Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Okay most of my 35 corn snake eggs have "hatched"... and I just wonder if it could be the male to blame!

The biggest problem is that I understand experimental design, I understand variables and cause and effect. I know it's going to be impossible to know right off what the real cause of this year's failures stem from... however...

Variables that could be at fault:
I used tap water to moisten the vermiculite
I used Vermiculite
They all have the same papa
They all experienced the same temperature spike
The defects of spine/head/jaw only happened to corn eggs all fathered by the same snake. The kingsnake eggs incubated in the same way did NOT experience those defects, though I did lose a whole clutch, and two of the second clutch.

Next year I plan on changing all variables but one (and even changing that for all clutches but one)....

I'm going to try a no-substrate method and/or different methods to see if this helps. I will not use the same male except for one control clutch. I will use purified water only... both for drinking for the snakes during brumation/breeding/gestation and the eggs during incubation. I will hopefully not have an Air Conditioner Failure.

My results from this year breeding my normal stripe male to my females:

Normal Het Motley (but perhaps Not?) het Amel
10 eggs: 10% good babies
9 normals, 1 amel. 8 died with kinked spines and/or huge bulging foreheads and/or deformed/missing jaws. kinked spines were the MOST prevalent in this clutch with some very severe kinks. This clutch is the only one that had too much moisture to begin with.

Anery Stripe
5 eggs 40% good babies
(1 bad egg, 6 slugs). 2 perfect broken stripes hatched out... the remainder didn't... inside were two kinked spine babies with deformed heads/spines and one perfect but dead in egg baby. The kinks and deformities were less on this clutch than the previous clutch which was laid 2 days before this one, and started hatching two days before this one.

Reverse Okeetee
21 eggs approximately 10% definately good babies, could be up to 25% good babies.
(1 went bad early in incubation, 1 went bad late)
two normals pipped two days after the previous clutch... both with perfect normals. Then I got impatient (48 hours with no pipping) and pipped the rest. Of those 9 were dead or so deformed they should have been dead. (missing lower jaws and bulging foreheads but no, or only mild spinal kinks)... I still have three more that appear to be dead in the egg, and 2 that are deformed but not horribly so, at least not obviously, and still hatching, and two normals and an amel that have noses poked out and appear fine so I'm not disturbing them. (I only investigated further on the ones with obvious difficulties or deformities.)

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SO.... is it the papa snake that is to blame? Could he carry some hideous dominant "deformation" gene but not express it himself? And if so do I consider all the babies that have hatched out as culls? (whether in the traditional "kill" sense, or the less traditional and secure "give as pets" sense.)

My thoughts on this issue is that I give away the babies that are not so deformed they can't live and flourish (dinosuar-heads but insignificantly kinked and with functional lower jaws) and keep all the perfect looking babies at least for a year until the papa snake is bred again and his babies examined for defects. If he has a "perfect" clutch next year without any sort of defects or problems, then I would consider this to be something environmental in nature, and the ones who live and flourish with no signs of defects could be sold without too many qualms.

My plans for next year include:
Striped but possibly genetically bad Papa x Anery female (not bred this year)
Snow Motley Male x Anery Stripe Female and x normal het motley female
Creamsicle male by normalsicle female and poss. creamsicle female.

We'll see what happens.

It's been a bad year... almost enough to make a person give it all up!
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~Sasheena

Sasheena,

Sorry to hear about all of the trouble you're having with your hatchlings! Last year, I lost all of my clutches but one due to an incubator malfunction, so I understand how bad you can feel over "what might have been" if things had worked out differently in just a few ways.

However, on the bright side, I doubt it's your male that is the source of your problems. The numbers are just to prevalent to be genetic, it seems to me. If the problem were genetic in nature, it would either have to be a recessive or a dominant (of some type) gene to blame. If it were dominant in some way, the male would have to express the effects to some degree, and he would have never been allowed to breed. If it is recessive, the female of a clutch would also have to carry the genetic deformity as a het, and then Mendelian numbers would start to show up. However, even in your individual clutches, there seem to be far too many babies with problems to be the result of simple recessive genes at work. When you then take into consideration that three females had such clutches, and that those three female represent the WHOLE of your breeding trials with that male ... well, the numbers get pretty staggering, it seems to me.

So, it seems likely that another variable is to blame here. I would most likely suspect the temps, because I just haven't heard of the others causing any problems at all, and I have heard MANY folks speculate that higher temps likely cause the vast majority of kinked babies. The fact that your kingsnakes were unaffected doesn't matter much when the difference in species is considered. Who knows what it takes to mess up one species as opposed to another???

Hope that helps a bit ... let us know how everything pans out as you separate the keepers from the culls.
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Darin Chappell
Hillbilly Herps
PO Box 254
Rogersville, MO 65742

I completely agree with Darin. His explanation of why it's not genetic is very solid. If the Papa is not kinked himself (you have carefully examined what you can feel for his spine, right?), then he doesn't carry a dominant gene for kinks. And if it was a recessive gene for kinks, then all of your females would have to carry it, too (what are the odds of that!), and even then, the odds would be that only 25% of the babies would have been kinked (two hets have only a one-in-four chance of producing a homo).

While Hoppy points out that the temps in south Florida (and here in Tennessee, and just about anywhere in the South) routinely get into the mid-90s or higher, that doesn't mean that wild-laid eggs are exposed to such high temps. The eggs would be typically laid in damp, cool, underground places (or at least under logs or other structures) where the surrounding temps would not get so hot.

I don't know what caused all your babies to kink, but logically, it is highly unlikely that the problem was genetic and much more probable that it was the heat spike.

Just throwing my 2¢ in.

Liz

Well I opened up a few of the "possibly good" eggs that had slipped over into the "probably not" since it's been so long. One of the eggs contained a set of twins! VERY bizarre!!! How does one describe them???

They were conjoined twins..... I knew pretty much immediately that something was weird once I opened up the egg... too many loops of snake for it to be just one snake. But kinked quite dreadfully.... with entire coils of each snake that were completely melded... I'll have pics soon.... but just describing them is impossible! When the snakes reached about two or three blotches below where the heart might be on both snakes, one of them was "wide open".... I could watch blood pumping through the heart of one of the snakes (one was alive, one was apparantly dead)... the alive one with his heart and innards all on the outside through a slit about one and one half inches long. From that point up it got wierd! They were joined sort of on the ventral surface, and seemed to be eating one another's head... then I realized ... Imagine the lower jaw of a snake... begins at the corner of the mouth of one snake.... looks perfectly formed, and ends at the corner of the mouth of the other snake. Then on the other side of the mouth of the combined monster the same thing happens. I'm not sure how good my photos turned out, but I did freeze the poor thing(s)..... It's impossible for me to imagine how to describe this monstrosity!

In any case, all but two of the remaining "questionables" are out of the egg.... my count from this clutch include: 2 normal perfect looking babies, one deformed "pet" snake, one amel that is just as I'm typing this coming out of her egg (looks good so far) and another one with a deformed head that is considering leaving his egg. The one who is coming out now, in spite of my pipping the egg for her, has decided to make her own hole and exit the egg through that, which I consider a good sign.
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~Sasheena

I would not try breeding the male again except for one female just to make sure. I doubt that it was your substrate or your water, as many have used both tap water (as I do) and vermiculite (I use moss) to incubate eggs. It could have been the temp spkie but unless they went much above 95 degrees, I doubt it. I live in South FL where it will get to 95-98 on a regular basis during egg season and corns are native here! Calcium problems with your snakes is a possiblity, I don't know your rodent source but it could be a problem with their diet. I would strongly suspect the common link of the male, possibly a genetic defect. I would get a second male to breed next season so you do not waste the entire year on "experiments" also I would not use the "good" babies for breeders ever, just because they look normal does not mean they are and they may have hidden problems.
Sorry you had such a rough breeding season, please don't give up on the corns, it is normally not so trying, I promise.
Good Luck
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Jim Hopkins "Hoppy"
Hopkins Holesale Herps
Hopfam1@aol.com