Welcome to BPNet Marlee.

I couldn't get a really good idea of the scarring but here's one of our mature, breeding size females that carries quite extensive dorsal scarring from an incident during her time with her previous owner. From what our vet can surmise this was probably from exposure to an overhead hot bulb left unprotected, Orlah would have curled near it, become burned and when she moved away, stripped off a huge amount of her skin leaving this major scarring behind. It likely happened when she was a quite young snake.



As far as burns causing a retardation of growth I can only tell you it has not done so with Orlah. She was over 1,000 grams when we found her dumped by her owners at a local pet store, she is easily twice that now. She is also a proven breeder having laid 5 eggs last season. Neither can a small enclosure restrict a snake's growth, that's a bit of a myth that they only "grow to the enclosure". They grow based on genetics, gender and a proper feeding routine.

I would suggest first that you have the snake re-sexed to make sure it is in fact a female, then have a decent herp vet do a fecal float to make sure you aren't dealing with a snake carrying a load of internal parasites. Once you know what you have as far as gender and health then basically it comes down to a good, weekly feeding program, proper husbandry and time.

We have another female here, Kyna, who came to us as a very undersized 18 month old female snake that was barely bigger than most 6 to 9 month old snakes. Healthy, just very undersized due to a sparse volume of prey offered to her. We got her settled, upped her to 2 good sized mice every 7 days (which she aggressively snarfed down) and began to pretty quickly see some nice, steady and healthy gains in both length and weight. It wasn't long before 2 mice wasn't enough and Kyna was transferred over to appropriately sized rats (though on the right volume of mice they do just as good growth wise).

Kyna is the female on the right, Rionnach the female on the left is almost a year younger. This photo is from January 06. She had gained a lot in these pics and was already bigger than Ri who she once was the same size as in those first months. These days Kyna is much larger than Ri and completely caught up with her growth potential. She's big enough now that she's in her first breeding season.




Best of luck with this lovely snake!