The Snake-of-the-Day headliner of this web site features photographs that we believe will interest our web site visitors. Each daily photograph will be posted at 11:00 am. central (GMT – 5) and replaced in 24 hours. Feel free to make suggestions regarding what snake photographs you would like to see in this daily feature. The animals pictured here are not for sale, unless otherwise noted, but you can find available surplus snakes for sale on the Surplus Page of this web site. We appreciate your patronage and welcome any suggestions you may have.
Breeding reptiles can sometimes break our hearts. This Pied-sided Bloodred corn (two angles of the same snake) is the result of a second laying of eggs in the same season. The intermittent gold areas are pieces of the incubation medium, vermiculite. Most healthy (and adequately-fed) corn snakes will lay two (and sometimes three) clutches of eggs per season, even if they were not re-bred after the first clutch. The result is almost always a notably low fertility rate, presumably because the sperm stored from the first breeding is low in population and vitality. Not only are fewer fertile eggs laid in most successive egg clutches of the same season, but developmental problems occur throughout embryology, causing some of the heretofore viable embryos not to survive full-term incubation. Finally, the few viable embryos that survive complete incubation are often incapable of emerging from their eggs, and subsequently die within them or emerge as this one did; deformed and surely destined to die very young.
Complications throughout embryology not only cause health issues, but also physiological malformations. In this image you can see deformities of the head and neck regions, but the spine is also deformed in many places. If this many deformities are obvious, there’s a good chance that there are also visceral deformations. In addition to such deformities, color and pattern are often affected, sometimes yielding snakes that look nothing like their nominate species form, and can also be atypical for their respective gene mutation–as probably is the case here. Almost certainly, at least the exaggeration of target aspects of this Pied-sided Bloodred mutant are probably due to the embryological troubles of this snake. Future breedings of the first-time parents of this snake will hopefully yield more beautiful Pied-sided Bloodreds, but surely without the negative aspects exhibited here.