two sudden deaths

It is had to say anything of value with out more information but if they showed no outward signs of illness I'd look toward poisoning. My thought would be a hurried cleaning with bleach and not washing it out fully. I have seen snakes left with very very poor husbandry and survive ages with out heat or clean conditions so I'd think that is not likely.

I am sorry for you loss and I can just imagine how difficult being so far away and having something like this happen. I hope it is some unfortunate mistake and not a truely nasty disease that will place your remaining animals in harm too.

best of luck. Alex

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Originally Posted by kitedemon

I am sorry for you loss and I can just imagine how difficult being so far away and having something like this happen. I hope it is some unfortunate mistake and not a truely nasty disease that will place your remaining animals in harm too.

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We're taking a disease into consideration and have decided to keep the two remaining snakes in the basement of the house (the geckos are upstairs) and to not go anywhere near the geckos after handling the snakes until clothes are changed and people are showered. Luckily my dad's a former medic and clean freak when it comes to this kind of thing, so I know he'll take the necessary precautions.

I just keep thinking there was something that I could do. Or that I at least could have been there for them.

I am sure that when you left you did not imagine this would happen and you did everything you could to insure they were well cared for. I understand that is small comfort but you did what you could. I am sure that whom ever was looking after them did what they thought was best too. It is sad and unfortunate and you would change it if you could but we can't go back and undo events. You can blame yourself and in your shoes I would too. But at the end of the day you did what you felt was best and that is all we can expect of our selves or anyone else to do the best they can. We can do no more than that.

Grandma says she checked them every day before work. They're not exactly active snakes, nor require lots of interaction, so it's entirely possible I wouldn't have noticed for a while. It's not like I expected them to do anything more than give them water and clean paper.

Oh, and the temps were normal. And the one I said was grumpy was actually the black racer (surprise).

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. Sudden deaths are the hardest, especially without necropsy (and oftentimes even with), because you will probably never know.

A good scheme when you're going through the causes of a clinical "symptom" (and, as weird as it sounds, "sudden death" is a "symptom") is DAMNIT:

D - Degenerative
A - Anatomic
M - Metabolic
N - Nutritional, neoplastic
I - Infectious, iatrogenic, idiopathic (I hate "idiopathic" since it basically just means "we'll never know")
T - Traumatic, toxic

(Note: That's my version of the DAMNIT scheme ... It's a bit more abbreviated than some, because I'm thinking in very broad categories. I've seen numerous different ways of listing it.)

Since you had two animals die suddenly, degenerative and neoplastic causes are unlikely. An anatomic malformation is also unlikely unless they were related, and even then it would be highly coincidental for their disease process to kill them both at the same time.

Since they were snakes and in good body condition, nutritional is unlikely.

That leaves metabolic and traumatic (some environmental factor may have impacted their metabolism or caused internal trauma -- ie, heat stroke), infectious, iatrogenic ("doctor caused," or in this case, keeper caused) or toxic. Iatrogenic is unlikely if nothing was done to them.

Questions I would ask would be: Have you added anything new to your collection recently? What cleaning, antiparasitic or other treatment products has your family used on or in the vicinity of the animals? Are you confident that there was no temp spike, drop or other environmental variable that could be involved?

A friend had a similar situation in which she left some snakes in someone else's care, and when she returned, one of the snakes was dead. When she went to go pick it up, she got a nasty shock -- the heating unit had short-circuited and fried her woma :(

Unfortunately you may never know ... It's awful. :( Good luck with your remaining guys -- I hope whatever happened was an isolated event.

Sorry for the late response, things have been crazy. We still don't know what could have happened. According to the herpstat, there was no heat spike unless it had something to do with the wires sautered to the heat tape. Both remaining snakes have been moved to my parents. Nothing new has been added lately, and we aren't really getting answers as to what cleaning products were used either.

When they got there, the ball python had no substrate and had been moved to a larger tub than we would have put such a young animal in. He was also very skinny. He's eaten two mice since then and seems to be doing well. He's active, eating, shedding well, and has had a BM. There are no signs of burns, respiratory infection or any other illness. He just seems skinny. I've become resigned to the fact that we'll never know what happened to Honey and Cash.

Moe, our black racer, seems fine as well. His humidity was low, but that was fixed within a few days. He's eating and just as angry as ever. >.<

I get home in a month, and hopefully by then Moose will be at a more healthy rate. Perhaps I'll even be able to find a nice adult female for him. We had planned to start a late breeding season once I got home. *sigh* Gonna be hard to do that now.