My baby ball died today :(

[angllady2]

I am sorry for the loss of your baby. I know you did what you thought was right, and then to have it die anyway is terrible.

I had the exact same thing happen to me. I got a baby ball from Petco who was INFESTED with mites. There were more mites than snake. When I went to them for advice, they sold me a blue bottle of mite stiff, I can't even remember the name. They told me to follow the directions on the bottle.

This stuff said to spray her all over, then spray her enclosure. Wait three days and repeat. So I did just that, twice. But by the end of that week, we found her dead in her tank. There were probably millions of mites on her. We took the whole thing outside [ it was mid-december ] and let it sit outside in the freezing cold for a week, then I beached the tank, boiled it, bleached it again and then put it in the shed for the winter.

Now, I have 18 snakes, and despite my best efforts, I occasionally see a few mites, usually in a water bowl and always in a quarantine tub. I use the Provent-a-Mite, which can be ordered online as pet stores don't carry it, and once a month I bag all the snakes up, put all the water dishes in the sink to be washed, dump all the old bedding even if it's not dirty, put in new bedding and then LIGHTLY spray each tub. I let it dry for 40 minutes while I wash water dishes and weigh snakes, then everybody goes back in their mite-free tubs.

The wonderful thing about PAM, is that while it isn't designed to kill the mites on the snake, it does kill them when they wander off to lay eggs. That way one mite doesn't become 1,000 mites. And a little of it goes a long way. I've had my can for almost a year now, and I am just about to order a new one.

So, do yourself and any future baby a huge favor, but yourself some PAM before the snake. Treat it's enclosure once a month, and never have to worry about mites.

Gale