Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I transferred my fetal heart monitor from the BCI room to the BRB room yesterday and immediately found lil baby heart beats inside Wilma, Tawney and Harriet. All three are due within the next 5 1/2 weeks. Others I checked with later due dates I could not hear.

Sooo cool to hear the little hearts beating inside mom. My last litter of BCI (born 07/16) I was very confident of since I knew there were little heart beats and she was rapidly approaching her due date, actually went one day over. Although I still take it with a grain of salt since I had a confirmed gravid mom with lil heart beats deliver early and lost em all.
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Thanks,

Dave Colling

www.rainbows-r-us-reptiles.com

0.1 Wife (WC and still very fiesty)
0.2 kids (CBB, a big part of our selective breeding program)

LOL, to many snakes to list, last count (02/01/2010):
42.61 BRB
27.40 BCI
And those are only the breeders

lots.lots.lots feeder mice and rats

That's awesome Dave. I had considered buying an inexpensive fetal heart monitor for my pregnant Dumerils Boa, but ended up passing on it. First of all, I wasn't sure that a 50-100 dollar monitor could pick up the heart beats effectively. Also, I'm hesitant to bother a snake having her first litter. Anyway, it must have been cool to hear those baby snake heart beats. What kind of monitor do you use, and what's the process like with a snake?

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Paul D

www.MoonlightBoas.com

I have a sonitrax basic. Inexpensive off ebay. Lots of slime and place the probe along her side in the back third. Typically if there are heartbeats, they are all over. Oh, and they are relatively slow, around 60-80 / minute for babies.
-----
Thanks,

Dave Colling

www.rainbows-r-us-reptiles.com

0.1 Wife (WC and still very fiesty)
0.2 kids (CBB, a big part of our selective breeding program)

LOL, to many snakes to list, last count (02/01/2010):
42.61 BRB
27.40 BCI
And those are only the breeders

lots.lots.lots feeder mice and rats

Paul,
...I use a Contec Sonatrax B with 3 Mhz probe. These things are amazing but there are limitations in their use. Like Dave said use LOTS of slimy ultrasound gel. You need to get a nice acoustic seal around the probe head or you will get poor sound transmission. The 3 Mhz probe has a large face. I think a smaller probe would work better. Many pocket ultrasound monitors have a very small 8 Khz probe which might be ideal for what we are doing but those monitors have not been targeted at the end user like these fetal heart tone monitors so they are expensive. If the snake will sit still for you it is much better. If the snake is moving the movement makes mucho noise and will make finding fetal heart tones difficult if not impossible. Resting gravid adult BRBs usually have a heart rate between 24 and 30. Adult Boa Constrictors are usually lower around 20. If the snake gets excited or moving around a lot the rate will go much higher. Finding the adult heart rate is easy with one of these cheapo monitors. Finding babies takes some effort. The gravid snake has a very large artery running alongside the muscle running the length of the snake to the sides of the spine. The blood flowing through that artery makes enough noise that you can find it most of the way down the body. It will fool you into thinking you have have the fetal heart tones which can be distinguished because they are around 60 BPM. Sometimes you get right on them and then move around the gravid snake's body with the probe and can count babies. Most of the time you can only find fetal heart tones for some of the babies. The later in gravidity the more likely you are to find fetal heart tomes. It would be nice to have a more powerful monitor to hear the tones in smaller babies earlier. We want a tool to determine very early whether a snake is gravid and these things are not the right tool for this. You can use one of these monitors to listen to adult snakes heart and breathing sounds. The snake heart is much different than our own and makes more of a whooshing sound than the distint lub dub of mammalian hearts. If you have a snake with respiratory problems you can find where the noise in the airway is coming from.
Good luck,
Jeff

That sounds awesome. I'll have to buy a monitor next year.

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Paul D

www.MoonlightBoas.com

Very cool! I may have to invest in one of those someday.
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Aubrey Ross

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