Hi, my name is Christina, aka CandyCorn88. I purchased a butter motley het stripe hatchling from Jim with South West Wisconsin Reptiles on September 28th at the Kansas City Herpetological Show and it died 3 days ago. The reason I am writing you is because once I got him home, after about 3-4 days of letting it get settled in I took it, Butter, out to feed and noticed something just wasn't right about him. He would flip over and acted as though he had no control over his balance, he acted drunk. I didn't think this was normal, but he didn't act sick, he took his first meal fine, so I didn't think much of it. I have only owned corn snakes for going on 3 months now so I am new to all this. His next feeding he regurgitated, so I followed Kathy Love's post-regurgitation instructions by the book. After 10 days I offered him a pinky head and he took it with no problems, no regurgitation. Only after I feed him this last time did he regurgitate his last meal, which was 2 days before he died. I was searching genetics last night and came across the oddities section on your website, and out of nowhere there was the sysmptoms that Butter was displaying. So I starting doing so research on stargazing and it seemed to me that is what he was doing. So today I went to see a reptile doc in the area for a non-feeder I also got from Jim at the same show, same time I got Butter, and I was talking to him about Butter and the behavior he was displaying and he absolutely agreed that it was stargazing, and as he put it, it is a symptom of any numerous things that could have been wrong with him.
Now again, the reason I am writing is just to let you know, and you in particular because it seemed to me that you were the one of the people with most of the knowledge about this and I also saw on your 2008 projects that you were breeding "stargazing' behavior I am assuming for research purposes, which is very admirable of you to do so much work to help the corn snake community. In some of the posts people were concerned about other morphs "stargazing" was affecting and if breeders were actually selling those animals without telling their constomers about their defects. From what I have heard, and also considered myself, Jim is a very reputable breeder. I have not written to him about this. I did email him twice about the problems I was having with the green spot snow hatchling I got from him, asking his advice or any suggestions he may have, but I have gotten no response from him.
Sorry this is such a long and jumbled message. I just thought someone would like to know that there are other morphs out there being sold by breeders that display this stargazing symptom.
Now again, the reason I am writing is just to let you know, and you in particular because it seemed to me that you were the one of the people with most of the knowledge about this and I also saw on your 2008 projects that you were breeding "stargazing' behavior I am assuming for research purposes, which is very admirable of you to do so much work to help the corn snake community. In some of the posts people were concerned about other morphs "stargazing" was affecting and if breeders were actually selling those animals without telling their constomers about their defects. From what I have heard, and also considered myself, Jim is a very reputable breeder. I have not written to him about this. I did email him twice about the problems I was having with the green spot snow hatchling I got from him, asking his advice or any suggestions he may have, but I have gotten no response from him.
Sorry this is such a long and jumbled message. I just thought someone would like to know that there are other morphs out there being sold by breeders that display this stargazing symptom.