Wow, sorry for your loss, that would have been an extraordinary snake for sure. It brings up a question that I've wrestled with for almost as long as I've been breeding snakes... is it appropriate to cut slits in eggs after the first one or two in a clutch starts to pip? I have done so, ever since finding what may have been the world's first captive bred dicephalous black milksnake hatchling, fully formed and dead in the last egg of the second clutch of gaigeae I ever produced. One of the heads had started to make a slit in the shell, but they either drowned in the egg or died due to internal deformities. I never want to lose another unique hatchling like that again. On the pro side, one would expect that a clutch of eggs that was fertilized at the same time, possesses the same genetics, and were incubated under the same conditions would develop at the same rate, so when one is ready to hatch, they all should be. That seems like a perfectly rational justification to me. On the other hand, though, I find that some of the eggs that I cut open still have quite a bit of unabsorbed yolk in them. I wonder if I had left this last clutch alone, would I have had fewer problems with hatchlings emerging from the egg still tethered to their yolks, as three out of six of them did? Also, I suspect that cutting eggs open could allow ones that would have otherwise been too weak or deformed to survive, ones that would have (and arguably, should have) died in the egg rather than being cut out and dying of general failure to thrive weeks or months later. This has happened to me at two or three times over the years. What do you all think?

Nate

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