Just this morning as I was getting ready for work.
My sunkissed diffused corn, Cirice, is the offender. I don't want to say she's dumb, but she certainly isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. When feeding, she has a lot of trouble finding the head part of her mouse, despite having bitten it. She'll even seem to lose the mouse altogether sometimes, despite being wrapped around it. By the time she eventually finds the head and starts swallowing, the mouse is pretty well battered in substrate. So I started using a feeding tub for her and have been using it for some time.
At dinner time, I take her out, place her in the tub, giver her the mouse, and while she's constricting, I place the tub back in her enclosure, then she slithers out after a while.
Well, last night was a pretty heavy feed and I noticed that she just lay in the tub for a while after eating. Then this morning I noticed she was still in the tub and thought that maybe she was so stuffed she couldn't crawl out.
I'll be a nice guy and help her out, I thought.
I took out the tub grabbed Cirice. Right away she was in feeding mode. Just the way she turned her head I knew it was coming. She struck and coiled right up my arm. And I needed to catch a train! I peeled her off but the coils went back up. She even had her teeth hooked in so I had to carefully pry her off.
It was clearly a feeding response. Of course, I've heard of cage aggression but I didn't really think that Cirice was smart enough to associate a tub with feeding. I mean she can't even find a mouse that she's wrapped around!
Well, it was inevitable. I've been keeping snakes for a while and this was my first bite. I was so audacious as to think that maybe I'd never get bit!
I'm actually kind of happy it happened, though. That "first" is over and done, and I can carry on and look forward to my next bite!
And I even made my train!
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