Well, even though I was beginning to wonder if it was even possible after all this time, one of my female booms laid her eggs today. They began their breeding process back in January, and there wasn't really any noticeable swelling until here in the past few weeks, so I was beginning to wonder if it would even happen. However, I was able to get a copy of the Chicago Herp Society's Feb 1995 Newsletter which has a pretty extensive article on the captive care and reproduction of D. typus, and according to it, booms tend to take a long time when it comes to reproducing. They can take up to 240 days between breeding and laying, and then eggs take much longer than most other colubs at about 90 days to incubate. Just goes to show, I suppose, how much different booms are to other colubs.



As far as specifics, my female that laid today (the smaller one at around 4' or so), gave me 5 eggs in total, one of which is definitely a slug. The others look 'different' compared to my other colub eggs I'm currently incubating, but I'm not panicking yet. For this snake's length and width, the egg size is amazing. Each egg is around 2.5" long and about .5 to 1" thick. Keep in mind, a 4' slang is a very slender snake. Her posterior, in the past few weeks, was becoming very distended, but because of the irregular look to it, I began to become worried that maybe it was an impaction rather than her being gravid. No eggs could be palpated, but that might be due to their slenderness. But then again, I haven't ever had much luck at palpating eggs, so who knows. Anyway, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for these 4 good looking eggs and hope everything goes alright. My other female, at around 5.5', should be gravid by now as well, and I imagine she'll lay a much larger number of eggs.



And who knows, with the way the male is acting, she may go for another round, though I've not read much information on them double-clutching. Anyway, thanks for reading!
River Valley Snakes

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