Here is some eye candy… she’s at 700-800 grams right now gotta check her weight again… did it 2 months ago and she was 700 grams… this sunset gene is mind blowing
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She was my first snake…now I’m up to 40 snakes…mostly combo hets…can wait to breed lol
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That is indeed the supplier that seemed to be the culprit. Could also just be the fact that they have such low prices and most people get their feeders from them.
Regardless, I never stopped using them until recent years when I began breeding my own feeders.
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Could it be related to the diet of the feeders in some way? In terms of nutrients or perhaps carotenes? Or hormonal, maybe as a result of reaching sexual maturity, breeding, or responding to environmental change and/or stressors? I have definitely seen my leopard geckos undergo changes in their appearance when the ambient room temperature changes significantly for several months (I used to live in a place without air conditioning). I am just wildly guessing.
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Apologies, was off grid for a bit and only getting around to this.
So…
We have seen something like this in the hobby before. There are two different cases and they are unrelated to one another.
The first is one everyone knows about: Stormtrooper.
The second is a situation like Ryan described - the animals, usually during a shed, will suddenly lose a huge amount of pigmentation. Most of these cases have traced back to some type of external factor (feeder diet, poor husbandry, radical humidity/temp change, etc.) and the animal will eventually regain the pigmentation back
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@t_h_wyman the only reason why I don’t think it has something to do with food is cause this is already a long process. She turned axanthic looking in April/June… she has shedded and the only thing that happens is more blacks and white comes… if it was a bad food item how long will it be affecting her ?
@t_h_wyman also she’s been in the same room for almost a year now. I don’t clean once a week, I clean everyday I see poop or pee. Temperature has been the same cause my room has no windows. Even thou I live in New York I keep other reptiles as well red foot, bearded dragon, red ackies, Pygmy mulga monitor, and with the combination of heat lights I get to control the temperatures. So no difference at all. She eats every 7 days. She’s on weaned rats now. I feel like she has had a stress free environment. I barley handle my babies.
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Firstly, I will note that I was speaking in generalities but you appear to have taken it all as personal accusations.
Note that I did not say “bad food” I said feeder diet.
Here is the difference: Your rodent source was feeding a “home brew” diet of seeds and grains that were acquired from a tack store. Due to the pandemic, the small local supplier of the seeds/grains for that tack store went out of business so not the tack store orders in bulk. The bulk seed are shipped in from across the country and exposed to a huge variety of agents that the local stuff never saw - fungus, trace chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, dust, exhaust, insects, etc. Your feeders are still healthy to all intents and purposes, but what is inside of them is now different than what used to be. And, as a consequence, there is a change to your animal’s diet
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Opening and closing an enclosure daily is a form of stress. And long-term accumulation of that stress could end up having some type of effect
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My room is also windowless but I still get temp changes. Winter cools your house more than you anticipate, summer heats it more. Your house dries out with heating so humidity levels change. Vents leak air. Lights on any kind of cyclic timer fall in and out of synch and change waste output. Probes shift or go bad, altering the ramping up/down of tape/cable… Nothing is ever as static as we like to believe it is
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Pigment change in a hypo boa due to what was believed a chemical reaction to food likely treated with flea spray. We aren’t sure.
Similar can happen with vomited food where they crawl though the mess and the stomach acid bleach’s their scales. They can regain some colour but often look faded or have a calico appearance.
Know almost nothing about balls but could be similar.
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