Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My 2.5 year-old Mexican Black king has suddenly lost a lot of her muscle tone. She was fine when I handled her yesterday, but today she seems floppy, for lack of a better word. When I pick her up, she usually likes to wrap around my arm or neck, but it seems like the lower half of her body has become very weak, and she will not make grasping motions with her tail when I give her something to wrap around (she will usually wrap her tail around my finger). When I let the bottom half of her hang down to see if she would curl up, it took her an abnormally long time to tense the muscles, and she did not pull herself up all of the way. The muscles seemed to be moving jerkily, when moving at all. Sometimes she moves like that (in short, jerky spurts) when she doesn't want to be touched, but this is the first time I've ever noticed the floppiness. I really don't know what to do, and I would appreciate any help or advice you could give me.

Thank you very much.

Here are some images that I hope will help illustrate the problem:

As you can see, she is just hanging from my hand in each picture; normally, she would be twining around my arm, and she would never stay limp. In the last picture you can sort of see the lack of muscle tone by the contrast between where I'm holding her and the area on either side of my hand -- her whole body is rounded, whereas her ventral scales would usually be flattened to follow the contractions of her stomach muscles. All of her movements are very weak, and she seems abnormally subdued and docile.

I'm really worried about this, and I will bring her to the emergency vet tomorrow if I don't hear otherwise from someone here.

Thank you for your time, I do appreciate it.

Is it possible that the snake got its spinal cord injured during handling?

OK! I've waited to see more postings on this problem. How is your snake? What was wrong with it when you took it to the ER?