Egg Disaster, Need Help Now, PLEASE!

[Babysnake]

I have been letting my female ball python incubate her eggs. The wafer thermostat I had on the box went bad and most of the eggs cooked. There are a few that still look viable, but when I tried to take the bad ones out, I could not get them out because they are stuck to the good ones. Now, it looks like the few that were still viable are going bad due to the bad ones spreading bacteria to them.

How do I get the bad eggs out of the clutch without damaging the few viable ones that are left?

[snakehunter]

maybe some warm water to help seperate them, im not sure, i have never bred before, and have NO experience

[Jeff_Favelle]

If your female was incubating the eggs, why did you have a wafer thermostat on them??

[Ron]

Originally posted by Jeff_Favelle
If your female was incubating the eggs, why did you have a wafer thermostat on them??

I was wondering the same thing, maybe he was incubating the female aswell. I believe if an egg is healthy it will hatch even if there is a rotten one attached to it.

[dave68]

last year I screwed up and moved my egg box that the female was incubating her eggs in to get it closer to the heat source, all but three cooked so to speak, but the three hatched no problems with the dead eggs attached. So I'd say to let the female do her thing and don't try to second guess her she knows what she is doing. just my opinion good luck!

[Stockwell]

I'm with Ron on this one... good eggs don't get spoiled by "bacteria" that is untrue. I assume you probably mean mould, but that isn't really true either. Healthy eggs are one of the most mould resistant things in nature.
There is no way to safely separate fused eggs. The blood vessels that feed the fetus are on the inside of the shell, and any significant stretching of the shell in the process of separating them, almost always results in the death of the embryo.
It can take some time for the shell to indicate that the egg has died.
Good ones will still hatch, so don't worry about separating them.

[Babysnake]

Thanks for your responses everyone. Unfortunately, I panicked and did not wait for them.

A little explanation: 1) the thermostat was on the box Angel was incubating in to keep her temps steady. The temps around here fluctuate a lot this time of year and I did not want her to get too cold and have to expend a lot of energy trying to keep the eggs warm. It worked just fine last time, and I figured don't mess with success.
2) The idea that pathongens could contaminate good eggs was not mine. It came from Ross and Marzec "Reproductive Husbandry of Pythons and Boas." Since most of the eggs were definitely dead, and the book said that it ws possible for the bad ones to overwhelm the immune responses of the good ones if there were too many, I thought it important to remove them. There were 5 that looked all right after the temp fiasco, but those were one by one starting to go, too. The dead ones were looking and smelling really bad and some of them were oozing fluid. Between that and what I read, leaving them there did not seem like a healthy thing to do.

At any rate, the bad ones were removed, with difficulty, Angel is back on the remaining 4 out of 10 ( 1 of those 4 doesn't look good), and whether any of them will survive is anyone's guess. I'm just really sorry that Angel and her babies had to suffer for my mistakes. Sometimes this "trial and error" stuff really stinks, especially the "error" part.

[Babysnake]

Despite all of the problems with the heat and warnings about damage to the remaining eggs from separating them, all 4 of Angel's remaining eggs hatched last weekend into 4 normal, healthy baby ball pythons.

Whether or not the eggs would have hatched with the dead rotting ones still attached is anybody's guess, but I am happy with the way things turned out. Since I was expecting nothing, getting 4 healthy babies was a pleasant surprise.

[smeagel]

congradulations with the hatching of your healthy BP. Yes the trial and error does really suck sometimes, but then again it is all that we have sometimes, especially if the person is new at breeding. Most of the time nature works everything out though.