From the other fertile egg incubated from Hussy, we have our second royal hatchling, our first royal python morph:
it has an interesting pattern, quite a few “alien heads”, perhaps the effect of the granite gene in Hussy.
I cut one of Hussy’s eggs last night - it had collapsed in an odd manner, and to be honest I thought it was dead. It took a while to carefully cut round the veins on the egg as delicately as possible, and in the end I could see a fully formed normal royal python through the small hole, but no movement.
A couple of hours later, I returned to see this:
He/she looks absolutely perfect, I imagine he’ll stay in the egg for a few more days until he’s ready to come into the outside world, and hopefully by then his sibling from Hussy’s other egg will have pipped too. I am over the moon with this - our first ever royal python baby!
All of the fires and bloodreds from Strawberry’s clutch have hatched and shed now - there are a variety of different looks in the clutch from very diffused from the beginning to a few who are less diffused but have more extreme head patterns. We have ended up with eleven fires and nine bloodreds, and although they’re not all sexed yet it looks like we have more females than males.
Their first feed went fine - not as good as the lavenders, but quite respectable. As they’re big hatchlings I expected some of them to refuse before they finally take a defrost pink, and I was quite right! Still, half of them fed without any hesitation so that’s not bad at all.
I’ll put some pictures and details of the ones who are started up on the website as soon as I can, and add the rest of them once they decide they’re hungry and take some food!
It was feeding night for the majority of the snakes last night - our yearlings are all on a weekly schedule, and the adults all either get fed once a week or once every two weeks, so I tend to feed the youngsters while stan feeds the adults.
The vast majority of the yearlings are a breeze to feed, and strike happily at their food (notably excepting Jacob, who prefers to politely take the food from your hand). Loads were freshly shed and particularly gorgeous looking, Shetland in particular who is gaining the most incredible amounts of delicate pink colouring.
Cranberry, Hussy, and Lingonberry, our royal girls, got fed last night too - they’re getting fed more often than usual at the moment as they’ve all laid recently and are looking a bit skinny. Cranberry and Hussy both laid clutches amounting to 1/3 of their total body weight, so they look exhausted (not that you’d know it from the power of their striking when they feed!). Lingonberry’s clutch was proportionately much smaller, less than 1/5 of her total body weight, so she still looks quite healthy - but while she’s acting hungry, we’ll let her eat!
It was hatchling feeding night last night. Second feed for half of the lavender clutch, and first feed for the rest of them - all but one ate defrost without any problems. I’m really pleased that the first clutch Sebastian’s sired has proved to be such strong feeders, like he was as a baby.
Raspberry seems to be going into slough (I say “seems to be” as I find it really hard to tell with her sometimes). I really expected her to lay this year, so I’m hoping that this is finally her pre-lay slough. She’s been mated to Sebastian for lavenders het hypo opal, so fingers crossed there.
I am finally seeing veins in most of Barzona’s eggs now. There’s a couple I’m not sure on yet, and of course they’re in a big clump so I can’t get to the bottom ones, but I think they’re doing well. I can’t wait to see if a little cinder pops its head out of one of those eggs!