ball python scare please look

[ericarditti]

a few months ago, i woke up to something moving in my snake tank. Turned the light on and found this



the thermometer had fallen off the tank and i guess it had a metal ring around it, which somehow, my snake, Snake Gyllenhall, had crawled through. It was stuck around him and i was freaking out at 5 a.m. I tried to get it off without hurting him. i could tell it was really bothering him. I ended up getting scissors and cutting it off but it took me a while. Has anyone seen something like this before? i was tempted to call the company and complain because I think it could have hurt or killed my snake.

[Artemille]

Definitely good reason to have a digital probe thermometer now.

I had my friend's big normal at my house and one day I was handling him and he bolted straight for the inside of a luggage tag on a suitcase on the floor. Luckily I was right near my art desk with some scissors before he went too far.

[ericarditti]

yeah i have a digital one now, not sure on why or how he got into the gold ring in the first place

[MrLang]

Definitely a really helpful post. I have no doubt this will get linked in the future when people talk about being careful with what kinds of decorations/thermometers to keep in the tank.

Glad your snake was OK! He was probably trying to scrape that stuck shed off.

[ericarditti]

yeah i think so too, this is when i tried to put him in water hoping it would kind of slip off of him

[LLLReptile]

Fortunately you were able to get it off of him!!

In the future, you can try a little bit of olive or vegetable oil to make it more slippery and easy to get off. However, judging by the size of the ring and the size of him, I am not so sure you would have been able to get that all the way down. It's incredibly scary when snakes get stuck like that; my African House Snake managed to get herself stuck in the button hole on one of my work shirt's pockets, and getting her out of that took considerable patience and maneuvering.

Glad you were able to get her out of it, though.

-Jen

[Pythonfriend]

for that, one of these vibration cutters would be perfect. Its the stuff they use in surgery to remove wedding rings from burned hands, or to cut into the skull without hurting the soft tissue or the brain underneath. So basically any hospital emergency room could cut this up without scratching the skin of the BP, even without pushing inwards to make space for the tool.

i dont think you can get the company unless this was sold SPECIFICALLY for snakes or reptiles. Oldschool thermometers/hygrometers/barometers are precise, expensive, and nice-looking things that you put on your wall to look at. And this brass alloy ring looks just like that, its a component typical of the expensive (or at least expensive-looking) stuff you put on your sailing yacht or in your recreational vehicle. There is something like this hanging at the wall in my grandparents home, purely analogue, bimetal thermometer and hair-tension hygrometer and aneroid barometer. Very precise, very old, very good looking, but very fragile. Now knock-offs are cheaply mass-produced, with lower accuracy, but are they marketed for reptiles?

By the way, what can really REALLY go wrong is using tape inside or near the enclosure. You can make traps that catch adult BPs with double-sided tape if one escapes in your home. Double-sided tape is kryptonite for snakes, you get stories of someone fixing a cork panel to the top of the tank with double-sided tape, and an adult corn snake ends up hanging there, stuck to the ceiling, for until it is found. Use duct tape or double-sided tape near snakes and you might find one of your snake taped into a desperate position. I guess its because the snakeskin surface is water-repellant, non-polar, like the glues of the different kinds of tape. Feathers of Sea-birds repell water and attract oil and glue the same way, trapping birds with glue has a long history.

Glad you got the ring removed, animals in the wild are not so lucky and often get killed by such nonsense.

[ericarditti]

yeah i didnt even think of olive oil or anything like that, it was 5 am and i was kinda freaking out. but thankfully i got it off.