Snakes, some for sale, some not eating

Today (Wednesday, 1 Oct), we took 28 snakes over to our friend, Golan, at Kibbutz Matzuba (near Shlomi). There were actually several reasons: some are for sale; some are in partial payment for Y'hudit, the anerythristic female that we got from him last year but who actually belonged to another friend of his; and some have either not eaten at all or have been poor eaters (Golan and the guys who work for him there are good at getting snakes to eat). This will decrease the number of mouths I have to feed considerably. While we were there, he also paid us for the 4 babies that he has been able to sell so far. So, it was a profitable and enjoyable trip on a lovely early autumn day. Afterwards, we went to Greg Cafe in Nahariya and had a nice lunch there before returning home.

Baby snake eating update

Today, I fed all the baby snakes from this year. I won't go into too many details, but this was an important feeding, since it was the 3rd opportunity for babies from the last 2 clutches to eat. If a baby snake eats 3 times, we can usually assume that it will be a consistently good eater, although there have been exceptions on occasion. The results at this time are encouraging: of the 57 babies that we currently have, 43 have eaten at least 3 times, 6 have eaten twice (having skipped last week), 2 have eaten only once, and 6 have consistently refused to eat. This does not count the 8 from earlier clutches that refused to eat that we had already taken to Golan to see if he can get them to eat. I was particularly pleased about the 6 that ate this week who hadn't eaten last week, since they are from Y'hudit's clutch, meaning that they are all heterozygous for both caramel and anerythrism (and the ones that are not hypomelanistic are also het for hypo).