How long can they survive in a shipping box?

[Robyn@SYR]

With proper packaging and reasonable temps, a snake can survive a day or two delay just fine. We have seen 5 day delays over long holiday weekends in the past (exceptionally rare) and the animals arrived safe and sound. When you receive a live reptile on a delayed shipment, your first concern should be hydration and access to fresh water. Get the animal in a proper setup with proper temps, fresh water, a hide spot, then be hands off for a few days, let them recover from the stress and settle in.

IN REGARDS TO THIS PARTICULAR STORM DELAY- delays are exceptionally bad. We don't yet have specific numbers, but over 50% of packages are delayed, hundreds of live reptile packages. Thunderstorms in Memphis are very common this time of year, delays aren't unusual. Delays of this magnitude are though.

To make it worse, the FedEx tracking system is indeed down and malfunctioning. We have seen plenty of packages "tracking" as stuck in Memphis, scheduled for delivery tomorrow, and then 10 minutes later they are delivered to the door, safe and sound. The tracking system is just chaos.

It is going to take a couple of days for FedEx to fix the tracking issues and get the Memphis hub back up to full speed. In the meantime, those delays ripple across the entire country. We strongly suggest holding off on any live shipments until next week.

On a positive note, temps are very favorable across much of the country, so that is a positive for those packages that are still waiting on delivery.

If you have a delayed package with ShipYourReptiles, your best bet right now is to email us at Info@ShipYourReptiles.com. Staffers are available by phone at 303-730-2125, but they are also constantly on the phone with FedEx right now, so email is the best way to communicate at the moment.

Calling and hollering at FedEx won't do much good at this time. If you have a ShipYourReptiles package, ALWAYS bring issues directly to us, let our pro staffers handle it, we have our own elite team of FedEx service folks for our account, not the often-numbskulls at the 1-800 number : )

If you aren't using SYR for your live reptile packages, you are also missing out on the On-Time and Live Arrival insurance, which no other service offers. Well over 100 packages were shipped yesterday with insurance, they will all be getting shipping refunds. It was an expensive hit for us, but that is exactly what insurance is for!

Thanks for everyone's patience and understanding. Chaotic delay days like this are very few and far between!