My fiance's king snake is housed in a 10g tank. He is still small and should be fine in that tank until we move and are able to build a rack. He's on newspaper, has two hides, and a water dish.

My first question. My fiance has a heat lamp on the tank, but now that spring is here, temps are going up for all our reptiles. The tank normally stays above 80, never dropping below 75. With the heat lamp, the temps sometimes get too hot. Would it be ok to leave the lamp off and just let the snake live in the room temp. This does not create much of a temp gradient though, but we can't exactly cool down the tank as they don't run the AC.

Second question. We are feeding him mouse pinkies. So far he's taken 2 live since we got him on the 25th of March. He did a really wierd thing yesterday when we went to feed him. He began to inch foreward, like a worm. Instead of slithering with his body all going in the same pattern (you notice that when snakes move, their body follows itself. If there is a bend, the entire body follows that bend until he tail.), he bunched up his body and then moved foreward. I have never seen Zim do this, so it worried me that Spencer was doing it. Other than blue eyes, I can't really judge when a snake is about to shed, so I'm not sure if shedding could be a factor in this. His eyes were not blue.