SerpentSteve
10-08-14, 02:11 PM
Just an interesting story I thought I would share from an experience I had a few years ago working in a reptile house.
I volunteered at a reptile house my freshman year of high school and ended up staying there about 3 years. We had just about every common herp you could think of along with a few you don't see so much. We also had several hots. Rattlers, cobras, gaboons and eyelash vipers to name a few. That was the first time I had seen an eyelash in person and fell in love with them, so naturally I started asking questions. Come to find out the female was gravid and according to a recent ultrasound should be due to drop in about 3 weeks. Fast forward a little over a week later. I went in on a Saturday and started cleaning the front glass where the guests viewed the reptiles. The tanks were built into a wall and opened up on the other side in the room where we worked with them. Coming to the eyelash's display I seen the female, noticeably skinnier, but... no babies. I waited for my boss to come in and pointed this out to him and he said they were probably hiding. so he opens the tank lid and pulls out the female and begins poking and prodding around the cage with the hook moving everything around. I continued on doing regular new guy stuff until I seen it... a few feet away from me on the ground was a tiny little eyelash viper. Apparently they had all crawled out through a hole in the lid of the tank. Over the next year we found babies here and there but we never found all of them. No clue what they were surviving on food wise. But just goes to show there is no room for complacency with hots. Luckily, no one ever got bitten, but it could have turned out really bad.
I volunteered at a reptile house my freshman year of high school and ended up staying there about 3 years. We had just about every common herp you could think of along with a few you don't see so much. We also had several hots. Rattlers, cobras, gaboons and eyelash vipers to name a few. That was the first time I had seen an eyelash in person and fell in love with them, so naturally I started asking questions. Come to find out the female was gravid and according to a recent ultrasound should be due to drop in about 3 weeks. Fast forward a little over a week later. I went in on a Saturday and started cleaning the front glass where the guests viewed the reptiles. The tanks were built into a wall and opened up on the other side in the room where we worked with them. Coming to the eyelash's display I seen the female, noticeably skinnier, but... no babies. I waited for my boss to come in and pointed this out to him and he said they were probably hiding. so he opens the tank lid and pulls out the female and begins poking and prodding around the cage with the hook moving everything around. I continued on doing regular new guy stuff until I seen it... a few feet away from me on the ground was a tiny little eyelash viper. Apparently they had all crawled out through a hole in the lid of the tank. Over the next year we found babies here and there but we never found all of them. No clue what they were surviving on food wise. But just goes to show there is no room for complacency with hots. Luckily, no one ever got bitten, but it could have turned out really bad.