Notes on: VBB shedding (I)

The Fury has shed once a month since I've got her, and is about to do so again for the third time.

Her first shed happened a few days after I first brought her home and went on like a charm. The second one, on the other hand, was awful (you can find the details and pictures here). It got me trying to pinpoint what had changed between the two, so I would be able to counterrest it for Furia's third shed, which is imminent.

I finally figured out the one thing that diferred in The Fury's viv between October and November: I turned on the heat mat. As simple as that!

And yet, at that moment I didn't realize turning the heat on would reduce the humidity level in my VBB's terrarium. It lowered to 40% and that sufficed for Furia to have a whole retained shed.

In a day or two, after her third shed, I'll hopefully be able to confirm my veredict...

Scale up!

M.






Edit - 21 December 2013:

Furia had an awful shed again yesterday. Temps were ok and humidity was up to 65-70%.

Her whole face had come off normally *relief* but 80% of her skin was still there. I put her in a RUB with 1,5 cm of warm water and a towel for her tu rub against, put that partially in the hot side of her terrarium and left her for half an hour. When I came back, she had shed 1/3 of her body, so I left her to it for another half an hour. After that, I found a perfect shed, up to her tail tip!

Note to self: add a moist hide just when her eyes clear next time.

Scale up!

M.

Edit - 2 February 2014:

In order to start 2014 with a nice shed I added a homemade moist hide in Furia's terrarium right after I noticed her eyes were starting to be opaque. She was reluctant to hide in there so I was forced to remove all other hides... and make her. 

It WORKED. I found a one-piece perfect shed!

Note to self: I didn't do anything else to raise humidity in Furia's terrarium this time; it was stable at 40%. Placing a moist hide seems to be the winning method for the Beast.

Bad shed, what to do? How to manually remove un-shed skin from a Vietnamese Blue Beauty snake.

After being in blue, your snake will eventually shed its skin. If everything goes well, you should end up with one piece of old skin going from the snake's nose to its tail.

If your snake has had a bad shed, you'll find scattered pieces of old skin in your terrarium. Make sure you're able to complete the puzzle; if not, keep reading! If it's had an awful shed, you'll notice this:

Can you see the wrinkles forming on The Fury's skin? Nasty. Her old skin was still adhered to her new one, and she hadn't been able to slither off of it. In some parts of her body, ragged pieces of skin were hanging:

After taking a close look to Furia's terrarium, I found this:

Obviously not enough skin to cover a 50cm snake, this was the ultimate evidence of a bad shed.

Un-shed skin has to be removed as it may impede a correct blood flow and even lead to necrosis. After a bad shed, quickly examine your snake in order to evaluate damages. You have to pay special attention to (i) retained eye caps, and (ii) retained tail skin. Every piece of old skin must come off, but eyes and tail are especially sensible. In some cases, a retained tail tip may cause the death of skin tissue and even tail loss.

You want to make sure that both spectacles have been correctly shed, so you need to look for this:

If you notice un-shed skin anywhere on your snake's body, there are a few measures you can take; ranged from lighter to harsher:

1º The towel method. Cover your snake with a towel and put light pressure with both of your hands while you let your snake slither its way out. If you find ragged pieces of skin in your towel, the measure is working. Consider repeating. 

Tip: this measure works well when the un-shed skin on your snake is still humid. If dry, skip to the next one!

2º Moisturizing with olive oil. If there is a stubborn piece of skin refusing to come off, you can apply olive oil (or any other oil) to the area with a cotton ball and let the skin get impregned by it. After some minutes, try to manually remove the old skin. If it doesn't come off, let it work by itself. Put the snake back in its terrarium and come back later to see if the skin has effectively been shed. If not, you can repeat or try with the methods listed below.

This method is not appropriate for a large un-shed piece of skin!

3º The humidity cure. Place your snake in a R.U.B. with a damp towel covering 100% of its floor. Leave your snake in there for several hours or overnight. Humidity will help the old skin to come off. If there's stubborn un-shed skin, you can then use the towel method above.

4º The warm bath. Put enough warm water to cover 2/3 of your snake's height in a R.U.B., as shown below, and let your snake bathe for 20 to 30 minutes. After that, try the towel method explained in no. 1.

Tip: you can also put a folded towel in the RUB floor; it will get extremely wet, but will likely help the old skin to come off easily and naturally as your snake wanders by. This works best if you put part of your snake's body between the tower folds (and pray it doesn't move too much).

5º The manual removal. After all other measures have been tried and failed, try to manually (and very gently) remove your snake's old skin. For this, the snake's skin MUST be moist, otherwise you will very likely hurt your snake.

The Fury is a feisty snake, but calmed down by herself when I attempted to manually remove her old skin. I can't say she was comfortable, but she made the process easy by not moving as she felt it was something good, I guess. Either way, it took me a good 30 minutes, so you might want to put some music on before you start ;)

Manual removal has no secrets. Just be careful not to hurt your snake by pulling up the skin too fast and don't forget any piece of skin, especially not the eye caps and tail tip. You can try to mimic ecdysis' natural process by rolling back the old skin, from the head to the tail.

I hope this proves useful! If you want to share your results or any technique that has not been listed in this post, please do in the comments section below or by email :) I would love to hear from you.

In the meantime, scale up!

M.

Is my Vietnamese Beauty snake in blue?

Any snake will eventually prepare for ecdysis (aka shed its skin). There are a few signs to recognize the different phases of this process. Here we go:

How do I know my snake is about to shed? You'll notice the start of the shedding process because your snake's colors will become duller, paler and kind of greyed out. Depending on the color of your snake, this will be fairly obvious; it particularly stands out in darker colors. 

The ultimate evidence that your snake is about to shed is that its eyes will become clouded and opaque. A snake is continually getting things in its eyes. I mean, can you imagine tunneling in 2m of aspen bedding with your eyes open and without using your hands? Yeah, it sucks. So in order to protect their eyes, snakes have specific scales covering them, known as spectacles or brilles. Just like the rest of the snake's scales, the spectacles will be shed and replaced by new ones, and start detaching from them. This is known as "being in blue".

You can find an example below. The first picture was taken when Furia was in blue, the second after a shed (click to enlarge).

You can tell the state she's in just by looking at her eye and "eyeliner". Simple :)

Another sign that your snake is approaching ecdysis is that it will usually become secretive and hide for several days in a row.

After two or three days of having clouded eyes, they will become clear again. Then, you're sure to have your snake shed its skin in another two or three days. And that's when you have to prepare the shedding gear. More on this in a later post!

Why does a snake shed? Well, there are various reasons for this:

1. Snakes need to periodically renew their skin's outer layer. It will happen more often as hatchlings and sub-adults, when their growing rate is higher, but they will keep doing it throughout their lives.

2. They will also shed their skin after an injury, in order to quickly remove damaged scales. That can take several ecdysis in a row.

3. In females, it can indicate that they are ready to lay their eggs after brumation.

4. It can also evidence the presence of skin parasites such as mites that the snake is inefficiently trying to get rid of.

Snakes don't show their physical state as plainly as a dog or a human, so you have to constantly read the signs. It is useful to keep record of every shed in order to be able to check your data every time and again to determine whether or not a specific shed may be evidencing a health issue.

Scale up!

M.