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I am excited to share that I finally hatched out some Costa Rican Pseustes poecilonotus. This was quite a rocky road trying to get to this point and I actually thought I was going to have to wait another year for success because these eggs seemed to be over calcified and I thought they were all going to die in incubation (some did, but I am very happy to have what I have).

My friend Bryan Suson came into my house from Texas whistling within an hour of telling him my eggs were hatching. He was hard to understand, but all I could make out was something about batteries, lights, and black marble tables. So here I share the first shot and you can see how thick and calcified the eggs are.

If anyone has any information on successes and failures with this species, I would love to chat and exchange different experiences.

Thanks for looking!

Huge congrats again man!! They are sweet looking and you better be talking to me first before you do anything with them...

Jason

At first I thought "Born in the USA" would be a fun title to express my excitement on this breeding and hatching, but something dawned on me. There are some people who import gravid and pregnant females that were taken straight out of the wild and have babies that are born here in the USA and they can technically call their animals "CB" meaning "captive born."

I guess I should make it more clear that this isn't why I am happy about these babies. I bought the adults as an unrelated young pair that were bred and born in captivity by Quetzal Dwyer in Costa Rica some years ago, and then shipped to the USA. I raised these young snakes up to adulthood and have finally had a successful breeding with viable eggs that I hatched out.

This is how I would like to see more species come available in the United States, so I am happy I am successful with my hatching, and I am happy I have these babies without taking short cuts.

Thanks again for looking!

Great achievement Congrats

If you don't mind me asking: How big are your adults? I'm raising some babies up to hopefully breed......
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Lloyd Heilbrunn

Palm Beach Gardens, Fl.

Don't mind at all Lloyd. I am going to write up something on my successes and failures (as well as my hypothesis reasoning behind each) in the near future too because there have been some things I found quite interesting with this species. I have a few other Latin American snakes that aren't kept too often that I would like to compose a fun article, but please feel free to ask any questions and I would love to bounce ideas back with you too. There is some information I found particularly interesting with my results between these two years that I don't want to put in writing just yet, but would not mind sharing in conversation.

Female year start weights (she was a little more tricky with feeding over the growing years)

weighed 703g 1-7-09
weighed 762g 1-1-10

Male year start weights

weighed 843g 1-15-09
weighed 830g 1-1-10

What is that in inches?

Thanks
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Lloyd Heilbrunn

Palm Beach Gardens, Fl.

Haha, I don't keep quite as precise of records on that. I just took them both out and let them stretch across my tile floor for you.

The female is a little longer than 6 ft, and the male is a little shorter than 6 ft.

I have a friend with some cool equipment coming over this weekend. Maybe we can get a water displacement on them : )

Thanks, mine need to do some growing!
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Lloyd Heilbrunn

Palm Beach Gardens, Fl.

Do you have any Costa Ricans or do you just have the 1.1 Peruvians you got from Ben Seigel?

I have a male from the group you have and a female from a different clutch that should be a fun contrast to the look of the Costa Rican poecilonotus.

This really is a fun and diverse species (and genus for that matter)

Keep in touch

Just the Peruvians.
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Lloyd Heilbrunn

Palm Beach Gardens, Fl.

I would love to see pictures of yours. They say the Costa Ricans are the only ones with the huge diversity with their colors and patterns, but my pair and some of the ones my friends ended up getting from Peru seem to be turning very different colors. They don't seem to have much pattern to them, but I think they are very pretty snakes and can't wait until I have breedable adults of that local too.

Did the eggs die early in the incubation for some other reason than "over calcification"? If so, that could have been any number of reasons. From what I can see in the pictures, the eggs look pretty normal to me. I think this species, like Drymarchon, make pretty thick eggs. If I were concerned that the babies could not cut out, I would definately cut all the eggs as soon as I saw one cut. Hopefully in your experience the babies that made it through full incubation were able to get out and make it. Good job with your success.

ECTimaeus

I only had one die early on and it was one that was layed a little later and I caught it when it had stuck to the snakes basking shelf and a later of the shell peeled away.

I am not ruling out other causes for some of the eggs dieing (and I am glad to have the majority hatch), and I am sure my stresses messing with some of them was a cause too, but there will be some subtle changes I will be making to the diet of the female next year to see if it makes a little difference.

Over all, I really am not worried about the way the eggs turned out and I am glad I have this info to document for other people wanting to work with them.

I realize they might be a little harder than some of the other Latin American colubrid eggs I am familiar with, but Bryan (who took the pictures) would varify that some of these were shockingly tough and even quite difficult to manually pip. One egg that did hatch even bulged a lump in the bottom and I would suspect it was partly to do with the difficulty the rest of the egg had in swelling (or it had a little layer peeled away when I removed the egg from the cage, and this one just got lucky and made it...or a combination of each).

Again, not something I am too worried about for the future even if the next clutch looks exactly the same.

Good info. I would be reasonably sure that anyone that has hatched Dry eggs will tell you that there is some bulging at the bottom of the eggs. I suspect that is because the substrate is moister that the air above the eggs and the shells stay more supple. This will allow for the egg to grow downward into the substrate. It is sometimes difficult to match nature and humidity levels that are optimum for each specie of snake. One year I had several Dry eggs that actually cut out of the bottom of the egg (totally unatural). I could see where they had tried to cut through the tough upper part of the shell. After that I started making sure the substrate maintained moisture and I monitored the toughness of the shell and even misted the tops of the shells occasionally.

Again, good job on your success. Sometimes all we can do is trial and error, especially when dealing with new species.

ECTimaeus

Big congratulations. They really are neat snakes. I had a pair getting close to adult size so maybe I will give them a try next spring. How long did you leave the male and female together?
Thanks for all the information you already provided.

Bob Herrington

I introduced them early this year after temp and humidity cycling and kept them together until eggs were dropped in late April.