two sudden deaths

[Serpent_Nirvana]

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. Sudden deaths are the hardest, especially without necropsy (and oftentimes even with), because you will probably never know.

A good scheme when you're going through the causes of a clinical "symptom" (and, as weird as it sounds, "sudden death" is a "symptom") is DAMNIT:

D - Degenerative
A - Anatomic
M - Metabolic
N - Nutritional, neoplastic
I - Infectious, iatrogenic, idiopathic (I hate "idiopathic" since it basically just means "we'll never know")
T - Traumatic, toxic

(Note: That's my version of the DAMNIT scheme ... It's a bit more abbreviated than some, because I'm thinking in very broad categories. I've seen numerous different ways of listing it.)

Since you had two animals die suddenly, degenerative and neoplastic causes are unlikely. An anatomic malformation is also unlikely unless they were related, and even then it would be highly coincidental for their disease process to kill them both at the same time.

Since they were snakes and in good body condition, nutritional is unlikely.

That leaves metabolic and traumatic (some environmental factor may have impacted their metabolism or caused internal trauma -- ie, heat stroke), infectious, iatrogenic ("doctor caused," or in this case, keeper caused) or toxic. Iatrogenic is unlikely if nothing was done to them.

Questions I would ask would be: Have you added anything new to your collection recently? What cleaning, antiparasitic or other treatment products has your family used on or in the vicinity of the animals? Are you confident that there was no temp spike, drop or other environmental variable that could be involved?

A friend had a similar situation in which she left some snakes in someone else's care, and when she returned, one of the snakes was dead. When she went to go pick it up, she got a nasty shock -- the heating unit had short-circuited and fried her woma

Unfortunately you may never know ... It's awful. Good luck with your remaining guys -- I hope whatever happened was an isolated event.