Hey everyone,
This evening, something truly amazing happened to me. About a month ago, I noticed that a single specimen of Ramphotyphlops braminus that I had been keeping in a small vivarium was not seen as much as it usually had been. I searched all over the surface of the tank, not to find it. I broke apart the wood, combed hrough the roots of the plants and tendrils of mosses in the setup, and checked under evrything; nothing. I dumped the soil out on my car-port, and carfeully combed through that too. Still nothing. I emptied the gravel, dismantled the filtration system, dumped out evrything, and spent several hours combing through it all. I searched at last 30 times up and down; it was empty. No snake. I washed out the tank with a mild bleach solution, blasted it out with a powerful hose, and bought entirely new things to create an even better setup for the animal. I reinforced the caulking that prevented the animals from escaping around the lid, and created a tank 10 times better than the one before. For awhile, it was up and running, just waiting for some more inhabitants. Just tonight, I walked by to see someting in the tank; a baby blind snake crawling through the moss area. I am sure that there are more in there. It lookd very healthy, and was quite active. I am thrilled. I have no clue at all how it ended up in the tank after what I did, but it's in there, and it cannot get out. Plenty of ant eggs for it too. It is really no wonder that these things have colonized all over the world in so many unioque habitats; they come out of nowhere, and when they do, there is no stopping them. I hope to expnand this colony even further, and it appears to be up and running again like a charm. How strange!!! How miraculous!!!
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DAVE
0.0.1 Oriental fire-bellied toad
0.1 Western hog-nosed snake
0.0.1 Okeetee corn snake
0.1 Dubia day gecko
0.0.1 yellow * Everglades rat snake
1.0 Yunnan beauty snake
1.0 scarlet kingsnake
0.1 albino African clawed frog
0.0.1 Northern black racer
0.0.1 African brown house snake (Zambia locale)
0.0.1 Sonoran gopher snake
1.1 European fire salamanders
(parthenogenic) Brahminy blindsnakes *
