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beetigerI'm feeling disturbed.
We've had two cornsnakes, Chili and Xoco, for about four years now, having fallen in love with them when we saw them at a local snake show. They'd been tended for a year by a college student who no longer was able to keep all of the snakes she owned. Cornsnakes are the classic ambassadors of the snake world; they're mellow and easy to handle, they get to a reasonable size (3-5 feet) and stay there, and they grab but are not really constrictors. They are really easy to convince to mate, and have a large variety of possible single-gene inherited phenotypic variations, so amateur breeders love them. The classic cornsnake is a festive pattern of brown and orange, but ours are both semi-albinos. Chili, the male, is missing his brown color, thus being patterned orange and white, while Xoco, the female, is missing her orange coloration. If they had babies, they could be full albinos, or classically colored, or like either of them, since these are single-gene mutations, I'm pretty sure.
We house the two of them together, and since we've had them, Xoco lays eggs every few months. Despite anything we've done to convince her otherwise, she tends to like to lay them in a clump under her hutch. By the time we've noticed, they've clumped together and dried out a bit, at which point they are unlikely to live. We'd never caught the snakes doing their thing, so I wasn't sure if they were even fertile. A few months ago, Bard got lucky and caught Xoco while she was laying eggs. He was able to get them into an appropriate container separated from each other. We buried them in bedding and misted them with water regularly, and they stayed plump and soft-shelled, as they are supposed to. But it's about two weeks past a reasonable hatching date for them, and we've just discovered another clutch, underneath Xoco's hutch tonight, so I really wanted to know what was up with the older clutch.
I took one of the eggs that was most in a clump, and separated it out. I tried to look in with a bright light, but couldn't see anything. I decided to sacrifice one of the eggs to look inside, cutting it open with a little scissors and pulling it apart with toothpicks. There was a fully formed, beautiful, but dead, tiny cornsnake in there. Brown and white, with tiny dark eyes and a purplish cast to the skin, attached to the placenta, or whatever that part of a snake egg is called, with little blood vessels. I thought it was moving, at first, when I touched it, but it was just my imagination, just some slipping around the container I was using to open the egg up. Bard couldn't look at it. I wandered out in the dark, almost tripped on the rosebushes climbing over the edge of the porch, and put it under the peonies. I'm trained as a biologist, it's true, and did an autopsy on another pet snake that died a few years ago, trying to find out what had gone wrong. But when it comes down to it, I'm both somewhat squeamish and somewhat sentimental.
We now know the eggs are fertile, which is more than we knew before. I'm going to keep the rest of the clutch a bit longer, just in case they are alive and just running late or something, though I don't think it's likely. But I feel sad and guilty that I don't know what went wrong, because whatever it was, it was late enough in the process that the snake looked quite perfect.
We've had two cornsnakes, Chili and Xoco, for about four years now, having fallen in love with them when we saw them at a local snake show. They'd been tended for a year by a college student who no longer was able to keep all of the snakes she owned. Cornsnakes are the classic ambassadors of the snake world; they're mellow and easy to handle, they get to a reasonable size (3-5 feet) and stay there, and they grab but are not really constrictors. They are really easy to convince to mate, and have a large variety of possible single-gene inherited phenotypic variations, so amateur breeders love them. The classic cornsnake is a festive pattern of brown and orange, but ours are both semi-albinos. Chili, the male, is missing his brown color, thus being patterned orange and white, while Xoco, the female, is missing her orange coloration. If they had babies, they could be full albinos, or classically colored, or like either of them, since these are single-gene mutations, I'm pretty sure.
We house the two of them together, and since we've had them, Xoco lays eggs every few months. Despite anything we've done to convince her otherwise, she tends to like to lay them in a clump under her hutch. By the time we've noticed, they've clumped together and dried out a bit, at which point they are unlikely to live. We'd never caught the snakes doing their thing, so I wasn't sure if they were even fertile. A few months ago, Bard got lucky and caught Xoco while she was laying eggs. He was able to get them into an appropriate container separated from each other. We buried them in bedding and misted them with water regularly, and they stayed plump and soft-shelled, as they are supposed to. But it's about two weeks past a reasonable hatching date for them, and we've just discovered another clutch, underneath Xoco's hutch tonight, so I really wanted to know what was up with the older clutch.
I took one of the eggs that was most in a clump, and separated it out. I tried to look in with a bright light, but couldn't see anything. I decided to sacrifice one of the eggs to look inside, cutting it open with a little scissors and pulling it apart with toothpicks. There was a fully formed, beautiful, but dead, tiny cornsnake in there. Brown and white, with tiny dark eyes and a purplish cast to the skin, attached to the placenta, or whatever that part of a snake egg is called, with little blood vessels. I thought it was moving, at first, when I touched it, but it was just my imagination, just some slipping around the container I was using to open the egg up. Bard couldn't look at it. I wandered out in the dark, almost tripped on the rosebushes climbing over the edge of the porch, and put it under the peonies. I'm trained as a biologist, it's true, and did an autopsy on another pet snake that died a few years ago, trying to find out what had gone wrong. But when it comes down to it, I'm both somewhat squeamish and somewhat sentimental.
We now know the eggs are fertile, which is more than we knew before. I'm going to keep the rest of the clutch a bit longer, just in case they are alive and just running late or something, though I don't think it's likely. But I feel sad and guilty that I don't know what went wrong, because whatever it was, it was late enough in the process that the snake looked quite perfect.
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*hug*
Special
Date: 2002-08-08 07:06 am (UTC)"Through special photography, we can see the development of the baby chick." There was no special photography, they just cut open the eggs and showed the dying fetuses at various stages of development, including fully-formed and ready to exit.
Trickster