Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Well, recently my snake has been showing a few symptoms. It has minor tremors (it's head will spasm for about a second if not less), and also stargazing, but it's only looking up and not moving for maybe 5 minutes max. It's about 2 years old ad only 5-6ft long, it was abused before the friend that gave it to us received the snake. We did notice some small black insects (i'm guessing ticks). We're having the friend who gave it to us put it in quarantine....Can somebody explain the actualy symptom of stargazing? Like is it a prolonged time or anytime it extends itself towards the top and looks onward without motion?

The beginning symptoms of Inclusion Body Disease is about what you have described. It does get progressively worse and it seems that boas are slower to succumb than pythons. The disease is viral and gets it's name from cytoplasmic inclusion bodies that will be present in the cells of various organ tissues. In later stages, I think you may also see some fluid discharge from the glottis and gaping, as well as spasms. This is a highly infectuous disease. Ask your vet, there may be a blood test available to detect it, although I don't know of an effective treatment.

Well I know there is no cure for it. I also heard that these tests can injure the snake worse if it does not in fact have IBD. The person who gave it to us has it under quarantine as of today. Hopefully the best comes from this. Beautiful albino burmese python. Thank you for the reply.

A friend of mine operates a venom laboratory. He was experiencing massive death loss from what he was told was IBD. He sent samples off to a lab for confirmation and was told they were positive for IBD. We did fecal smears on some of the affected animals and they had quite a load of protozoa. He treated the animals and checked them again until they were clean of the protozoa. Just for grins, I suggested he send samples in to be re-tested for IBD. The results came back negative for IBD. Curious.