Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My female honduran is 10 days past her pre egg laying shed and she's plump as can be, she's moving around the cage and in and out of the moss box as expected. My question is she seems to be cruising her cage and squeezing between anything that is close together. under her hides and out the side without the door so that it will squeeze her when she goes through and I mean shes really working under every big or heavy object in the cage that she can fit through is she trying to squash the eggs or what? should I remove all the objects but the moss box? does anyone elses gravid females do act with this kind of behavior?
Thanks chris

chris and i talked today, i'm skeptical that a female would try to manually expel her eggs by squeezing under or between things in a sort of serpentine Heimlich maneuver.

My guess was that she's searching for a suitable laying site. I asked chris whether the laybox was on a heat pad, or too small, or otherwise unacceptable, but he's using just about the same setup my females readily accept. By the time we talked, though, she was back in the box and had burrowed to the bottom of the laybox, behavior that often shortly precedes egglaying. I suggested he throw a towel over the laybox just to create a greater sense of privacy in it (in my housing, layboxes are in the backs of trays in rack systems, so it's dark in the back; chris' was in a large aquarium so glass all around, no doubt more light entering the (clear plastic) tupperware container than in my circumstances. He's said he'll update us on the results.

terry

Female snakes will often get extremely restless immediately prior to egglaying. It is a good indication that they are about to drop their eggs soon. One technique that has worked very well for me I learned from Tad Fitzgerald, a mountain kingsnake breeder in Las Vegas. Tad puts the female in the egg box and closes the lid. This way the female cannot hurt herself during her ramblings and it guarantees the eggs will be deposited in the egg box. It is a simple thing to do that works well. (Of course you need to use a solid lid that does not have a hole cut in it.)

Good luck,

Tim

Third Eye