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shedding problems in captive copperheads
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Anonymous post on July 17, 2003
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I have had northern & southern copperheads,and for some reason they couldn;t shed properly.I have kept them in the same type of environment as other snakes from their area,e.g. texas rats,cottonmouths,canebrakes and timbers.All of which have not had any problems shedding. Any ideas that might be the cause of this?
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RE: shedding problems in captive copperheads
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by PIGMAN on July 18, 2003
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Depending on the locality of your copperheads may depend on humidity preferences, Copperheads and othersnakes that come from wet areas seem to have slothing problems after being put in captivity or homes that have central air more so than copperheads collected from dryer regions mabe if you raise the humidity level this may help, or you can try soaking them from time to time. I have one that almost always has a dry shed while the others kept either with him or under the same conditions do just fine. That particular individual is a little more killed scaled than his siblings. Also some snakes that are more likley to dry out can find areas best suited for them in the wild, while in captivity some of their personal requirements may be hard to accomidate for certain individuals. Hope this helps
Zach
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RE: shedding problems in captive copperheads
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by TomT on July 23, 2003
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I find myself inclined to agree with what Zack said. I just wanted to add a little bit of personal experience about copperheads and a few other species that we see here (Virginia). Many many many times, I have found shed skins in rotting piles of wood. You may ask yourself what the significance of finding sloughed skin in wood piles has to do with your copperhead shedding queation, so I'll try to tie it together for you. Rotting wood has to be humid, else it won't rot. Rotting wood also is giving off heat and it is a very stable environment from many (humidity and temperature mostly) perspectives. Snakes often use wood piles (it's safe there too, I imagine) to shed because is is dark, humid and warm. It takes a lot of humidity for some species, copperheads included, to have a nice easy shed. So, one thing that you can do is build a humidity box and put it in your copperhead cage when your animal(s) is/are in the blue. The box can be made of most anything. I use shoe-box sized plastic containers with dampened peat moss in them, but you can use newspaper that has been soaked in water instead of peat moss... Cut a smallish (about 1 1/2 snake diameters across) in the top or upper part of one side of the box and place it in a corner away from the heat source in your enclosure. If the snake feels it needs more humidity to assist if casting off that old skin, it will use the humidity box..... Another alternative is to soak the substrate and leave something right on top of the wet spot (ever caught a copperhead under tin LOL) and leave a gap under one side for the snake to get itself underneath.....
The bottom line is that snake sheds that look like the snake swallowed a grenade aren't something that you OR your snakes should have to tolerate.... they're preventable and unnecessary....
TomT
P.S. Hi Zach
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