Milking Western Hognose for Research Purposes
Hi everyone!
I'm kinda new to the forum but I had used it once before when actually buying my pet hognose snake a couple years back to figure out husbandry needs and everyone was super helpful! Anyways fast track to now and I'm doing a PhD project working with western hognose snakes in which I have to try to extract venom for our observations. I wanted to test out voluntary venom release to see if that would increase venom output (if a snake has more reason to inject venom for example thinking its prey, maybe it would release more?) and I'm having a hard time trying to come up with a way to collect the venom in this manner.
Western hognoses are fixed fang snakes that have really weak muscles attached to their venom glands so they need to chew their venom into their prey. Whatever device I make to extract the venom would have to be able to withstand that while capturing as much of the venom as possible. I was thinking some kind of durable ball thing with bubble wrap like material around the outside so that the individual teeth could slide into pockets that I could extract the venom from afterwards. Any help or advice on even on how the regular milking method for a hognose goes would be super helpful (if people even do that given its low potency)!
Thanks in advance!
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