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Re: Cali King regurgitated
How old is the snake....how big?....how long have you had him? (how long is "never an issue with feeding"?) Is he a captive-bred (c/b) or wild-caught?
Shedding seldom "stresses" a snake, they're usually hungry after shed. It might possibly be the feeders themselves, but you need to fix other issues to be sure.
What size is his cage? A 150 watt bulb is a massive amount of heat & can over-heat a cage- MUST be regulated!!! BUT much of the heat is wasted going up and
AWAY from the cage rather than INTO it...snakes (especially terrestrial ones like king snakes that don't "bask") need BELLY heat to digest their food. His "ceiling"
may be hot, even dangerously so, but if his cage is tall (what are the dimensions? length...width...height???) then his "floor" where he is may be cold, especially
since heat rises & you ran the A/C in the room. Also, what KIND of cage are we talking about? glass? plastic? wood?
I highly recommend that you immediately install UTH under part of the cage (the size* you need depends on the size of the cage, & the ambient room temperatures
year-round...you likely need to provide more additional heat in winter & UTH should be controlled by thermostat for safety...yours and the snakes!
(*UTH- you never heat the whole floor of cage...usually only about a fourth of the area, but it depends...)
And don't replace that "stick-on" gauge that fell off, they aren't accurate & can be dangerous in several ways...you still need to measure the temps. but accurately.
Many years ago I used to visit a local nature museum where I lived then...they kept snakes & I was just getting into them. I learned from the curator & staff that their
snakes often regurgitated their meals, or refused them out-right, about a third of the time, & they pretty much thought this was "normal". This museum was in
the desert so they ran plenty of A/C (or they'd have had no visitors, lol) and the snake's tanks were heated ONLY by incandescent light bulbs overhead, just on/off,
nothing in-between....gee, NO WONDER they kept barfing their food! The heat from the lights were never in the right place in the first place...cage floors remained
quite chilly since most of the heat rose up & away from them, so it's almost a miracle the snakes had survived as long as the did. (some didn't) I nagged them until
they changed & installed UTH...the elderly curator meant well but she "did things the way they always did" without ever learning more until I came along to share
more modern ways of doing things. Poor snakes (& lizards)! So please, put the heat where your snakes can USE it?
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