Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Baby (sinaloan, 5 weeks)still won't eat and now he has started opening and closing his mouth as if gasping when handled and seems listless. Please help!

Forgot to mention, vet just gave him the once over last week and said he looked fine!

Just got back from the vet. He gave my snake an antibiotic shot and tried to tube feed a little "formula" but he regurged (snake, not vet ). The vet said that he couldn't really tell what was wrong and the gasping could be from a number of things. Problem is the snake is too small to see certain anotomical aspects very clearly. I am to bring him back on Saturday for another shot.

Anyone have anything like this before?

Sounds like a respiratory infection to me. I had a gray band that went off feed, was yawning a lot, and then started sitting with his head propped up and his mouth opened. I took him to the vet. After two weeks of daily antibiotic injections, there are no more signs.

Good luck,
TA

Babies are very, very difficult to diagnose and treat. Anatomically they are too small to really see what's going on, pharmacologically they are very difficult to dose accurately and physically they are more fragile. They have very little oxygen exchanging surface in their lung and even a slight respiratory infection can easily prove fatal. They don't have the energy reserves of an adult snake, so they can't take the extended off-feed periods as well. Overall, they are much, much more challenging to treat.

Usually, I try to shy away from administering antibiotics to baby snakes. If I had to use an antibiotic for a RI, I think I would use something like Ceftazadime because it seems to have a little wider margin of safety than something like Baytril. It is still effective on the Gram-negative rod-type bacteria that are normally associated with RI in reptiles. Normally, the best course of action is to increase the cage temperatures early in the infection and try to boost the little snake's own immune response. One of the problems that baby snakes have with that is that they don't get the jump-start to their immune systems that baby mammals get. In baby mammals, the mother's first milking is almost all Hyper-Immune Colostrum, which has antibodies for just about every pathogen the mother has been exposed to. Reptiles don't nurse, therefore there is no exchange of antibodies. The snake pretty much has to get that on it's own.

Try bumping your cage temps up a few degrees and see what happens.

A quick update...tonight he ate the pinkie I gave him! I did turn up the heat a bit for the last few days so hopefully either that or the antibiotic or both are working. Still gapeing open every now and then and I could swear he sneazes occasionally but I am taking the returning appetite as a hopeful sign. He is still listless and he is milky eyed now, which I am hoping means he is going in to a shed and nothing more.

Thank you all for the advise. He is just a plain old sinaloan, not a het this or hypo that, but he is a lovely little guy and I would hate to lose him!