Hatching update

Sure enough, the 2nd clutch began pipping before all of the 1st clutch babies were even out of their eggs! All 19 of the 1st clutch eggs are now hatched, and all of the babies are safely in the Hovabator. So far, 2 babies from the 2nd clutch have crawled out of their eggs, and at least 3 more have pipped but not emerged yet.

The 2nd clutch babies are from a pair of our "project" snakes from last year's project. We have only 2 clutches (the 2nd and 3rd ones) from "project" snakes this year. Last year, we had 5 "project" clutches, I think, but some of the parents have died since then. The project parents are actually all brothers and sisters from a single clutch that we produced in 2004, while we were still in California, which we brought with us. They were the result of us breeding a male amelanistic Emory rat snake to a female lavender corn snake. The first generation is uninteresting in itself, but when we mated them last year, we got normals, amelanistics, lavenders, and "opals" (both amelanistic AND lavender). Besides that, we got a 2 or 3 individuals who were totally unique and unlike any of the others. This indicates that some other genes are involved that we did not know about but which must have been hidden in the original pair. We're hoping to get some more interesting ones this year, but the 2 who have hatched so far are, I think, just regular normals. Of course, ALL of these are, like their parents, half Emory rat snake and half corn snake (really 2 different subspecies of the same species, which, however, apparently do NOT mate in the wild even though their ranges overlap).