"male" just laid eggs!

[GoRabbitGo]

I've made a huge mistake.

The Story So Far:
Last summer (2013) at the Sacramento Reptile Show, my boyfriend purchased his first corn snake: a beautiful 2012 male amel named Osiris. I wasn't present for the purchase so i didn't talk to the breeder and i don't handle Osiris very often. I have eight babies of my own that all need my attention and love.
A month ago, my friend got into a financial bind and her teenage son's two 2011 co-habbed male corns became two surplus mouths to feed, so she asked me to take them off of her hands. It happened a little sooner than i was ready for and i didn't have two new tanks set up, so i figured they were close enough in size and could spend a night with Osiris while i got their new digs put together. One night became almost a week, but i did eventually get them split up.

Present Day: Osiris laid four eggs and three slugs the day before yesterday. I feel so, so guilty for not confirming "his" gender for myself and just taking the breeder's word for it secondhand through my boyfriend. And i feel just awful about putting her in such a dangerous, scary situation with two larger males!
I'm completely unprepared for eggs and i didn't even realize Osiris was pregnant because "he" has always been chubby for a corn snake i thought "his" lack of appetite this past week was because "he" was in preshed. I found the eggs on feeding day after "his" successful shed. I wasn't going to breed until 2015 or later, so this is way premature.

I have the eggs in an incubator that's currently filled with leopard gecko eggs. I won't be surprised if they don't hatch.

Lessons learned: Check genders for myself, don't assume! Also, co-habbing is bad, mmmkay? Even for just a short period of time!

I also have another thread about a snow female i recently purchased (to be Osiris' mate next year, d'oh!) who i'm afraid might be gravid, so i'm learning as fast as i can.

 

[smigon]

Why cohabbing is bad

 

[GoRabbitGo]

^YUP.

Let my mistake serve as an example to others. I break my rule ONE time and look what happens. Don't do it!

 

[Nanci]

Okay, so even before breaking the cohab rule, you broke the quarantine rule. If you had been following proper quarantine, the two new males would be in a whole different room than your own snakes.

But that's water under the bridge.

How do you have the eggs set up? Do you want them to hatch? At this point, if you aren't prepared for four new hatchlings, (you don't mention the morphs of the two males) likely normals, for you to keep for weeks or months until you find new homes, it is perfectly fine to not incubate the eggs. You would need to freeze them for 24 hours before disposing of them, or feed them to a kingsnake or whatever. No one would fault you for deciding not to incubate.

If you want to incubate, you can set them up in barely damp sphagnum moss, or HatchRite, or vermiculite. I put mine in organic lettuce containers, nearly buried in HatchRite, covered with about an inch of barely-damp moss, with no holes in the container. There should be a fine mist of water droplets on the sides, and none on the lid. You can open the container, lift the moss, and gently fan them for a minute, a couple times a week.

The eggs hatch in something like 55-65 days, sometimes longer. Incubation temps can range from 80-84ish, with about 82 being common. Don't go much above 84- the incidence of defects increases as the incubation temp increases, and the incubation time is shorter, and people report that the babies are smaller. About 7-10 days before the eggs hatch, you may see them start to dent. You don't need to add more humidity as long as it's "right" to begin with. This is a normal pre-hatching sign. If you gently touch the eggs, when hatching nears, you will notice the shell feels thinner and softer. This becomes apparent about 4-7 days before hatching.

Then you let the babies emerge in their own time- don't rush them- you don't want them to come out with the yolk unabsorbed. It can take 24 hours after the baby slits the egg for it to be ready to come out. The eggs don't necessarily hatch all at the same time, either. It can take a couple days. I immediately remove each one and put it in its own shoebox bin, with a toilet paper tube hide (squashed flat) and a large ramekin water bowl (they like to perch on it). On paper towels. The babies go blue immediately, and shed in 5-7 days, and you can then feed, or wait up to a week for them to get hungrier. You can start with day-old pinks, (I'd slit them) VERY hot, or even boiled.

Good luck! And you should split up the two "males," too. You really only know one is a male.