Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I picked up thes two baby zigzag corns recently, and they ate two good meals here, but for the past three meals, they have been keeping them down 2 days, then regurgitating them. I leave a week in between trying to feed them again-maybe I should make that longer. When these two got here, they were extremely skinny-one is a runt, thats for sure.

All my other baby (and adult) corns are fine, just these two are sick. From they day they got here, they have been in quarantine. I have been keeping them in separate gladware containers, with a water dish, and paper towel substrate.

I've tried turning up their belly heat-didn't do any good, they still regurged. I'm starting to think there may be something more serious going on. Possibly parasites or something worse.

photos are up at: http://chaoscat.lowerground.net/sickcorns/

Boy am I thankful that I've been using disposable latex gloves to clean their cages with.

-cat
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http://chaoscat.lowerground.net/herps/
My collection and herp photography

waiting for a week or more and then trying ONLY a newborn pinkie head and nothing else? If that doesn't work, I would try 1 cc of diluted meat baby food (tube feed). If they regurge that, they have serious problems that a QUALIFIED HERP vet may or may not be able to rescue them from, in my opinion. If the above does work, then don't be in a hurry to up the food rations too soon, or they will go back to regurging - take it VERY slowly.

Good luck!

It isn't about great minds thinking alike as much as it is patronage to the addage "necessity is the mother of invention". Your advice perfectly mirrors what I give to folks with regurgitation syndrome and yet you and I never personally discussed it. Even though it's always been good practice to greatly reduce calories to help this problem, it's good to have confirmation that others are dispensing the same treatments. Many out there will be saying, "I thought everybody knew that", but there are many that don't frequent th forums and are otherwise ignorant of successful treatments. What on Earth did we do before the forums?

Thanks Kathy for your seemingly inexhaustable supply of advice and your willingness to share it with us.

Don
www.cornsnake.NET
South Mountain Reptiles

how much more quickly we could have advanced the hobby back in the "old days" if we had this much info available to us instead of learning by trial and error or corresponding / visiting with the relatively few others who shared our interest back then.

Remember when the chapter "So you want a boa" was about the only decent published keeping advice in the old Kauffeld (sp?) books? And when we had to make snake hooks from golf clubs or coat hangers, or spend a fortune on a professional one? Reptile T-shirts were only available as individually airbrushed items by an artist, too. All of this change in such a short time!! It was really exciting to figure things out anew and, in return for sharing, get a new idea from another herper, but it sure is a lot easier now! WOW - I think I'm feeling really old all of a sudden!!

Kathy Love

You're so right, Kathy. The kids reading this will hear their grandparents telling how they walked to school barefooted in the snow, uphill both ways when they read our historic accounts.

When I was a kid, the only way I knew what a reptile ate was IF there was a picture of what it ate on that page of Reptiles and Amphibians by Herbert S. Zim. Of course, they had rudimentary sketches of wooden boxes to show you how to keep them, but the word "heat" was never mentioned. Since it was the only reptile and amphibian handbook in the library, the librarian would have to take it away from my twin brother and I. Our names were often the only ones on the library card for that book for almost the entire school year.

In the absence of heat and proper food, there were two ways snakes left my possession. Escape or death. I hate to say it, but I just couldn't figure out how to keep them alive back in the 50s. I remember removing all my socks and covering the bottom of that drawer of my dresser with dirt. My box turtles in the back yard would always reward me with hatchlings that emerged in the Spring. I would keep as many as 20 hatchlings in that drawer and couldn't figure out why their eyes would seal shut days/weeks before they'd die. No sunglight and vitamins and minerals other than the veggies I'd give 'em.

Enough of all that, but suffice it to say, I do agree with you about the tons of information we now have. Imagine where our industry would be today if information was even available back then. The only way one got breeding advice was to ask the right person and those people would often send you in the wrong direction to protect the monopoly they had for success.

In terms of reptile husbandry, we can't call those "The Good Ole Days".

Don
www.cornsnake.NET
South Mountain Reptiles

from the curator of our local zoo reptile dept. at the time (I wanted to breed snakes) "Well, you see, you can't really breed snakes except by accident. That's because you have to cool them down to breed them. And then they get sick and die. So it is just good luck when they breed and don't die" Not too encouraging, but glad we didn't all follow his advice and give up!

Kathy Love