Reptile & Amphibian Forums

When cleaning cages today I noticed some weird material in the water bowl of one of my Easterns (2 year old female). They look kind of like human eyelashes, but thicker and about an inch long. I've seen these in their water bowls before, but I've never seen them with my colubrids. Any idea what they are?

I freaked out over those things once before and went on a rampage trying to figure out if it was the remnants of some sort of parasites or whatever. I don't know why I had never seen them before as many years as I've been keeping snakes. Shows how observant I am sometimes.

It's tongue sheds. They shed the skin on their tongues just like the rest of their body. Each one of those thingies is the shed skin from one fork of the tongue. Now that you've seen them, you'll notice them in other snake's cages, too..scaled to the size of the snake.
-----
We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Ralph Waldo Emerson

.

I posted the question in here and Cris Raden (gila7150) answered it. I had gone as far as splitting one open, staining it and laying a section flat on a slide and looking at it under a microscope...and still couldn't figure out what the heck it was. It was obviously epidermal type cells, but I didn't make the connection. I mean, it's not like I didn't have enough clues to work with...the thing was the same shape and size as one fork of the snake's tongue, it was found in his water bowl...but, every time I put 2 and 2 together I came up with 5.
-----
We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes you can find tongue sheds adhered to the chin of your snake, as I found one last week on one of my Y/T cribos, but they will normally appear within the water container .
I have to admit, I was a bit disturbed the first time I ever found one as well, and had a devil of a time identifying it...

Jeff