Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Greetings;

For the past 3 years I have been starting my hatchling rat, king and milk snakes out in the small, square Gladware sandwich containers with paper towel substrate and a small portion cup for water. Each container has 3 1/8" holes in each side for ventilation. I started using these because they were really easy to to clean, stacked up nicly and were very secure.

In each season I have noticed that I have had what seems to me to be an inordinate number of deaths amongst the hatchlings where the animal just presents itself as dead with no apparant symptoms or signs of any previous trouble. I have never had this to occur previously with hatchlings which were kept in either shoeboxs or deli cups and eventually I began to wonder if there was something wrong with the boxs themselves which might be causing this problem? Perhaps some sort of out gassing from the plastic? Nothing is apparant upon gross examination of the dead snakes or through a rough and ready counter top autopsy. I have not had any sort of lab work done on any of them although I had considered it a time or two.

I have had mortality in Corns, getula Kingsnakes, Pueblan Milks, Blair's Kings and obsoleta spp kept in these containers. This year after finding 4 Corns dead on the same day I removed all animals from these containers and replaced them in shoeboxs. Since doing this I have had no furthur hatchling deaths in 3 months.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this with animals kept in these containers? If so please let me know or if you have any ideas I would be interested in hearing them.

Thanks!

Peter
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Peter and Sara
Beouf River Reptiles

wow, that's something to take note of, I'm sorry for all of your losses. I use these containers, but don't house animals in them long term. I dont' really know how you could test for such, other than telling your concerns to the vet, and take the container, and a fresh carcass in to be sent to the lab. Testing for oddball toxicities is part of their training, though they probably use it more in mammals.

Things that I can think might trigger such toxicities are residues left from manufacturing, thus washing them first would be a good idea. However chemicals used in disinfecting might also start such problems. This isn't exactly high quality plastic that we are talking about. Heat from dishwashers might also bring out toxins... who knows eh?

If you do find an end to these questions, do please let us know

Ian