Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi

My bf and I just acquired a new female baby licorice stick rat snake. She supposedly has eaten frozen pinkies at least once, but I think she's a 2008.

We are used to boas and pythons. We know this baby has different heat and humidity needs, but we aren't sure what they are. Current set up is as follows: Apartment temp about 78 degrees with usual humidity in the low 20's. We are in Laurel, MD where the current daytime temps are in the 50s. Currently, the baby is in a shoebox ventilated tupperware, on papertowel substrate, with a water bowl and a hidebox. She is sitting on a chair next to a (closed)floor to ceiling window with mostly closed horizontal venetian blinds. We have heat tape, but we think that made them too warm, so it's presently (noonish) off. We were out and when we came back, the baby was lying on her back and we were scared that we had already done permanent damage. A bit of time to cool, and a few mists of water, and she was moving around ok again.
Without the heat tape, is everything else ok? Should she be moved away from the window and further into the room?
Please let me know where a good FAQ is.

Thank you for your time,
Antigone

I would move the snake away from the window. Sounds like there may be something already going on, most snakes don't do the belly up thing normally. It is an '07, '08 would be quite the trick. I would wait 10 days and offer a very small live pink or completely brumate it. Move the animal out of the light for now. I don't think indirect sunlight would cause a problem, but eliminating it from the scenario will provent the possibility. All snakes should have a choice of temps, but maybe your heat was up too high? Do you have a thermostat? Just my opinions. Good luck.
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Todd Hughes

You should be measuring the temperature inside the cage. Measure the warm spot on the heat tape and the cool end of the cage. I'm guessing that you had heat tape with no thermostat or rheostat. That's not a good scenario. With the ambient temp in the room already close to 80, I bet the temp in the cage could have reached the 90s or 100s. Sun from the window could create a greenhouse effect. Get the temps under control. 85 warm spot, room temp cool spot.

Your snake is a morph of a black rat snake right? Black rat snakes live as far north as Canada. Cool temps aren't going to hurt them one bit. Best to er on the side of leaving the cage a little cool for this guy.

Good luck!

Greetings

Thank you. I have moved her further into the room. I also did some looking around on the internet at various sites. I'm a bit confused.
I could have sworn that the person we bought her from said that if the apartment was at least 70 (and we had a dip in temp recently when winter came back), which it is, that corn snakes don't need a heat source and don't need extra humidity. On the pages I pulled, they need 75-80 degrees, plus a basking temp of 85, and somewhere around 60% humidity (which would definitely mean spraying). The conditions described in the sites I looked at were much more similar to our boas than I had originally been led to believe. What's the right answer on this?

I put her house half on the tape, half not, so she has a bit of an option. And I think the heat tape was up to 82 yesterday, but slightly less last night.

Antigone

And to clarify things just a little bit (this is Antigone's bf) we do have a dimmer on the heat tpe with a thermo on the tape. We were initialy trying to keep that tape around 85ish but now are taking it down to about 80 with the cold sound round 75ish.

Widj

Was the snake upside-down underneath newspaper or something? Sometimes they can do that and its normal. They get kind of lost in the substrate. If it was laying in the open upside-down and the temps were OK, either something may be wrong or you have one crazy snake.

Hi

We did have a couple layers of paper toweling... I hadn't thought of that as a contributor. But I believe that temps really were the bigger problem.

She's been much better since being moved, and with having a proper thermometer and a dimmer keeping the temperature in check.

Antigone