kind of a long story here. i got my 1.0 spider back on 2/5/10 @ 431 grams. he ate every saturday since unless he happened to be in deep blue, in which case he ate when he was done with his shed. (i feed all my snakes in their cages)
he refused his first meal on 7/25 @740 grams. and continued to refuse for the next several weeks. i know they do this so i wasnt overly worried about it.
his cage is right next to a 1500 gram virgin female, so i started to think maybe he was getting the "urge to merge". so i put em together for a couple days. he couldn't have been less interested.
i had been looking for signs of sickness since the first refusal and never found anything, held him tail up listening for crackles. i even put his head in a drinking glass to amplify the smallest noises, nothing. checked his mouth, looked normal.
i will note that every time i offered food he acted like we was going to eat. he would go into his strike pose and start respiring like he always did right before he laid the the hand of death on all the asf's that entered his cage. only after a min or so of strike pose he'd turn his head and lay down. i tried smaller rats, tried mice, tried fresh killed and nothing
by 9/8 he'd lost over 40 grams and i was worried. i decided that night i was gonna call the vet the next day. i stood outside his cage looking in for awhile thinking "what is wrong with you". temps are good, humidity is good, no signs of being sick, nothing inside the cage has changed. i decided to try and feed again. same old strike pose and lay down thing.
so i took the rat out and tossed it into an empty cage on the bottom. empty as in no bedding, hides etc. after a couple minutes i got the idea to put the spider in there with it, cant hurt to try right. it wasn't 10 seconds and he put something on that rat formula 409 couldn't take off. he finally ate, the rat was pretty small so we offered another and boom no sooner than the rats feet hit the floor of the cage he had the swollen eye syndrome.
so we continued to feed this way for the last several weeks, he still will not eat in his cage but no problems when moved to the empty one. he has put his weight back on and then some.
i cant help but wonder what caused this change. would he have starved himself to death? im glad he's back to weight but i feel bad and stupid for not trying it sooner.
sorry for the long post but i didn't want to leave anything out. anyone have any ideas or experiences on this type of thing?
thanks, james
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