Eggs, and razorblades
Jul. 19th, 2004 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumMules aren't the only things we have newly arrived on the demesne... Peppers are bearing edible fruit, the elephant heart plums are; as is the wont of that tree, arriving earlier than anyone else gets to enjoy them.
And the snakes are continuing to hatch.
The morning after the foal was born (names of dubious worth are being bandied about. since it's a jack, not a molly, the interest one would expect Pat to have is much less. I am loathe to attempt to analyse this... but I think Cavort is not much better than Quodlibet... brownie points to those who know what the last without using a reference. Gambol was rejected,because it is too close in sound to gamble... which seems a silly thing to me, but my religion doesn't forbid the latter, though it has been known to frown on some aspects of the former) we had more of the snake eggs slit open.
For those of you who've never had to deal with the hatching of things from eggs... it's a trivial thing, like a foaling horse it can almost be ignored.
Chickens, for example, need to be ignored, because they get their lungs working from the effort required to bash their way out the prison the shell has become.
Snakes, they use a specialised scale on the tip of the nose which falls off with great speed, I have never seen it on the beastie. With this, "egg tooth," they slash the top of the egg to ribbons.
Then they sit there in gory glory... a bubbling froth of left over egg-white foaming about the cute little heads the poke into the world.
Some hide in the egg for a couple of days, some jump right into the world.
Some, however, don't open. We had a clutch which was looking fine, the eggs were growing (they do that, an average increase is for them to double from laying to hatching) and three slit, and the rest just collapsed. Fine looking snakes in it, when I tried opening them to see if they were stuck (unlike birds, this is doable thing), but they were not among the quick.
So, we have eggs which have slit. A cute little face staring at me, and an albino (which isn't, if you want a post on snake color, I'll be glad to oblige, suffice it to say it's complex, and simple, all at once... but albino means they have no black, not they have no color... crazy and wrong, but that's what it is... sort of. I'm a wonk, and tend to say "amelanistic" because that avoids having to explain all that I just explained) side in the other open egg.
The next day I looked in again... it isn't an albino... it's striped. This is a rare, and hard to get, color morph (breeding snakes is a long term project... it takes about three years to get a hatchling to a good size for breeding, which means when you get a good snakelet,it can be a decade before you can isolate a good breeding line to get the colors you want).
Jazzed is not the word.
And we got another one. Three normals, two stripes and a few eggs which died. This isn't surprising, because stripes is a fragile, almost feeble, variation. Low fertility, and high mortality, in the shell.
And one egg, which looked good, but was doing nothing.
We also need pinkies, because we have some 20ish babies who need to eat, and soon, or they may not figure it out at all.
So we take the stripes, and the eggs, and head to our herp-store (Maia used to work there, and we have a good relationship with them).
Carol says, given that the other eggs opened three days earlier, that slitting it is good idea.
Now, all of us are nervous... the egg is huge. We have chickens (bantams) which have laid smaller eggs than this thing.
Out pops a little head. Striped. And four-five yolks. Seems the mother had shelled a lot of yolks all together.
I hope it eats.
If it does, and it's a boy, we can have a lot of stripes in about two years, because inbreeding isn't a big deal in snakes, and we can "line breed" him back to his mother.
Which might move the snakes to the realm of better than breaking even.
TK
And the snakes are continuing to hatch.
The morning after the foal was born (names of dubious worth are being bandied about. since it's a jack, not a molly, the interest one would expect Pat to have is much less. I am loathe to attempt to analyse this... but I think Cavort is not much better than Quodlibet... brownie points to those who know what the last without using a reference. Gambol was rejected,because it is too close in sound to gamble... which seems a silly thing to me, but my religion doesn't forbid the latter, though it has been known to frown on some aspects of the former) we had more of the snake eggs slit open.
For those of you who've never had to deal with the hatching of things from eggs... it's a trivial thing, like a foaling horse it can almost be ignored.
Chickens, for example, need to be ignored, because they get their lungs working from the effort required to bash their way out the prison the shell has become.
Snakes, they use a specialised scale on the tip of the nose which falls off with great speed, I have never seen it on the beastie. With this, "egg tooth," they slash the top of the egg to ribbons.
Then they sit there in gory glory... a bubbling froth of left over egg-white foaming about the cute little heads the poke into the world.
Some hide in the egg for a couple of days, some jump right into the world.
Some, however, don't open. We had a clutch which was looking fine, the eggs were growing (they do that, an average increase is for them to double from laying to hatching) and three slit, and the rest just collapsed. Fine looking snakes in it, when I tried opening them to see if they were stuck (unlike birds, this is doable thing), but they were not among the quick.
So, we have eggs which have slit. A cute little face staring at me, and an albino (which isn't, if you want a post on snake color, I'll be glad to oblige, suffice it to say it's complex, and simple, all at once... but albino means they have no black, not they have no color... crazy and wrong, but that's what it is... sort of. I'm a wonk, and tend to say "amelanistic" because that avoids having to explain all that I just explained) side in the other open egg.
The next day I looked in again... it isn't an albino... it's striped. This is a rare, and hard to get, color morph (breeding snakes is a long term project... it takes about three years to get a hatchling to a good size for breeding, which means when you get a good snakelet,it can be a decade before you can isolate a good breeding line to get the colors you want).
Jazzed is not the word.
And we got another one. Three normals, two stripes and a few eggs which died. This isn't surprising, because stripes is a fragile, almost feeble, variation. Low fertility, and high mortality, in the shell.
And one egg, which looked good, but was doing nothing.
We also need pinkies, because we have some 20ish babies who need to eat, and soon, or they may not figure it out at all.
So we take the stripes, and the eggs, and head to our herp-store (Maia used to work there, and we have a good relationship with them).
Carol says, given that the other eggs opened three days earlier, that slitting it is good idea.
Now, all of us are nervous... the egg is huge. We have chickens (bantams) which have laid smaller eggs than this thing.
Out pops a little head. Striped. And four-five yolks. Seems the mother had shelled a lot of yolks all together.
I hope it eats.
If it does, and it's a boy, we can have a lot of stripes in about two years, because inbreeding isn't a big deal in snakes, and we can "line breed" him back to his mother.
Which might move the snakes to the realm of better than breaking even.
TK
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-20 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-20 06:36 am (UTC)Cornsnake Pantherophis gutatta, (taxonomy recently changed from Elaphe gutatta guttata)
Western Hognose Heterodon nasicus
to be bred
East African Sand Boa Eryx colubrinus
Snakes not bred
African House Snake Lamprophis fuliginosus
Yellow Rat Snake Elaphe obsoleta quadrivutatta
Calif. Gopher Snake Pituophis melanoleucus deserticola
Ball/Royal Python Python regius
We have our first clutch of Hognose in the incubator, and our fourth set of clutches for the Cornsnakes.
Last year was our first sets of eggs from snakes we hatched out.
The Sand Boas ought to be easier, because they are ovavivaparous, and so need no incubating. They ought to be clutching next spring. On the other hand they do better with three, or four males per female.
The African House Snake would be easy, if we could find her a mate, because they will lay every nine weeks, so a new clutch could be hatched about that often.
I think that covers the herps.
TK
no subject
Date: 2004-07-20 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-20 10:42 pm (UTC)We keep the ones which interest us (patter, or color) and sell the rest to pet stores we trust. The store we trust the most, sadly, does its own breeding, and so needs our stock not at all.
A normal has a wholesale value of about $15. Other colors vary. The stripes, were we willing to sell them would go for $50-100, wholesale.
Oddly we have so many snakes because mice were so expensive. A baby snakes needs to eat every 4-7 days. A pinkie mouse costs the same as an adult. We had three babies, and that was something like $15 a month to feed.
A pregnant mouse costs the same as a pinkie... we did the math.
But then we had too many mice (a baby, fresh from the egg, is limited, mostly, to mice of less than three days), so we got more snakes. The cycle moved on to its present equilibrium.
TK
no subject
Date: 2004-07-22 01:52 pm (UTC)