Quote Originally Posted by boasandballs View Post
There are two reasons that have brought me to this thought process. Have you ever noticed whenever you give a snake an antibiotic they will go into a shed cycle? Or when they get an infection, like belly rot?
The first time this happened I had a young female, say 200+ grams in a boot box, She either, did not eat or spit up her rat. I noticed it days later when the sides of the tub were brown. I thought she would die for sure because the cage was so bad. After getting everything all cleaned up, she looked fine but I watched her because the smell in the cage could not have been healthy. She went into a shed cycle and then another one right after. When she finished the second shed just a couple weeks after the nasty cage incident a she was white and black. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. She is all grown up now and produced a clutch of babies this year, with the lesser platty. She looks relatively normal now, and the babies were all normal looking also. But it took 2 years for her to get all the color back.

The second time this happened was last year. I'm not so sure why it happened to this animal but again she shed out white and again she is slowly getting her normal colors back.

I had a the exact same thing happen with a batch of fat mice -- several animals got steatorrhea (fatty, oily poop) after I stupidly fed them these gigantic retired-breeder mice with WAY too much body fat. One of the snakes was a young male who puked up the mouse, like yours did, and then shed out all of his color at his next shed cycle to become the coolest black and white.

I don't think that he had a bacterial infection, though; with that animal I was lucky enough to catch and clean him up immediately, so although the cage was very nasty for a few hours he wasn't sitting in it long enough to get septic. He also never showed any signs of systemic infection and ate just fine after that incident.

I do think it's metabolic in some way, though, at least in these cases ... I've heard more than one person say it's happened to their snake after a "bad" or fatty batch of rats, so I wonder if it may sometimes be related to a temporary lipemia ..? I can't for the life of me think of a mechanism though.

What baffles me about it is that it only seems to affect the lighter pigments in the pattern (browns/yellows -- pheomelanin, I believe) while sparing the black pigments (eumelanin). There must be something in the way these two different pigments are synthesized that might give us a clue ...