Hello gang!
As I anxiously await my babies hatching, so far, some of the eggs look to be no good. *sigh* Oh well, it was their first time breeding, the pines that is. So it looks like I'll get eight. One of the eggs collapsed a bit, turned a greenish blue hue on the top a bit, and now has a mold trying to grow on it. I wish it wasn't attatched to two other eggs or I would remove it. This year I bred four first time breeding corns. Three of those went egg bound this year. Two of them in the process of palpating the eggs out pushed out the oviduct. All three of them seem to have recovered and eating like pigs. So now I assume I have at least two females who are now fixed as what was discussed with my buddy John. Odd how my little female Charleston locality female laid all 18 eggs within a few hours. And yet the largest of the four went egg bound... So now I'm left wondering, are we feeding our charges too much? Now these snakes were not round obese by any means, but still, it makes me think that I still overfeed when you look at wild snakes who you'd swear are starving in comparison. I'm curious how others out there do their feeding and what they've found in breeding their animals. Now granted these examples were corn snakes but looking back on last year with my female pine, she got picky about eating half of last summer. And she went to lay a huge first time clutch with no problems. She is now recovering nicely. In a few weeks John will be here and we can look at the animals and he'll give me a good idea on what to do. Myself starting with today's feeding am skipping feedings with snakes. I'm thinking letting them have a meal every week is simply overfeeding when they didn't have to hunt several miles a night for a week just for a meal like I assume they do in the wild. I have three female corns plus the younger female pine that will be breeding next spring for the first time. Right now all four are plenty big enough and in good weight. So I'm stopping feeding weekly. We'll see how they do next year. In fact I haven't fed my Hypo Okeetee female for two weeks allready, and she still didn't get fed today, I know she's fat. So I'm going to start feeding on what looks like it needs to eat so to speak rather than a timed weekly feeding. Babies obviously should feed weekly, and animals recovering from breeding. It's little wonder to me now that the older pair of pines seemed picky about eating last year. They allready had enough and didn't need a weekly schedule. So I'd get frustrated with them cause gosh darn it, I thawed out the meal for them. why don't they eat? LOL! So any thoughts you can add to my musings, please do share, I'd love to hear them! The end of next week is the earliest I'm expecting baby pines. I'll keep all of you posted. Take care.
