Broken jaw?

[MJT_23]

Just fed my new firefly I got last week, I fed him the frozen thawed rat and came back to check on him, and he tried striking at me through the glass. He hit pretty hard as it made me jump a little bit. He just got done eating so I'm not sure if it's from not resetting his jaws or what's but here's pics.
The first one looks a lot worse then the other two.

[Pythonfriend]

sometimes they can by accident ram their fangs into their own jaw. they do not have much power for opening the jaw. you know, like alligators, lots of biting power, but holding their jaws closed is easy to do with two hands, even if its a large alligator.


that may be it, but im not sure. if this really is it, opening the mouth once and allowing the teeth to go back into normal position should fix it. if its broken, then i dont know, but i suppose opening the mouth to get things into normal alignment is just as important.

is he able to open his mouth, and goes back into the weird position afterwards? or is he right now unable to open his mouth?

i have no hands on experience with this, i just know that it sometimes happens that they accidently ram their own fangs into their own lower jaw. and everything i said goes right out of the window if he is still able to open his mouth on his own.

[kylearmbar]

I can't tell you if it's broken or not. But I do know injured animals are usually very aggressive. Is he acting aggressive? And just watch him for awhile to see if he 're adjusts his jaw like they normally do after eating.

[wilomn]

It's most likely not broken. The jaw is out of alignment and the snake will probably take care of realigning it by itself. You can try to gently open the mouth and let the snake close it again. It looks like it may have caught a bit of the lip on the teeth. Ball pythons do not have fangs. It is remotely possible that the teeth have snagged on something and in this unlikely event, again, gently open the snakes mouth and allow it to realign its jaw.

[DooLittle]

I'm going to say looks like he just needs to realign.

A bit different, but my boa struck the glass several times one day. She got her tooth through her lip. I had to use an earring back to slide the tooth off the lip. I cleaned It with a betadine rinse inside and out for a few days. It was fine. But yours looks nothing like yours.



I think your fine though.

[Shann]

It looks similar to what happened to my boa when she was a baby. In her case it was simply that her teeth had gotten caught on her bottom jaw. It's happened with her a few times, though not usually to the degree of the picture I posted. Normally I leave her alone to see if she can figure it out herself. The one time she didn't seem to be getting it on her own (as pictured), I gently pried her mouth open to avoid hurting her, and got it unstuck from the tooth. She then realigned her jaw and was fine. I can't say that that's exactly what is happening with yours, but this was my experience.

[Pythonfriend]

yes, well, my bad, they dont have fangs. i looked it up, in snakes, only venomous teeth are called fangs, while in mammals, any large pointed canine tooth is a fang. so when a cat bites a non-venomous snake with its fangs, the snake has no fangs to bite back

@OP any updates?

[rabernet]

They bite back with their TEETH.

[MJT_23]

Yes thank you everyone for your posts, they made it a lot easier on me as iv never had something happen like that before. I just checked on him this morning and everything looks back to normal, besides the tip of his nose is a little discolored kind of like a bruise. I don't see any teeth stuck through so that's good! Thanks again everybody

[Pythonfriend]

"Would you like some teeth with that?" "No fangs."

Yes thank you everyone for your posts, they made it a lot easier on me as iv never had something happen like that before. I just checked on him this morning and everything looks back to normal, besides the tip of his nose is a little discolored kind of like a bruise. I don't see any teeth stuck through so that's good! Thanks again everybody

thats good to hear