know which is sick? And even if you do know which it is, you have to realize that if your animal is contagious with something, you now have two sick aniamls when you could have had only one.
Someone will likely post Jimmy's excellent post on the subject, but I have to say that I can find no justifiable reason for the average keeper to be putting two or more animals in in a situation wherein the possible negatives obviously outweigh the limited positives.
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Darin Chappell
Hillbilly Herps
PO Box 254
Rogersville, MO 65742
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I have to strongly disagee... - Darin Chappell, Fri Sep 28 10:18:18 2007