How to Prep and Care for Snake Eggs!

in this enclosure I have a rather large female bull snake who is gravid and in case you don't know when a gravid snake sheds their skin it's called a pre lay shed and it means they're within a week or so of laying and she just shed about four days ago so we're expecting her eggs pretty soon here although I think this latex is a little too small for her I'd hate for her to squish the eggs after laying them so to make it more comfortable we are going to upgrade this today new you are hi this is her old lay back and this will be her new lay box here we go we've got our door made and I used a welding pen and I literally just melted away the plastic to make an entrance and this melts down any points that may otherwise show up if you use a saw or a knife or something and to make sure that your snake can't get hurt by the plastic going in and out okay now we are going to fill up our lay box with langing substrate and there's a lot of different opinions on what to use some people use pure vermiculite or perlite which is what you put your eggs in after they've been laid but I just use tropical soil mixed with moss and to be honest this full snake has laid in just Aspen before because I wasn't expecting her to lay when she did and she guess she was just ready and the eggs were just fine so I don't think there is picky as people say they are but I just use a combination of tropical soil and then I sprinkle this moss around as well we're actually going to add a little bit more here [Music] hi mama you are huge I cannot wait to see how many eggs we get from you now the question is did I make the door big enough you're fine you're fine let's see man look at that she's so thick right until her vent those are all eggs right there okay let's put in your box I'm going to put this on the warm end of her enclosure so it stays nice and humid in there you're pretty much setting up a humidity box but with a little extra dirt for the egg laying okay you go on in that fits in here like perfectly and I put it in backwards whoa check it out let's see if she can fit going in oh yeah that'll work just fine this style of lay box also makes it convenient to just take out all of the eggs once she does lay and we can just take off the lid and remove them all pretty easily and while she's in here we can just take a peek inside and see if she's laid yet last night our bull snake Brad was very restless she just couldn't get comfortable which usually means she's trying to find a place to lay her eggs so last night could have been the night it's now the morning after we gave her her nest or her lay box and I haven't peaked at all so we're going to check to see if we have eggs get this out of the way and let's see nothing yet false alarm check number two for today she has not left bully box since the last time I recorded nope nothing ah nothing yet it's been about ten days since she had her pre Latian we have eggs I think she might still be living though keep going I won't bug you okay let's see how she's doing holy Sh and you are still pumping them out okay I will check back later while we wait for Brad to lay her eggs it's time to get the egg incubation material ready so in the past I have used vermiculite with decent success although I've heard really good things about perlite so we picked up some organic perlite and we're going to run a little bit of an experiment this time around because I think she'll lay enough eggs to fill up more than just one of these containers in the incubator so will will use two and we'll split the clutch up and everything will stay the same except for the medium we use so we'll have one for room a few light and one for perlite so first we're going to fill them up with the medium I think I just have barely enough vermiculite yeah that should that should work that's actually a little more than enough but we'll just ease up the whole bag and we'll get our perlite poured in [Applause] there we go you want there to be enough so that you can partially submerge the eggs in the medium but not cover them completely next we're going to pour water in now with vermiculite I know you can mix it 50/50 by informs of weights not volume when it comes to mixing water but after a while you just kind of get the hang of how much you need and you don't want there to be so much that when you squeeze it water drips out see this would be too much so I think it's because I haven't stirred it in completely but if you do accidentally add too much water just squeeze it over the sink to drain it until you get to the point where when you squeeze it that's a little still too much when you squeeze it there isn't any water dripping out there we go that should be good your hands will get messy so just accept your fate now okay just wait till we get to the perlite this isn't much better just gonna wipe this off on here so for a like same thing just add your water but not to the point where it drips when you squeeze it now once she's done laying her eggs we will put them in but that might take a little while so we're gonna cut for now okay just checking on here oh my gosh there's still one left it looks like maybe two so looking for a little more time to get that last one out hopefully without help okay so we're going to take out the eggs ones that she's late anyway can I get them out of the way and into the incubator oh she got the last one out sweet she must have just laid that in last like five minutes there might be one here but I think that could just be how she's curves to because I think it would have been down here following the other ones so perfect timing I know that was a ton of work wasn't it Brad you look so grumpy grumpier than usual so carefully move her out of the way okay look at that yeah I'll get the rest you're fine Brad I don't see a single slug no this one's a little sluggy looking what's the one that was last mostly lady so now we have to split them up because they are attached with kind of a little adhesive that they make so that the eggs spread the heat around the entire clutch to keep them all the same temperature but we're going to maintain that temperature in our incubator so now I have to split them up but make keep their orientation which isn't as important in the first 24 hours because with them after the first 24 hours that's when the embryo attaches to the side of the egg [Music] we're done splitting them up we left this group together because they are so much adhesive in between them all it would take a lot of effort to pull them apart and they're short enough they're in the right angle that it won't interfere with the lid being on top so now we have to mark the highest point of each egg so that we can know which angle or which orientation it was facing so here we go [Music] and last but not least write the date on the bin don't forget that part when it comes to your incubator you don't need anything too fancy you can even use the $40 little giant incubator from Fleet Farm to be honest but what we're using is a chicken egg incubator and we use this back and we were raising quail but we tweaked it so that it stays at a lower temperature for the snakes and inside we have several different trays so we can house quite a few eggs and B is normally would rotate back and forth for bird eggs but we stop that so because eggs to wait by the reptiles you don't want to rotate at all so we are going to slide these in I'm gonna switch I have some egg-eating snake eggs in here that I'm just going to move to a different level and we're going to set this probe directly inside of the tray so that it reads where the eggs are at and their temperature and to me to be level Versailles we came home to a surprise just now even though we put the 24 eggs in the incubator we have a bonus 125 that looks good so we'll bring this downstairs and put him with his friends [Music] we'll put him with these [Music] there's a little more room in this tray [Music] and actually I'm gonna make a note this is AG 25 [Music]

Channel: Snake Discovery

Views: 16,250,172

Rating: 4.5565329 out of 5

Keywords: snakes, pets, reptiles, animals, exotic, eggs, vermiculite, perlite, pearlite, medium, snake egg, incubation, incubator, bullsnake, care, how to, lay box, my snake laid eggs

Id: w6aPZTgVZ5k

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2017