Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've had an adult female since June, and while she was obviously treated poorly by her previous owners, she seemed healthy enough. I had her tested for parasites anyway, and treated her for nematodes, and life went on. Until about a month ago she seemed to be adapting, then she pretty much just stopped eating. Since the weather was changing, I thought that might be a factor, so I moved her to an a room where the temperature was more stable. Then, I figured it might take a while for her to settle in after being relocated. But in the last four weeks, all she'd eaten was one hornworm and a couple of cockroaches. Weight seemed to be stable, and when bothered she seemed to have normal movement and reflexes, so I tried to be patient, but tonight I finally cracked and decided to make sure she had something in her, so I forcefed her one f/t fuzzy, just to get some nutrients in there and see if it got her appetite going. She didn't like having her mouth opened, but once I got it in there and backed away she ate it immediately, so mission accomplished, sort of, but I don't think any more that the problem is purely psychological. Her body is very round and feels much harder than I think it should. I don't know if it's eggs or some kind of fluid buildup or what the deal is, but I'm going to have to get her in to the vet and find out. I have no idea how long she's been like this, because her pen is big enough that I very rarely have to handle her, and I don't know I'll be able to get an appointment right away, so since it's after midnight and I certainly can't call the vet's office, I figured meanwhile I'd fish for information about what the problem might turn out to be. Has anybody seen this before?

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0.1 Coastal Carpet Python (Boots)
0.1 Western Hognose Snake (Bebe)
0.1 Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)

That possibility had occurred to me before, because right before the fasting period started I'd gotten lazy and fed her mostly superworms for about a week, but when repeated soaking and increasing substrate moisture and humidity didn't make a diference I sort of ruled that out. Today when I checked on her, though, she'd hit the water bowl and excreted a very small amount of stool along with a superworm shell and a bunch of pieces of roach chiton. She also apparently hit the food bowl, which had three roaches and superworm (certainly not going to give her many of those again, but they do trigger the strongest feeding response, so I still think one of them is sometimes a useful tool) and her food intake yesterday apparently went from one fuzzy to one fuzzy, one superworm, and one medium to large Death Head nymph. Looks like I can postpone the vet trip, which is a big plus, because she really hates being handled.
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0.1 Coastal Carpet Python (Boots)
0.1 Western Hognose Snake (Bebe)
0.1 Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)

My cane toads would get impacted on mostly mammal diets, and I would give them crickets most of the time. They had a big feed response to crickets. Tried to get them on nightcrawlers but they were too hard for them to pick up much of the time.

I've never succeeded in getting her to take nightcrawlers. Crickets she'll eat, but not nearly as quickly as they run around and hide and lay eggs. So besides the fact that I can't keep them in a food dish so there's the danger of substrate ingestion, there's also the problem of winding up with thousands of little pinheads in there that are too small for her to be interested in at all. I've nothing against them as staple, but for this particular toad in this particular setup they don't work. She has a three foot wide pen, with solid sides to obstruct her view of the rest of the room, and still waits until it's dark and she's alone before she eats. So I don't see the seperate feeding tub trick working any time soon.

I don't plan on making mice a staple, nor was I trying to suggest other people do. Most of her diet is large nonclimbing cockroaches, and she gets calcidust at least once a week. Since it seemed that the fuzzy loosened her up, if a similar problem occurs again I will do the same thing, but otherwise I'll stick with insects and supplements. Death heads aren't very hard-shelled; they're more like a larger version of discoids, so the meat to shell ratio is much better than when I was letting her fill up on dusted superworms.

What level of mouse development were you having problems with? Mice that eat solid food don't have the same loosening effect as very young ones. I'm not even sure the trick would have worked with a hopper, which was one of several reasons I didn't opt for one, although she's certainly large enough to gulp one.

Anyway, she's eaten every day since then, although I'm not feeding her as heavily as I was before. And from the looks of her water dish in the morning, all is functional again.
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0.1 Coastal Carpet Python (Boots)
0.1 Western Hognose Snake (Bebe)
0.1 Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)

My cane toads were too small to take more than pinkies and fuzzies--but I once had a rococco toad that once took two rat pups in a single bite! I always used a small separate feeding tub with a vented lid so that I could feed crickets. The canes were skittish and sometimes couldn't be watched while they ate, unless I wanted a tub full of crickets drowned in toad urine. But they got used to it and I handled them quite a bit to keep them used to me. Crickets were an easy prey item but kind of expensive unless you breed them.

So you think handling makes them tamer? I've been going with the opposite philosophy, and trying to just keep my distance and let her forget whatever humans did to her before we met.
I know how to tame snakes, because I undestand the kinds of things snakes like to do, so I can sort of make myself the kind of tree that they're comfortable in, but what do you do with toads? I'd love to get her less scared, because it would improve her quality of life immensely, but I haven't really wanted to dive into a lot of ham-handed trial and error and risk making things worse.
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0.1 Coastal Carpet Python (Boots)
0.1 Western Hognose Snake (Bebe)
0.1 Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)

I found cane toads much harder to tame down than rococco toads, and for one cane I simply stopped trying because the stress levels were obviously high (non-stop whimpering chirps). But in general I found that if I were able to ignore the oceans of urine they then learned that was not an effective technique. Maybe "tame down" is not quite accurate--I encouraged the puffed up threat display and respected it, and it seemed like they learned that puffing up worked better than peeing of they wanted to avoid handling. Hand feeding also helped, and when I opened the cage I would either get an eager feeding response or a puffed up threat display, and when it was the latter I just left them alone a while longer.

If she ever reaches a point where she accepts hand feeding, I'll already feel like we're there. The only reason I even know she eats consistantly (except during that blocked-up period) as opposed to the roaches just figuring out how to climb better, is that I always see wings and legs in her water dish in the morning. She hasn't squeaked in a long time, and I have to hold her for several seconds before she pees, but I still take the refusing to eat unless alone to be a bad sign as far as stress goes.
Although.. you know what I just realized while writing this? It didn't register before when I looked in on her after work, but she ate one of her roaches today while the light was still on! That's the first time she's ever done that, as far as I know.
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0.1 Coastal Carpet Python (Boots)
0.1 Western Hognose Snake (Bebe)
0.1 Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)

And the eating alone thing might just be a "personality" (toadality?) quirk rather than a stress response. Some of my hand tame rococco toads who ALL went crazy with a feeding response when it was crickets in the feeding tub would ignore fuzzies and mice if I was watching. That was the only thing they got to eat in the tank and they liked to be alone--I could watch from a distance but couldn't be anywhere near their tank or they wouldn't eat the mice.