...were less than optimal to put it mildly. You win some and you lose some, this year I got my rear kicked hard!
To start out, I had 4 females reabsorb their follicles/developing eggs. I have limited tactile sensation in my fingertips due to a job I held in my teens that burned the heck out of my fingers on a daily basis (I was extruding various rubbers and plastics at 600+ degrees F). However, despite this disadvantage, I've been able to palpate with pretty accurate "guess-timations" of the number of eggs I can expect. The four females that reabsorbed their follicles were DEFINITELY gravid.
They all had been bred to a Bumblebee and a Russo het. Lucy.
They were
0.2 Pastels (neither have been bred in the past)
0.2 Wild Types - one of which had her first clutch last year and the other hasn't given me a clutch in the past two seasons.
So what did I end up with? One first time breeder female wild type gave me three eggs.
You read that right - three lonely eggs. When they finally hatched I had 1.0 Pastel and 0.1 Odd looking Wild Type. The third egg had a Pastel that crawled out of it's egg and died due to a twisted umbilical cord that cut off it's yolk supply.
I had the same thing happen with a hatchling last season. However, with that one I was able to ascertain that something was wrong with the little guy due to his small size, lethargic behaviors and the fact that 24 hours after everyone else left the egg he still didn't look like he was anywhere near ready. I was able to remove him from his egg and untwist his umbilicus. I then placed him into a small, plastic, disposable Gerber baby food dish lined with moist paper towels. Within 24 hours he had absorbed his yolk and eventually made a full recovery.
The hatchling Pastel from this year showed absolutely no outward signs of it's complications and I wasn't able to see either it's yolk or it's umbilical cord from it's position in the egg. If I had known I would have attempted the same thing that I did last year. Instead, he (she? I didn't sex it) crawled out of it's egg, pulling it's yolk sack behind it and died. When I saw what had happened I felt really bad. I would have liked to have helped him somehow, it couldn't have been pleasant for him to essentially starve to death. However, the umbilical cord was actually wrapped all the way around his body and appeared very tight - almost like a rubberband. I'm not completely sure I would have been able to help him without damaging some of the sensitive tissues that surround the yolk sack or possibly rupturing the sack altogether.
The survivors are doing fine. The female Wild Type has quite a few flames running bilaterally and has a very clear belly. I did breed the Dam to a Russo het. Leucistic but she appears too dark to be a Russo. She is either a very nice (but odd) looking Wild Type or she is the ugliest Russo I've hatched to date. Sinice the Dam has such a dark (almost inky black) ground color, if this hatchling is a Russo het. I would expect for her to inherit some of the Dam's deep coloration and thus be difficult to determine her genetics. Hopefully, a few more sheds will help me determine which.
The 1.0 Pastel is "okay". I don't think he will be winning any beauty awards. Since the Dam is a fairly dark female I really didn't expect any Pastels to be stunning (I was hoping more for some Bumblebees... the BB Sire has incredibly high white sides along with a huge reduction in pattern that makes him almost appear to be a Killerbee).
Like I said, you win some, you lose some. For those of you who read through all of this you deserve some photos. Below are pictures of the clutch results. However, the dead hatchling pictures may be unsettling to some people - so I'll keep them last.
A sad, sad, sight... sigh. Oh well.
1.0 2009 Pastel pic1
1.0 2009 Pastel pic2
0.1 Odd-ball Wild Type pic1
0.1 Odd-ball Wild Type pic2
0.1 Odd-ball Wild Type pic3
0.0.1 Pastel with the most twisted umbilicus I've ever dealt with or seen. Poor little guy.
You can see that his yolk sack is nearly completely full (at least as full as you would expect for this stage of development.
Here's a view from the underside. He was definitely better looking than his sibling Pastel and his pattern was much more interesting.
In this final shot you can see how tight the umbilical cord was wrapped around it's body. I thoroughly checked over the snake, the umbilicus and the yolk sack and there didn't appear to be any gross deformities. C.O.D. seemed to be completely due to the simple fact that the umbilical cord became tangled. The appearance of kinks or other apparent deformities in some of these pictures is strictly due to the angles the pictures were taken along with my lighting, the hatchling's lack of nutrition and the angles of rigor mortis. He/she had no deformities that were visible to the naked eye or that could be felt (palpated) upon examination.
.
.
.
.
-----
Stay United!
"...I say 'apparently' because despite all our progress she is not at all a tame or handle-able snake and gettting her from that cage would re-start a war.. and we've had a good armistice for several months now."-Gus Rentfro - I love this quote!
