Advanced species.

[Gio]

This is something people that are considering this species should pay careful attention to.

The day before Wallace was supposed to eat I had to perform some in cage maintenance and change out his water. I used the rubber, or handle end of the snake hook to gently tap him to retreat away from the area I was going to be dealing with.

He was fairly keyed up on me so I knew I was going to have to tap him a few times to settle him.

He attacked the handle, and coiled. I tried pulling the hook away and noticed he had it in his mouth. The handle was not scented, it actually had hand sanitizer on it as I typically use it before and after all my snake and frozen rodent interactions.

He never let go of the hook and eventually started to eat the handle end. I ended up twisting it out of his mouth. He remained coiled.



That is musk or Pee on the glass which I felt was a bit odd during feeding. Possibly a defensive behavior response when I tried to take the hook.

I tried to break the feed response a second time using a closet dowel with a sopping, wet rag dipped in Listerine. He attacked the rag and dowel. The strength of a 8-9 retic is incredible and he yanked the dowel around the cage with ease.


The snake actually began eating the rag causing me a great deal of concern. I dumped a little more Listerine on him. After about 10-15 minutes he let go of the rag. He remained fired up and the next day I gave him a rat, the following day a quail. He usually eats every 10-14 days and doesn't get anything larger than a large rat or quail.

I attribute this completely, out of the norm behavior to some extremely hot and humid temps here. Yesterday we had an 80 degree dew point. Even with AC the snakes notice it. All four were a bit more active than normal, but retics are on another level. This also came on the heals of a 10 day vacation with the house temp regulated to 78 degrees while we were gone.

I spoke with Garrett Hartle for about a half hour the other day and he also felt the extreme temps were part of the issue. I don't have any indication that this was breeding related as there are no female retics, or other male retics here.

I'm going to have to "retrain" Wallace a bit after this incident as he is a bit fired up even still. A cold front came through this morning and things have dried and cooled.

Photo from yesterday morning.


This post isn't meant to scare people away from retics, not at all. However you need to be very committed to their care and very cautious. I was very surprised that the "old school" yellow Listerine didn't do a thing to change his behavior. At least not for a good 10 minutes, which may steer me toward rum, or Jack Daniels. A shot for myself and a half bottle for the snake LOL!

A 3 year, 1 month old, 8-9 foot male was plenty of snake for me that day. Had he actually gotten a hold of me, my night would have ended on a very bad note.

I am not at all surprised that folks that get into the species, end up getting out after their snake hits its adult size. Mine isn't all that large.

This incident is isolated, I haven't heard many stories like this, but it did happen here and I was lucky I didn't take any damage.