Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Welcome to kingsnake.com's message board system. Here you may share and discuss information with others about your favorite reptile and amphibian related topics such as care and feeding, caging requirements, permits and licenses, and more. Launched in 1997, the kingsnake.com message board system is one of the oldest and largest systems on the internet.

Click for 65% off Shipping with Reptiles 2 You
Click for ZooMed
Click here to visit Classifieds

CAPTIVE BRED Sunbeams (Xenos)

Montage_Morphs Dec 30, 2007 01:10 PM

Heres our pair of Xenopeltis unicolor, bred by Karl Green in England roughly 4/5 months ago. We are extremely humbled to have a pair from the small clucth he produced. Well done dude!

They now live happily in Scotand with us, the male weighing 22 grams, and the female just over 30. They are perfect FT feeders and well behaved wee snakies.

Zehn - male in shed

Oracle - Female

Sorry for the naff photos, its extremely difficult to photoghaph these slippery wee snakes whilst manually focusing a big stupid macro lens.

Replies (2)

billysbrown Dec 31, 2007 10:51 AM

That is really, really cool. Since those are so rarely kept successfully in captivity (and so often kept poorly), please post how you're keeping them, and anything you know about how they were bred.

Thanks,
Billy

-
Phillyherping

Montage_Morphs Dec 31, 2007 12:02 PM

Well I don't know exact details of how Karl managed to get the WC parents to cycle in captivity (apparently that is a real feat). I will deffinatley ask him though

We keep them on kitchen towel with a low bark hide running the full length of the box stuffed with moss. Almost 100% ambient humidity at all times, however some spots are dryer than others and the box is not soaking wet otherwise I think they would have skin problems. You can almost always find them under the kitchen towel, under the moss and under the hide (all at the same time).

Temps: 86-90F If I remember correctly, just using a heat mat covering 1 3rd of their plastic see through boxes. The don't strike feed, we just leave it in and its gone pretty quick. We are going to try hiding the food in different parts of the box to see just how much they roam etc and how much work they are willing to do to scavenge food. Both shed perfectly, both are very docile specimens and growing like weeks, the female much faster than the male of course lol.

We tried using eco earth soil To save so much work with misting the box every few days and mould troubles with the bark, but they proved far too squirmy and difficult to find. It was causing both them and us stress trying to find the snakie!

So they were switched back to the initial kitchen roll, moss and bark setup. We control the mould by cleaning it off every other day and disinfecting with F10. It's working out a real treat and both snakes seem perfectly content. I hope this answers a few of your questions

Site Tools