I’m glad I waited another 24 hours to post this as not only did Colony 2’s babies open their eyes, but Colony 3 just had a bunch of babies! The featured picture is of Colony 2 and their healthy and robust babies sleeping in their hide as the two moms and dad walk around the container. I just checked on both colonies before writing this post to ensure everyone was okay and not eaten as I saw in Colony 1. The parents of that colony not only killed all 10 of their babies, but the babies I let them adopt from Colony 2 weren’t being very well taken care of. Comparing the adopted babies to their biological nest mates made it evident that the mothers of Colony 1 weren’t doing their job. The adopted babies were growing and alive yet weren’t nearly as active as their biological family. Their eyes weren’t opened and they seemed almost feeble. So bad news all around.
The worst part in all this is that the feeble ones are my females, which are very hard to get hence my day long journey to travel to the only female mice store within a 24 hour round trip. Though more females will be born to replace the weaker ones if they were to die I still value my animals as they are living things. Even the ones I feed to my scorpions and snakes have value as their death helps keep my predators fed on fresh, properly raised feed stock. It is my belief that no life is worthless and every animal I take care of is my responsibility and deserves to live the best life possible until its time for it to end. It is gruesome, but I see it as necessary to my snake’s health. I’ve already seen a difference in their attitudes as I no longer have to keep their food in front of them for minutes on end to coax them to eat. Olympus the milk snake would only eat when I held him and even then it would take +10 minutes before he’d finally take. Now I don’t even have to pick him up. I put the live baby in front of him and he’ll quickly strike and coil it as he would in the wild. Though his technique needs work he gets better with every feeding and I see less anxiety from him afterwards.
The male babies that I haven’t fed off are too big for any of my snakes and therefore will likely be sold/donated to local snake keepers for feeding as I have no use for the males. This won’t be done until they and their sisters are weaned so they can all be handled together; the males get taken away while the females are allowed to breed their own colonies. I’ll have to time when I introduce the male into their containers to ensure there is a near constant flow of babies coming in as I have snakes of various development stages.
Here is a video of the little mites walking around with some having their eyes opened and others not being quite there yet. All of them are pretty active and will be weaned off in the next two weeks provided all goes well with their health. I had a male in Colony 3 come down with a wicked infection that caused a mass to grow on its back seemingly overnight. I have no idea what it was from as none of the mothers came down with it, but it considering their roles as breeders I needed to put him down immediately before it spread. I ended up placing him in isolation as I watched to see whether or not his health would decline or not. He seemed fine despite the weird growth continuing to fester on his back, which eventually led me to decide he needed to be taken out. I decided to use asphyxiation via dry ice as it gives off carbon dioxide, which would quickly take him out. It did its job and he was unconscious within 30 seconds once the gas set in. Though sad to have to do and witness, his offspring were all born seemingly healthy, though time will tell for sure. Here they all are below:
There are approximately 15 babies in that cute pink mass which came from two of the three mothers in Colony 3 with the third mother not being impregnated once the father was let go from the colony. A set of unrelated males will be introduced once this brood is taken care of to ensure they aren’t eaten by a jealous father sensing the babies aren’t his. One will go in Colony 3 while the other three will be split among the weaned females when they are of age and ready to breed at around 4 months old.
Hopefully everything will stay well and the Colonies will survive to create healthy brood now and into the future. Fingers crossed!
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