Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Finally after about nine month my male sand boa ate a small live mouse. It was actually my mistake. I was going to feed a smooth scaled sand boa in the next tank and dropped the mouse in the wrong tank. Well I thought I'll get the mouse out later. To my great surprise when I came back about ten minutes later the mouse was dead with the Saharan swallowing it. Wonderful. There is something about feeding Saharans that I don't understand. Why are they such reluctant feeders? Wrong food, temperature too shy, stressed out? After the snake swallowed the mouse it spent about ten minutes nosing the surface of the aspen shavings and then burrowed under.

I put a small live mouse in cage with the two Saharans and it was gone several hours later. Don't know which snake took it. I am going to use Reptisand rather aspen shavings and increase the heat.
Saw Saharans for sell earlier this year with claims they felt eggs in them. Sould have bought six of them.

I have never really had any feeding issues with Saharan's. The only exception is with males, they seem to skip a meal once in a while. be very careful about leaving a live rodent unattended with a snake, rodents get hungry too! I'd be careful feeding two snakes in the same enclosure. I did that once and five minutes later.. no rodent and one HUGE snake, it later regurged its mate, and then it died. If you only have one per enclosure you can avoid possible exposure to health issues from one snake to another, and keep better track of who ate and who didn't.
What is your exact setup? temps? etc.

Hello,
I had the same issue with my Saharan. I got him (assuming it's a male) in Oct 2010 and finally got it to eat in March 2011. I tried all different substrates, temps and food items / sizes before he finally ate for me. After feeding live for close to a year, I was finally able to get him to take frozen. He feeds for me around every three to five weeks.

I feel one of the main problems with this species is that since it if physically similar to other sand boas, people assume that the care requirements are the same.

I have had the most success with my snake after switching to Bed a Beast (coconut shell). I occasionally wet the substrate with room temperature bottled water very week of so.

I no longer heat the snake from above either. Since my snake appears to be most active at night, I have settled on just heating from below with a commonly available Zoo Med under tank heater located in one corner of it's enclosure. I do not light the tank.

I also think one of the biggest mistakes that reptile keepers make is overheating their animals. Since you did not include the temperature that you are keeping your snake, I am not going to assume you are making that mistake, but that is always a possibility.

Remember, it does get relatively cold in the desert at night (even in Africa) and many of the species we assume need to be kept at 90f are slowly becoming desiccated over time due to overheating.

So, to make a long story short, I had to figure out how to make my animal comfortable before it started to behave and eat normally.

Losing the cedar would be a good start. Good luck and keep us posted.