Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Ok, I just introduced my firefly male to my fire female yesterday. I just checked on them and my firefly male is dead. He was all contorted and on his back. This has happend a few times over the last 10 or so years. I will have what appears to be a perfectly healthy snake and then find them dead in the exact same way. all twisted up almost like they had a seizure or choked to death or something. This particular snake had eaten good just a about 10 days ago and has bred for me the last 2 years. Does anybody have an explanation of what might cause this? It's a huge bummer and almost makes me want to just step away from keeping and breeding snakes for a while.
Thanks.

Where do your rodents come from?

Dan

I order mainly from Big Cheese. I also breed my own rodents but lost most of my colony last summer so I had to go back to feeding frozen.

That is so tragic, I hope you can find out the cause of this. The only experience I have had with a healthy snake becoming distressed was when I had a baby snake accidentally come in contact with some freshly sprayed mite killer, the ingredient that caused the distress was permethrin, it became disoriented and began to lose muscle control, I read up on it a s fast as I could on the google machine and learned to wash the snake and raise temps, I put him in the incubator and he was fine in a few hours, but left unchecked could have possibly been fatal,

I have heard of this before! Was there any blood coming out of his mouth? I think you're on the right track, seizure or brain aneurism!

No blood that I could see and also no mucous in or around the mouth.

...seriously....my first and only thought was to actually check the "females" sex.....if the female is actually a larger male ,,,the "male" might have had a heart attack from fighting all night?...

....other than that....no reason to die....
....we have all ran a male through female after female for months straight without problems, other than maybe a slight weight loss.....
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.....some small rodent species die right after their first copulations , 80% of all male opossums are said to die after their first copulations (never proved that one) and I think most male racoons actually break the bone (baculum) in their penis after copulation(not proven here yet either )...
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........JY

I have made that mistake in the past but in this particular situation the female was a proven breeder and producer. No doubt about her sex.

then it is hard to find a root cause....the mention of seizure....

I had one snake die suddenly of a heart attack I think....it was a 2 year old jungle corn...spatic snake that hated me...would go nuts alot....I opened it and found what I bet was an enlarged heart...it took up the whole width of the chest cavity....the snake had very little body fat also....which was uncommon in my collection at the time......

feel the dead snake and estimate the heart's size?.....it may feel larger than normal?....

......all I got .....

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........JY