Let me preface this note by saying that I am an expericed keeper with over a dozen years of snake keeping experience. I do know about proper quaranteen protocols and have been using them for years. For reasons of my own I chose to forgo those protocols this time much to my detriment. So please no flames or snide comments. I am relating my recent experience so that hopefully others will learn from my mistakes and not have the same problems, not so that you can sit back and judge me.
I recently received some baby ball pythons which I set up in my hatchling rack which also contained various neonate to yearling snakes and Leopard geckos. A few days later I discovered mites on the ball pythons. Though no mites were discovered on any of the other snakes in my collection, I decided to treat the entire collection starting with the hatchling rack. I began treatment last night. I used two products. One was Provent-a-mite, which I had used before as a preventative measure and a product called de flea which I have not used before. I followed directions exactly with both products. I sprayed down clean shoe boxes with the provent a mite and let them dry for 10 minutes until they looked dry and vapors had dissapated. I then put the snakes and lizards in their new boxes and sprayed each one with one squirt of de flea. I checked on them again 9 hours later after coming home from work. The corn snakes were all fine, even those that only hatched a couple of days ago. The milk snakes were fine, and the AZ mountain kings were fine. Two baby leopard geckos of about a month old were dead, two yearling/adult leopard geckos are alive but appear to be in distress, standing in one spot with eyes closed and backs arched. And three hatchling bullsnakes appear to have severe neurological damage. The bullsnake hatchlings are 2 weeks old and had shed a week ago. I guess that I am most surprised by the reaction of the bullsnakes. Baby corns that are even younger are just fine but the larger older bullsnakes reacted badly? Maybe something about bullsnakes causes them to react more strongly to poisons that don't appear to affect other species of snakes?
I don't know if the problem was with the provent a mite or the De flea or using both in combination. I have used the provent a mite on adult bullsnakes before with no problems but never before on neonates and like I said this is my first time using De flea.
I just wanted to let people know about my experience so that they could use greater caution using these products, especially around bullsnakes and Leopard geckos.
Mark
