Kingsnake.com - Herpforum

Posted by: Nicodemus at Wed May 7 13:59:23 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Nicodemus ]

My provent-a-mite won't be coming in until tomorrow. As much as I love my kids, $50 for overnight shipping is a little excessive. And an extra day should hurt them horribly as long as I start cleaning.

So I spent a number of hours last night and this morning giving snakes baths (even if they didn't appear to have any mites) and completely drenching tanks and enclosures with bleach solution and even just a good old fashioned hose down outside. Lots of washings...
I even sealed up some of the tanks and left them out in the sun to cook for a few hours, apparently the excess heat will kill lots of mites....yeah I'm using every damn trick in the book that I can find .

Sigh, problem is, my big snakes must have had them for a while now. Poor guys. I don't take them out much (both are kinda timid) and I change the water regularly, so I've never noticed any mites in the water dish. But DAMN, when I checked the water, there was a bunch of the little bastards in there. And after the bath, I had a bunch of dead ones on my hands.

So my guess at this point, the mites got tracked in by someone and infected my carpet python first. Her enclosure in on the floor (its pretty big) and she seemed to have the most mites. Then my boa got hit next as he had quite a few as well and I usually take him out just after the python to play with them a bit. So I must have transferred some then.
A couple of my smaller snakes were hit, but it doesn't look like all of them (at least I hope) three looked fine, so I might be lucky in that the mites might have just been contained in the tanks and havn't been migrating on foot but by my own hands...

...which is odd actually, because I'm usually REALLY careful about washing immediately after touching any of the animals.