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Corn suddenly died - opinions?

Tiffycj

Tiffycj

Western Corns
Hey guys...
So my 8 year old male corn snake just died over the weekend.

he's housed in a 25 gallon tank
88 over mat (a few degrees high but not enough to kill), 78 on cool side. (It's been warm in the house, so I can't bring it down much)
Always has water, housed on Aspen, housed alone, two hides (warm and cool end). No recent changes.

His last meal was approximately 4 weeks ago. As I've had lots of males go off food for a few weeks, I didn't think about it. He had NO weight loss or muscle loss, and was acting completely normal otherwise.

I left on Thursday and came back Sunday. I think he died on Thursday night or Friday, as his eyeballs had sunken. The head and neck seemed skinny, his main body was very bloated, and the lower half of his body was skinny again. He had a bunch of aspen in his mouth.

Was it the heat? The aspen? I have no clue =( I've never encountered something like this before.
 
I have no idea. The refusing to feed may have been a sign that something was wrong. A friend of mine had a snake die unexpectedly a couple days ago, and did a necropsy, and found the pancreas was black and hardened. You never know what is going on in there- they are so cryptic when not feeling well.

I'm sorry for your loss!
 
:( Thanks Nanci. He was the sweetest boy too.
Most of the time mine will stop feeding for a bit, and start like nothing happened, so I didn't think of bringing him in. maybe I really should've... It probably was a sign of something wrong and just well hidden behind my own experiences.
I can see dark inside of him too through his belly, but I'm unsure if this was due to him having been dead a couple days or failure of something internal
 
They get a dark spot where the gallbladder is, after death.

There are just as many snakes that eat a normal meal and then turn up dead a day or two later- so you can't really judge by feeding habits, especially in the spring when males are thinking about mating and females are ovulating. And you wouldn't suspect parasites if he was maintaining his weight. It's hard to know when a change is just a normal variance, or something that needs to be checked out, and when he's acting perfectly normal otherwise...I'm sure I would have done the same thing.
 
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