for the thousandth mite post?!
20 years or reptiles and this is the first time Ive had the little bugs myself. I'm blaming bedding from a big box store or somehow picking up a hitchhiker at an expo. Anyways, my biggest concern is my female that's due to lay in a week or so. I treated her along with the rest of the collection because as much as I didn't want to handle her and stress her out, it would have been pointless to spend hours scrubbing everything and everyone but her. I'm also probably being naive in thinking I caught them really early. I could only visibly see them on 3 snakes, and that was just 1 or 2 after staring and poking around for a while besides on the pregnant one that had more. they're also mostly BELs and other light colors that even hiding between scales I think a major infestation would be pretty noticeable compared to pictures I've found online. None of them have been soaking in their water either so that makes me hope I caught it pretty early. I spent 5 hours scrubbing EVERYTHING in the room down to the walls. I set the snakes in a different room in boxes while I scrubbed with soap and water, then reptie relief, then soap and water again and let that air out for a while until I couldn't notice any chemical smells. Then I followed the directions with spraying onto the snake and wiped dry with paper towels (new ones for each animal) before putting back into their tubs on just a paper towel and waited a couple hours before putting the cleaned water dishes back in. Its been a few hours and I only see a couple dead mites on the paper towels of the pregnant one and only 1 in another tub. Is it pretty much a given I'll still have to repeat this process in a few days once eggs cycle and hatch? Anyone have any experience with treating a pregnant female? I'm not sure if the added stress would just push back her laying day or have any direct negative effect on the eggs. I'm also curious if the most targeted her because of her lack of movement while growing eggs.
Another thing I can't seem to find info on is when I should feed them again. If the chemical residue is on them and they coil food in a few days then obviously a little would be ingested. Am I just over thinking it and that small amount wont do them harm? Ugh I can't imagine dealing with this in a collection of 20+ snakes seeing how long it took me to feel confident I did the best I humanly could scrubbing every part of 2 racks for a dozen animals.
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