Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Just wondering.

Plain rat snakes will eat other rat snakes. So, I mean, any snake could eat another snake. I expect if it has kingsnake in it it would just make it more likely to be cannibalistic.
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Andy Maddox
AIM: SurfAndSkimTx04
MSN: Poloboy32486@hotmail.com
Houston Herp Key
The Reptizone

Burgundy baby, With your blue eyed soul, You play the hits and I'm on that roll, Capricorn sister, Freddie Mercury, Jupiter Child cry

That is so true, one year we hatched out over 90 baby black rat snakes (Elaphe O. Obsoleta) and in doing so we ran out of cage space...se we doubled up and even tripled up a few of the rubber maid shoe boxes....well began to notice cannibalism not long after the baby elaphe's first sheds...this came as a complete suprize to us, especially when you consider that snakes aren't even mentioned as potential prey items of rat snakes in most texts (lizards, birds eggs and rodents being the species primary diet) first we suspected that it was because they smelled the prey item on their siblings, so we seperated all of them into individual deli cups for feeding then allowing the babies a little "down time" before reintroducing them to the rubber maids (the whole process took about 2.5 hrs.). Well later we noticed while opening the rubermaids that a few of the more defensive babies defensive strikes were so haphazard that they's strike at their cagemates and in some of them it illicited a feeding response...they'd constrict, kill and eat the sibling as good as any Lampropeltis I've ever seen...this often had dreadful consequenses not only would the baby that got eaten be lost but frequently the baby the did the eating would die from attempting to vomit up it's sibling meal (eating your sibling...hmmm. sounds like a Jerry Springer episode if I ever heard one)...so whenever we found that a baby ate it's sibling we'd have to pull the meal (still mostly hanging out of the snake) out...before it could die from trying to do so itself...that was no easy task since it potentially meant wripping out the babies teeth...so we'd cautiously perfrorm this task time and time again...Out of the 90 babies...15 were eaten and 7 died from ingesting their siblings...lesson learned is just because the feild guides and reference books say one thing...doesn't mean that the snake read it, or that they inheritly know what Conant, Collins, Dittmars or any other herpetologist say it should be doing