The female eastern king that I got the parthenogenic baby from last year had another clutch this week. Last year she didn't lay till mid-May. What I thought was a pre-ovulation shed and ovulation the other week was not.
She laid 3 odd shaped orange slugs and 1 halfway decent looking egg and then after that nothing. That 1 egg doesn't look like it's gonna make it. It started filling out then stopped.
Anyways, the remaining eggs inside the snake appeared blocked up. After soaking and massaging for a few days it was apparent that even though the eggs had dropped down like they should have, they were not going to come out. I thought maybe the oviduct was collapsed or possibly twisted some preventing the eggs from passing. Made an appointment with the vet who saw the snake this afternoon. He knew that this snake had had surgery 2 years ago by another vet for a prolapsed oviduct caused by malformed slugs so he was prepared for possible surgery. Good news is we managed to avoid that. He got a syringe of KY and a ball tipped syringe and managed to work it up inside and squirt the lube in then massaged the area a bit to help loosen things. It worked well enough that he could get the eggs to appear just enough to grab on with hemostats and pull them out one by one. There were 6 eggs removed total. 5 from one oviduct and 1 from the other. The weird thing is, there was nothing off with these 6 eggs that should have prevented them from passing. There was no malformed or oddly shaped eggs removed from her today. They were more or less normal nice sized eggs. There was however an infection inside the oviduct.. once we got the eggs out the smell just hit you. There was some cheesy like material that was probably creating the blockage he thinks. He filled a syringe with some powdered antibiotics and mixed it with water and irrigated the oviduct to help clear up the infection.
5 of the 6 eggs look like they might survive so I am gonna incubate and keep my fingers crossed on another possible parthenogenic baby. The 6th is partially deflated and discolored as it was the one closest to the opening and apparently was sitting in the worst of the infection.
I washed the eggs as best I could with water and got the worst of the smell and slime and gunk off. I'm wondering if it would be safe to dip a q-tip in say chlorhexidine and clean the eggs further hoping that the antibacterial properties will help give the eggs a fighting chance against whatever bacteria might still be on them? Would this be safe to use on the egg shells?
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PHWyvern
