Ah...the coffee woke me up slightly.....and the kids are loving the twins. Most of my students were not aware that there can be conjoined twins in snakes.

Anyways, I have been working with ball pythons and sand boas for awhile now, but this litter was my first larger boid attempt. I have had barely any sleep last night, and all morning I've been trying to figure out what went wrong exactly. Obviously, since there wasn't a thermostat set up the temperatures had more room for fluctuations, but I was pretty dilligent about temp gunning her often, and I never noticed a major swing. Here is my current thought....since we had literally half the litter healthy and half the litter either slug out or deformed, could it be possible that she didn't have enough of a hot spot? I was using a 17 x 11 heat mat, but what if some of the babies just didn't get on the heat? Is this a possibility? I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner!

For Future Reference: Do most of you use belly heat? In my AP and Vision racks I have heat rope stretching across the whole back of the tank, but in the 4 x 2's I couldn't figure out a way to use the heat rope, so I stuck with heat pads. I think I'm going to upgrade my Visions to Boaphiles or AP this year, and hopefully that will solve my problem.

Thanks again for all of you following my constant ramblings on this thread!
-----
Thanks,
Amy
My Boids

[ Show Entire Thread ]