Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am interested in how everyone names or codes each individual snake for record keeping purposes.
John

I keep my records in a spreadsheet program (MS Excel). I have a file for each year with a data sheet for each month. I print it off to have when I am weighing/feeding etc. but keep the overall data on the computer.

Within the data sheet I have each snake recorded to species and if there is more than one of a sex, I have a year of birth, catalog number (for wild caught animals with data), or description.

So I have a pair of Trans-pecos Ratsnakes. The male was caught as yearling male from the Baylor Mts, while my female is captive born stock from a place I call Bogey road. They are almost identical, so I added a description (the male is more olive green, the female more yellow/green) so that I can tell them apart at a glance.

I guess if you had large numbers of animals of the same species, you would need a more complex system. I have seen people use things like lgs92-0.2 to represent their number 2 female desert king from 1992.

The trick is not to outsmart yourself. The system has to be simple enough that you don't have to stop and think what the code refers to.

Here is a page from my excel sheet, showing how I keep my data.
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Chris Harrison