We’ve had this female bp a little over a year now. Always eaten well, super fun to handle but from day one she’s always had a slight shake when she picks her head up and her coordination doesn’t seem to be spot on. She definitely misses her strikes on a fairly regular basis. Anybody else ever run into that?
Could be many things but given that it’s a solid white snake my first guess would be that it may also contain a wobble morph.
I agree it seems like head wobble. Maybe there is another hidden gene?
Our spider is usually fine with his wobble, but when he was younger he use to miss strike a lot, still has the occasional wobble when his striking.
My girl does the same thing, so I posted about her possible genetics. She is still super young though so I’ll chalk it down to still figuring things out.
I hope you get the answers you need, once morph DNA testing really really kicks off, that would be an amazing tool for you (and all of us) to use.
For real. She’s never grown out of it. Granted she’s super healthy so it obviously doesn’t hurt her too much. When she misses her strikes I can usually just leave the mouse in her enclosure and she eventually comes back out to eat in the middle of the night
I agree with the other posts about possible wobble morph involvement. that would be the most likely cause. Do you know her parentage?
That said, there can be other factors as well. There is the possibility that she was just born with a bit of a neural deficit. Even an occassional normal can hatch with a wobble . It happens, just rare and usually the issue is handwaved as "it’s not a wobble morph it’ probably fine’.
Other factors though less likely to have occured… exposure to medications, pesticides or chemicals. Sometimes you can see issues like this with a severe parasite or bacterial infection. In a captive bred animal in the proper enviornment, that usually isn’t the case.
Which leaves once factor that may have happened but again… not as likely as a hidden wobble morph in a white animal. Extreme heat or Cold exposure. Personally I did have an issue where the heat pack had shifted when I had leopard geckos shipped to me. One died in transit, the other was just never ‘normal’. She would sometimes just walk in circles. Fairly similar to the enigma gene syndrome you see now, but this was before enigma was evenfounded as it’s own trait. She would alos just forget to eat for days at a time and I would need to jumpstart her with some force feedings.
So TL:DR: unless you had an issue with your baby if she was shipped to you, she most likely is hiding a wobble gene.