It figures that our first snake would be the first to potentially give us babies first! We noticed a lot of action with Little Man and Fat Girl (the ball pythons) this year, but wasn’t sure anything resulted from it. Boy, were we wrong! We noticed Fat Girl hanging out on the heat quite a bit the past month or so, and after a few days of not seeing her come out of a hide, finally decided to check her out and also get a weight on her since it’s the first of the month. Can you imagine our surprise when we pulled the hide off her and found her wrapped around a clutch of eggs!
We found someone to come look at the eggs to make sure they passed the visual viability test. This typically means that they aren’t green or just look molded or rotten. Typically if they are slugs, or unfertilized eggs, they will be discolored, slightly smaller than the rest of the clutch, usually have pointed ends, and sometimes shorter than a typical egg.
We aren’t for sure exactly how long she’s had the eggs, but figure it couldn’t have been more than 2-3 days. We quickly bought an incubator off Amazon, and got it set up the next day. To our surprise, she wasn’t especially defensive when Taylor pulled her off the eggs and put her in a holding tub.
Once she was removed, Taylor was able to scoop the eggs and put them in a tub inside the incubator. They had to be scooped because since we didn’t find them relatively soon after being laid, they had stuck together. Since snake eggs are fragile and porous, it’s best to not try to separate what’s already stuck together to avoid the potential for tearing a shell.
We check on the eggs every couple of days to make sure the water stays topped off and that the Vermiculite stays the proper wetness. It’s also important to check on the eggs to make sure none of them are starting to go bad. A bad egg will start to mold and rot, and if left with the others, can endanger the rest of the clutch.
Once we removed the eggs from Fat Girl’s tub, we filled her holding tub with some warm water and soap to help wash the egg smell off of her. While she soaked in that, we removed all of the bedding from her tub and cleaned it with a disinfectant to remove the egg smell from there as well. We did the same process with her hide box and water bowl. We put her in a smaller tub once we washed her up, and gave her a hide box and water bowl. We thought she would be good, but when we checked on her the next morning, she had wrapped her water bowl as if it was a clutch of eggs. After some quick Google searching, we tried giving her another soak and soap along with a quick rub down with a wash cloth to remove any residual egg smell that we might have not gotten off her the first go around.
so, we are expecting eggs to start hatching some time around the beginning of June. Approximately half of the babies should be hypos (Orange Ghosts), and the rest should be hypo pastels!