From time to time I'll see snakes offered for sale that have small spine deformaties. usually the ad will say something along the lines of "spine kinks cause by temperature fluctuations" or "my incubator temps didn't stay at a constant temp and it resulted in a spine deformaty".

I find temp changes hard to believe as the sole culprit. I've never used incubators for any colubrids... i've just put plastic tubs full of eggs on a shelf in my house and forgot about them.

60-80 days later a nose is poking out. 24 hrs after I notice the first pip, I cut the other eggs in the clutch. I've been measuring the temps on the shelf where I have my clutches sitting now and it gets as high as 82 in the day and as low as 72 at night. I have them on a shelf near the ceiling in my snake room on a SW facing wall.

I've never seen a kink... though i've only produced a little over a thousand babies, not the tens or hundereds of thousands some big breeders have.

so what is everyone's opinion on the kinks? if temps, how high/low does it need to be and how quickly does the temp need to change to cause the deformaty?

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