Yolk Baby

Snakesitter · 10-08-14, 01:43 PM

Last year, Living Gems experienced our very first “yolk baby.”

We discovered her still buried in the slime pile -- quite literally: she was underneath the newspaper, which was drenched in clear thick birth sludge. At first we thought she was a stillborn, but that passed as soon as she started trying to defend herself against the unwanted intrusion of my hand.

After several minutes of struggle with slimy paper and slippery baby, we managed to untangle her from the mess and place her in a drawer:

We kept her very warm and humid to prevent the yolk from hardening. We gave her a day and a half to work it off, then decided to remove it ourselves. But when we set up to operate, we found she had knocked it off herself. A day later, most of the umbilical cord fell off as well. As her belly was still very large, we then added a 40-hour heat pack to give her a boost in digesting any absorbed yolk.

She thankfully pulled through fine, and after two sheds looked like this:

One year later, when she was finally sold, she was a perfectly healthy little girl who has eaten 32 times and shed eight times. The last photo I have of her was from December (aged four months), and she looked like this:

Score one for baby boa resilience!

May this year's litters be just as tough.

Thank you for reading,