Thoughts on heating and burns in corn snakes

I like to talk about the subjects that get people heated, and one of the big ones is heating. From the time I kept my first corn snake to now, a ton of advancements have been made in the hobby -most notably, captive bred snakes, frozen rodents, professional caging and UTH/temperature regulation. For the first dozen years or so of my snake keeping, my animals were kept in either glass aquariums or homemade wooden vivs with light bulbs as a heat supply. A few years later, along came "hot rocks." We've come a long way, baby.

For starters, let me emphatically state that you do not need a lamp of any kind for your corn snake. They aren't efficient, dry the cage out (if it's well-ventilated), and are a bigger fire hazard than UTH. I can not think of a single upside to using heat lamps for a corn snake's heat source and I have yet to hear of a professional breeder with a single lamp on any of their snakes. Add that bulbs need to be replaced, and they are not at all energy efficient. No snake of any kind requires a lamp -of course, they are needed for some basking lizards and tortoises and the like. I think every experienced keeper here would agree that a UTH on a thermostat is ideal for corns, but good thermostats are not cheap. As many corn owners as there are with only one snake, I would expect one of the big herp supply companies to make a hobby level accurate thermostat, but to date, they have not.

On to burns. I have seen a number of ball python photos with burns. And even the same picture of an apparently burned anery corn snake. But I do not believe that a healthy corn snake will allow its body to burn with too hot of a hot spot in the enclosure, provided it can get away from it. If that is indeed a burn on the belly of the injured anery, my gut feeling is that it was either weak, the air temps were freezing, or the UTH covered the entire floor space.

From Don Soderberg's site:

Even if regulating devices like thermostats are not used, if the cage gets too warm, the snake can retreat to the cool end of the cage or in the water bowl, to reduce its body temperature. Insulating substrate materials like aspen bedding form a substratum that works as a buffer between the heater under the bottom glass and your snake. The temperature of the glass atop the UT heater can be as high as 120° F (48°c), but since corn snake virtually NEVER lie upon or near such hot surfaces, damage to your snake should not be a concern. Some snakes (i.e. Ball Pythons) eagerly burrow beneath the substrate and have been known to die from burns received from such hot surfaces. In the 35+ years I've been keeping corns - and having kept at least 40,000 of them - not one snake was ever burned from UT heating devices.

I have met many people using heat tape or UTHs running wide open who never had a burned corn, so decided to run a rack of 30 snakes with a 145 degree hot spot for several months. The result wasn't ideal but there were zero burns: http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=122237

I use a thermostat on every single enclosure I own, and even keep a spare or two on hand in case of failure. Not using a thermostat is not an option for me. Over the years I have lost animals I couldn't put a price on from heating failures, both using Flexxwatt and lamps and I believe a thermostat is one of the most important pieces of equipment you can buy.

I also believe that a lot of well-intended people panic when someone posts that theirs is set a few degrees higher than 86, or whatever arbitrary number. I set my own thermostats on open air cages at 105, and 90 on covered tubs. In both cases, these settings keep the surface of the substrate around 84-86 on the hottest spot, which seems about ideal for my colubrids in my reptile room. If I see digesting snakes laying right on the heat, I might bump it up a couple of degrees, if they seem to stay off it, I'll bump it down. I try to let what the animals tell me take precedence over the care sheet. Admittedly, most of the time some are on the heat, and some at the coldest end!

Our hobby is in its infancy. There will be advancements over the coming decades, in technology as well as husbandry. I do not expect we will re-write the basics, but that doesn't mean that new information will be unimportant. There are tons of care sheets right at your fingertips for any species you might fancy, but they are simply guidelines that worked for the writer of said care sheet. And anyone can write one, there is no experience criteria placed upon posting something to the Internet (see Melissa Kaplan). But with a good care sheet, you can follow directions to a T as if baking a cake, and the results will typically be reliable, although nothing is learned. I encourage you to experiment, but remember, it is all useless if you don't measure or record data.

And I think it is 100% safe to stop telling new keepers that their new corn snake might get burned if a spot in the tank is too hot.