Snake Stats - March 2014

Hey!

Here are March stats:

	Length	Weigh
2 March 2014	79 cm	81 gr
29 March 2014	83 cm
1 April 2014		93 gr

At roughly 8 months old Furia is starting to develop a nice feeding response and becoming much less of a finicky eater. Except when due a shed, when she will ALWAYS become super secretive and will refuse any food item she's offered. I have tried, and there's no way to trick her into thinking she's not in blue...

Also her blues are starting to show more on her face and she's slowly quitting her former earth-toned olive green. 

Growth-wise, I feel like she's bulking up a bit. She'll probably stop growing at monster rates and progressively get a heavier body, which seems normal for a yearling to be.

She has become such a nice and tame girl that I may be forced to reconsider renaming her. I don't handle her as much as I did when I was carrying on the taming program, although I try to handle her at least 2 times a week. I have observed that if I don't she quickly gets jumpy and nervous during handling sessions. She barely ever rattles or hisses anymore, and when she does it's when she feels threatened by the mice I am offering her, which doesn't prevent her from eating it...

No wonder why she's grown so much! Judge for yourself:

When I first got her:

5 months later...

Scale up!

M.

How to feed a Vietnamese Blue Beauty snake. Snake feeding gear.

How to feed your VBB will come down to your personal preferences. Here's what I use and why:

Glass jar. As I've had some trouble getting Furia to feed on frozen/thawed mice, I had to find a way to defrost my pinkies while keeping their original scent as much as possible. After trying several methods, I discovered the one that suits me and the beast the better. A closed glass jar will keep the mice's scent, will avoid contact with water if you put it in a casserole to heat and will prevent the mice from going bad if your snake refuses to eat. Put it in the fridge and call it a day!

Thongs. I have never enjoyed the idea to hold dead mice in my hands to feed it to my snakes, so I have used feeding thongs from the start [purchased off eBay, here]. I'd also rather The Fury doesn't associate my body scent with being fed, and that's just one way to ensure that. Again, it's a personal preference, many snake owners don't bother and have never had a problem.

Feeding bowl. I only use the feeding bowl (soap holder) in rare exceptions now, usually when I am in a hurry and don't have the time to feed Furia, then I just leave the pinkies in the bowl for her to find and eat. It prevents her from ingurging bedding and suffer from impaction. I don't really think it is mandatory, as snakes surely ingurge dirt and soil with their meals in the wild, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Until here, all I use when I feed Furia in her terrarium, which is being her personal favorite lately. Check it out:

            


Additional feeding gear (optional):

Back when I started with The Fury she was quite a picky eater, and I found I had more chances to succeed at feeding her when she was fed in a different enclosure.

Feeding R.U.B. This is something I never used with my corn but always did with my Vietnamese Blue Beauty hatchling.

Why? They are said to have such a ferocious feeding response that I worked to separate feeding and handling in my VBB's mind as much as possible.

So what I did is that I put all my feeding gear at hand, take The Fury from her terrarium, put her in the R.U.B. and fed her there. When she was done and her meals were down the lower half of her body, I put her back in her terrarium and leave her be for 48h, in order to allow her to digest peacefully. 


A snake handled while digesting can get stressed and regurge its meal, so it's really better to leave them to it ;)

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.

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M.

Feeding my Vietnamese Blue Beauty - What do I feed my snake?

There are many options when it comes to feeding:

• Smaller preys quite often (more than once a week)
• Bigger preys less often (usually every 7 days for hatchlings, yearlings and sub-adults, and every 10 to 14 days for adults)
• With / without supplements (calcium or vitamins)

If you wish to feed your snake more than once per week, just bear in mind a snake's digestive process is long and can last up to two days. Thus, it is not really recommended to feed a snake more than once every 4 days, which already seems quite a lot if you ask me. 

Also, snakes are opportunistic feeders: they do not eat because they are hungry but rather because they don't know how many time will elapse between one feed and another, so they feed whenever they have the occasion as a matter of survival. If you offered your snake a fuzzy every 4 days, it would most likely take it, but that does not mean it's hungry nor does it evidence a healthy practice. 

Of course, the feeding options listed above all give different results in growth speed and snake health. I found a very interesting experiment by Snake Bytes TV, the results of which did not exactly match my preconceived ideas. Although it was carried out with corn snakes, I am sure we can extrapolate the results. Watch out!

Feeding experiment: hypothesis

Feeding experiment: the results (starts at 02:07)

The Munson Scale mentionned in the video has been thought for average sized colubrids and is obviously not applicable to VBBs after a certain point, as a sub-adult or adult specimen will most likely weigh over 300 gr. However, until then it can be as good an orientation as any other. 

Snake Weight	Prey Weight	Prey name	Quantity of Preys	Interval
4 – 15 gr	2 – 3 gr	Pinky	1	4
16 – 23 gr	3 – 4 gr	Pinky	2	4 – 5
24 – 30 gr	5 – 7 gr	Small fuzzy	1	5 – 6
31 – 50 gr	7 – 9 gr	Fuzzy	1	5 – 6
51 – 90 gr	9 – 12 gr	Hopper	1	6 – 7
91 – 170 gr	13 – 20 gr	Weanling	1	7
171 – 300 gr	20 – 30 gr	Young adult	1	7 – 10

For those of you who are not familiar with the different mice sizes' names, here is a simple picture (not mine, but I can't find the source):

I personally don't follow the Munson Scale and just go by this rule of thumb: I go up a size when the bulge of the swallowed prey is not really visible once it has gone down half of my snake's body. This worked wonders with my corn, though it might need to be nuanced for my VBB girl. 

Because Vietnamese Beauty Snakes are so slender, it might be a good idea not to go up a size right away, but double the prey items instead for a little while and "upgrade" after that.

Aged 5 months old, I currently feed The Fury as I was told by the seller: 2 pinkies every 7 days. It has been working well so far, as you can see in November snake stats.

I hope this has been helpful.

Scale up!

M.

Snake Stats - November 2013

People use to wonder whether or not their snakes' body length and / or weight is according to their age. As for people, there is really no such thing as normal; every snake grows at its own pace, and that's just how it should be. There are fat snakes, skinny snakes and average snakes, and I am afraid the latter category englobes a huge diversity of slithery ones.

However, keeping numerical track of a snake's length and weigh can be really useful to detect a lot of things (a growth spurt, a digestive problem, etc.). I personally love to be able to put my snake's growth in numbers and pat myself in the back when the results are good, so that's that.

In this Snake Stats series of posts I will quickly state Furia's measurements (currently 5 months old):

	Length	Weigh
7 October 2013	53 cm	19 gr
1 November 2013	-	28 gr
18 November 2013	59 cm	36 gr

When first arrived, 3 months old aproximately, she was already quite long (considering VBBs hatch at 25 cm aprox.). As expected at this age, she is growing extremely fast. As for weigh, she has almost doubled her initial weigh in less than a month and a half! 

All the above does really make me happy, as I have been unwillingly underfeeding her for the first 6 weeks... but more on this in the post on reluctant feeders.

Scale up!

M.

Let me introduce you...

For now, this online notebook will have three actors: you, my VBB and me.

Let me start by saying that I am glad you stopped by and hope you will find what you are looking for in here. If you don’t, feel free to leave me a comment or send me a message and I’ll see what I can do.

About me, there’s just nothing interesting to be told, except that I have a little experience with snakes. I’ve always been in love with animals in general and reptiles in particular. Though snakes are my favorite hands down. In September 2012 I caved in and bought a corn snake to get me started. I had Discordia for a year and she was the most placid thing. Never aggressive, good eater and shedder, she fooled me into thinking keeping snakes was easy. No, not really ;)

I knew I wanted some sort of challenge snake-wise but wasn’t really planning anything in particular. In September 2013 I went to the annual reptile show nearby, wishlist in hand with just a list of accessories that I needed, and decided to behave like a good girl. Among around 500 snakes there, just two were Vietnamese Beauty snakes, and I happened to see them. That’s how my VBB girl made her entrance…

She was this teeny tiny olive toned shoelace locked up in a ridiculous deli cup in the Serpentarium stand.  After putting some thought into it -I wasn’t prepared for her and was going to face some major logistic problems- I asked to hold her. She tried to flee from my hands just as if she was going to grow wings in mid-air, she wasn’t aggressive at all but so freakin’ nervous she started rattling her tail as soon as she was put back in her deli cup. That’s when my friend told me to get her because we were very much alike… I am not even denying it.

Here are two pictures of her when she got home, in blue:

She’s a CB 2013 female Vietnamese blue beauty. When I bought her she was probably 2 months old, measured roughly 50cm and weighed 19gr.

She sure had some serious attitude, and I just love that. I named her Furia because it fitted her very well at the time; it means fury in Spanish. I wanted a challenge and I had it. Let’s see what she put me through…