The baby left the egg yesterday afternoon. I assume it's a she ... short stubby tail (approx. 31 tail ventrals). She is a fat sassy thing...already musking and tail buzzing and striking with lightening fast reflexes. Haven't measured or weighed her yet...but figure she's about 9-10 inches long.. certainly has a good weight for the size...not a scrawny thing. Very active and cruising all over the place. I'm gonna try a pinky tonight just to see what she does with it. I had a baby black rat snake hatch last year that ate less than 24 hours after hatching and it too had been just cruising all over the place.
She doesn't really seem to take after her mother lol. The mom has a heavily checkered pattern along the entire belly while the baby has like only 13 tiny checks..most of them on the lower half of the body..the upper half is pretty much a clean solid cream (tinted pink down the center from the blood vessels). The baby also has a lot of black striping on the side right above where the side meets the belly and a little bit of a yellow stripe down the back of the neck...mom doesn't.
Both the mom and baby are not great looking when it comes to a nice clean chain pattern of an eastern king. They are both very heavily on the broken side, but when compared to each other the baby has a much better pattern than the mother..definitely an improvement there. On both snakes most of the chains are on the lower half of the body ..the upper half is mostly broken.
The only odd thing I could find about the baby has to do with the scales on the underside of the tail.. instead of having clean rows of divided scales beyond the anal plate... they flip flop between divided scales and undivided scales: 5 divided, 3 undivided, 2 divided, 4 undivided, 3 divided, ~10 undivided, 4 divided.... very weird.
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PHWyvern
