Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Some guy in my area went on a crazy spending spree and bought more snakes than he can handle, so he gave several away with cages and everything. The problem is, some of them had mites and the rat was one of them. When I first saw the poor thing, it was crawling with black mites. There were a few dozen in the ventral scales of the neck and many embedded around the eyes. My friend and I that got them picked up some Nix lice shampoo and mixed it with water then rubbed them down with it for a while and rinsed them. We soaked all of them in water for a few minutes beforehand so they wouldn't try to drink any of it. This poor little rat drank the water forever-he must've been severely dehydrated. We ended up getting all of them off it, but the edges of its eye scales look ragged and I know it's been through a lot. The little fighter didn't offer to bite, rattle, or musk once. I won't be surprised if that changes when it feels better though. I've got it set up at my house now in a quarantine tank. I'm praying that we got all the mites and none of them will spread to my collection. We nixed the tank heavily as well all over and it's supposed to kill eggs too, so hopefully it will be successful. It was moving a good bit when I left so hopefully it will settle in well(I had to go back to college today, so mom's keeping an eye on him over the week). I'm pretty sure it'll pull through fine, I'm just hoping we won't have to repeat the mite treatment. Next weekend, I'll get a tail pic and see if anyone can sex it for me. I think it's too big to pop (it's at least 2 feet) and I'm not good at estimating from tail length. I'm guessing you can do this like you can with corns? I'll get full-body pics too, but I just thought I'd let you guys know I might be posting here occasionally now that I have a rat (non-corn rat anyway). I also came away with a honduran milksnake. My friend got a colombian rainbow boa, durango mt. kingsnake, creamsicle corn, and a mexican black kingsnake. The rat appeared to have the worst mites, but that's probably just because they were so easy to spot on it. I'll attempt feeding next weekend also. Wish us luck.

The poor thing didn't make it through the night.

Damn dude that sucks. I'm planning to get a leucistic this weekend.