Posted by:
Chris_Harper2
at Thu Jul 3 12:07:20 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Chris_Harper2 ]
I've told this story here before but thought it was worth posting again.
When I first bought my current house I had 2.2 Rhynchophis boulengeri on loan from a good friend of mine. I had just pulled them out of brumation and set them up in a temporary rack in our new home. The rack was very long and one of the casters had broken off during the move so it had a significant curve in it and one of them was able to escape. R. boulengeri are valuable animals still but back then adults were really worth a lot. I was freaking out.
I can tell you that having a snake escape during a move is a less than ideal time. You have open boxes everywhere and things are constantly being moved from room to room so the snake could be anywhere. I tore the room the rack was in apart and could not find it. I was contemplating what to do next and realized I had not checked the other specimens to see if they had escaped.
Long story short, I found the male in the tub next to his copulating with the female. So he had escaped from his cage and managed to squeeze into the one containing the female. Needless to say I immediately took the other male and placed him in with the other female. I never saw that pair copulate but both females produced clutches several weeks later. It was the first breeding for all four specimens and I think we got 15 fertile eggs that year.
And for the record, the next thing I unpacked were some wood shims that I used to straighten out the sagging rack. ----- Currently keeping:
6.10 Gonyosoma oxycephala (Javan, mixed colors)
1.1 Philodryas baroni
1.0 Rhodesian Ridgeback
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