I've realized my husbandry needs some serious help after an outbreak of RI in my collection. I'm out of ideas on how to improve my husbandry so I figured I'd post here and hopefully somebody more experienced can point out what I'm doing wrong. I'm trying to discover what mistakes I'm making that are resulting in the RIs. I have only been keeping ball pythons for about a year and I'm starting to realize I'm making a lot of mistakes. :/

The setup: animal plastics rack with 41qt tubs and 3" flexwatt underneath. Herpstat thermostat. Paper towel as substrate.



Larger animals have no hides


Smaller ones get hides


Water bowls are emptied/scrubbed out and refilled weekly (I should probably do that more often, right?)

Temps: the temp across the bottom of my tubs is weirdly inconsistent. For that reason I can't get acurites to work very well for me and I just use a temp gun. I took a video of me using the temp gun along the hot spot in a tub so you can see what I mean. This is the temperature I've had it set at for a while. I cant get a good reading of the hot spot temp because of this and its driving me crazy! Please excuse the audio playing in the background! About two months ago I replaced the flexwatt in my rack with brand new tape to try and fix this fluctuation but it didn't help. No idea why it's like this


For the cool side temp, it hovers around 75-78° but can on occasion drop as low as 72°. When it gets cold enough to do that I will turn on a space heater to bump it back up to 78°.

Humidity: I have no problems with humidity. I live in a humid area and it's always between 50-70%. Always have perfect sheds. I think I may have not had good enough airflow before so today I drilled holes in the front of my tubs... I hadn't had holes before because I thought the gap at the top was enough but maybe not. About half the time I have the fan going in my snake room to try and promote good airflow.

So I guess my questions/concerns are....
1) how often should i realistically change out their water?
2) what the heck is wrong with my hot spots? Why does the temp change so wildly over the flexwatt?
3) could the lack of holes in my tubs have caused the RI?
4)how can I keep my cool side temp more consistent?
5) why are my snakes getting sick??


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