Post by James Fenimoorehttp://groups.google.com/group/alt.revisionism/msg/715e9cdec322daf8
I will just cancel the post again. JF
Why is it when I want to look at discussions of reptiles and other
small animals
readily kept in vivariums I can't escape this overdone overblown tired
old subject which
has taken on a whole new dimension since the invalid extradition of
John Demjanjuk?
What is this thread even doing on this group?
I like reptiles and arachnids, not faux nations trying to build
sympathy for their faux
nations on the backs of dead people who died in a regrettable
conflict which would
never have occurred without the vindictive overkill punishments heaped
upon
germany subsequent to WWI.
I have relatives who fought, were wounded and interred in POW camps
during the War to
Make Europe Safe for Neo-bolshevism I'd just as soon forget the whole
subject.
I own one female midlands brown snake which gave birth to five
offspring this spring--three surviving.
I own one female emperor scorpion which gave birth to 15 offspring a
couple of months ago--all alive and
doing well.
I own one female three-toed box turtle--found in my yard by my now-
deceased cat and residing
in an outdoor pen. I've had the turtle about ten years now. She
produced fertile eggs for four
years in a row--most of the offspring have either been adopted out,
died trying to hibernate
and two were lost to raccoons when the trash-hauler gave everyone
covered wheeled containers
but the renters next-door took the lid off theirs because it was too
much trouble to lift it up depositing
the trash in it. This resulted in all the raccoons in the area being
concentrated in this vicinity and giving
me raccoon predation problems at my open pen for adult turtles and
even the covered one for the one
deformed hatchling I was keeping--a 'coon was able to reach down to
it and bring it up to the fence wire
covering the enclosure and bite the front of it's shell and it's head
off through the wire--apparently.
I'd never had predator troubles in the turtlepen before that. I'm not
saying I couldn't have or shouldn't
have made provisions against it, but for the preceding ten years the
concentrations of turtle predators
were such that they weren't a problem to me and subsequent to the
above-described changes they
were.
Hence, if anyone is keeping turtles in an open pen and reading this,
don't count on conditions remaining
static and be on the lookout for changes that could negatively impact
your livestock. I recommend
covering all such enclosures. There's a product on the market that
uses a passive IR sensor to turn on
a sprinkler some claim is a good deterrent to nocturnal turtle
predators.
I was never so angry in my life--ultimately at myself for not
realizing this danger in the design of that
enclosure and in not bringing the poor little thing in at night.
I'm still not over being angry at mr. lazybones next-door either.
I've recently taken the last 7 baby scorpions out of their mother's
enclosure and put them into two communal
enclosures where they seem to be doing fine.
The mother scorpion seems upset at their absence. I removed the
second half of her offspring after they
more-or-less disappeared and I was afriad she'd started cannibalizing
them. In fact she'd dug a second burrow
much deeper and hidden them all away down there and wasn't allowing
them to wander. I now suspect she
did this because she noticed their diminishing numbers as I would
take any that were out and place them in
their own enclosure---she must have become afraid something was eating
them and hid the rest away where
she thought they'd be safe.
Has anyone here had experience of these animals? I'm thinking about
putting some of the larger offspring
back in with their mother so she can realize they're not eaten, just
had wandered off and could wander back
too. She seems concerned and spends a lot of time sitting on top of
the area where that deeper concealed
burrow was, as if awaiting the return of some of her offspring.
As to the snake, she was wild-captured crossing a road last autumn
during a cool sunny day with a strong
cold-front boring down on us. I'd seen a bored loose-roaming housecat
just up the road and figured the
snake would probably not survive long, especially if caught out when
that arctic blast arrived later. I took her in
intending to possibly keep her over the winter and then release in the
spring---something I've done before with
small sized snake species as study subjects.
She turned out to have hookworms and I had her wormed---it was
difficult administering the second dose on such
a small animal--and she gave birth in the spring instead of late
summer as she would normally have done
due probably to having been kept up all winter.
I get a great deal of enjoyment from observing this small menagerie
and learn a few things too. I've learned that
some of the most primitive animals that were the first to crawl out of
the muck and ooze onto the surface of the
earth can be better parents to their offspring than some human parents
of my knowledge and acquaintance.
For anyone considering propagating small species of snakes like
browns, be warned that it can be difficult
getting small prey for the offspring to be able to easily consume. By
the first shedding they have become able
to eat pieces of smaller worms--at first they required very tiny worms
that had to be laboriously sifted out of
topsoil.
I've recently redesigned the turtle's enclosure so it can be covered
against intrusion by animals and last
winter I hibernated her in the refrigerator for the first time. I
intend to continue on with that practice---she didn't
seem to have come out of hibernation in her usual state of near
starvation, a fact I attribute to her not being subjected to warm-
weather thaws which would have created activity and use of her
stored resources.
I was able to easily remove her once-a-month for weighing and for a
prophylactic soaking in water to maintain
adequate hydration--a much more difficult proposition when they're
buried somewhere in a large pile of
damp leaves in an outdoor pen as was my hibernation regimen prior to
instituting the refrigerator hibernaculum.