After a bit of extremely disgusting dissection I can confirm that the critters are mites. However, we took apart the egg that had "exploded" and there seemed to be nothing amiss. There was an embryo in the egg, but it was dead.



There was another egg he removed from the clutch which had an usual growth starting on the end of the shell in the same fashion as the "exploded" one, which we dissected as well, but there was nothing obvious there other than a perfectly formed snake embryo



There seemed to be a lot of mites clustering round one of the rotten eggs and in the vermiculite, but none on the healthy egg we dissected. The mites themselves varied in size, but there were some fairly large ones (by mite standards), with some approx. the size of adult snake mites. They were white/clear though, with brown legs and mouthparts and under the 'scope we could see they had some long hairs portruding off their bodies.



We have suspicions that the mites have been residing in the substrate, possibly something happened to the original snake egg that it burst and the mites emerged from the substrate to feed on the dead egg. This is just a theory though, if anyone has any info we'd appreciate it.

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