Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Today I had a female eastern king drop a clutch of 11 eggs. She laid them in her nest box, as expected, and I found her curled up in her water dish. I picked her up to see if she'd lost an significant weight, and there was a definite bulge from an egg about 2/3 the way down her body. I was able to push the egg down toward her tail, but was met with a lot of resistance once it got to her cloaca. I set her back in the nest box to see if she would lay it on her own.

This is a new problem for me. I've never had an eggbound snake. What is standard procedure here? At what point should I take further measures, like aspiration?

It was a trip to the vet where he stuck a needle inbetween belly scales and sucked out contents of egg. the shell passed about 24 hrs later. I posted a similar question and was warned about forcing egg out, i tried warm bathes and left her nesting box in cage to no avail. Good luck and keep us posted. Dave.

Dont go through the belly in aspiration attempts ,go through btween side scales and you can thumb this skin away from needle penetration so the HEALING wound will not be under the puncture

I've had this happen a couple of times with my rat snakes. In both cases I left the nest box in with the female, raised the humidity in the whole cage and they passed the retained egg in three and five days - respectively.

Never happened with any of my kings, but I would do the same thing and not resort to aspiration of the egg for a week or more.

Best of luck with her.

byron.d

I just had to deal with this issue this morning.

I'm caring for a friend's Cornsnakes and one of them decided to drop a bunch of eggs when I wasn't expecting them, lol. She laid all but one just fine, but that last one was just stuck near the vent. I made sure she had a nice cozy humid retreat to relax in, but 24 hrs later it still had not passed. So what I did was I very very gently applied pressure in front of the bulge to coax the egg toward the vent. As it got right to the vent, she actually started helping by pushing on her own. Within 5 minutes a bright beautiful egg passed with no injury to the egg or momma.

I know not all cases are as easy as this one. In the past (when the egg(s) were not as close to the vent) I have just let the snake be for several days or even weeks, and they eventually come out on their own, or are reabsorbed.

Good luck!
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Aubrey Ross

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R.Bichlers Colubrids
http://www.webspawner.com/users/rbichler/index.html

I've tried varoius things over the years and have found I get the best results if I just leave the snake alone, especially if it's just an egg or three and especially if their two thirds or more down the body to start with. I've had a snake pass an egg as long as a year later.
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Randy Whittington

Thanks to everyone that responded!

After reading comments on this forum, and talking on the phone with some fellow breeders, I decided to give the snake a week before aspirating. A couple people I talked to on the phone mentioned snakes dying after just a couple weeks...

Just a couple minutes ago she pushed out the last egg. It looks to be about 33% larger than the other eggs from this clutch. Momma is going to get a big meal ASAP.

Here's a picture of the mother sitting with some of her eggs. For anyone curious, she is from Wakulla County, FL, and was found gravid:

The full clutch. Culprit egg is at the top:

Glad to hear it worked out.