Surprise.

[Vicic17]

Hey guys, as some of you may or may not already know, my collection of corns moved out east with my good friend until I'm back living at home from school because i can't keep them here with me. Anyways, he gave me a call last night and told me our monster female corn snake just laid 25 eggs! we paired her (creamsicle) with an nice 5 foot amel mot, early and didn't really expect eggs, we put them together once for about an hour, so anyways this was a big shock, He moved out towards Moncton and apparently noone knows much about snakes/breeding/incubators, so he used google and made a quick home made incubator, currently the humidity is sitting at 60% and tomorrow he has to go buy Vermiculite, we were just wondering how much would verm raise the humidity? and will the eggs be okay until tomorrow morning at 50%?

thanks for your help.
we're gonna need it.

 

[Vicic17]

Noone knows approx how much verm will raise the humidity? The eggs rely on your help at this point, if Verm wont send the humidity up from now 65% up to 90-100 I need to know what he needs to get asap, please help!

 

[Shiari]

My "incubator" was cobbled together from a wine fridge, and several under-tank heaters. The egg box was a sterlite shoebox with damp sphagnum moss. Not dry-ish, but not able to squeeze water out of it anymore. Placed the loose moss under, around, and over the eggs. Put the lid on. Checked once or twice a week and dampened the moss when it started to dry out. That kept the humidity fine. All 16 eggs went on to hatch.

 

[Vicic17]

Thanks Shiari, He's using a similar set up, however we were told to use verm, would the moss you used work better? or would it not really matter?

 

[Shiari]

doesn't really matter. I like the moss personally, but other people hate it. *shrugs*

 

[garweft]

I love the long fiber sphagnum moss. For a while I used perlite, but cant find any locally that isn't miracle grow. That stuff has the added fertilizer so stay away from it. So now I'm back on sphagnum and starting to wonder why I ever switched to perlite in the first place.... (Actually I know it was because sphagnum isn't the best for pythons and geckos so I went to perlite which worked for all)

Only thing I ever had problems with was the vermiculite. I used it one year with about a 50% hatch rate.... :nope:

When I set mine up with sphagnum I just soak the sphagnum, squeeze as much water out as I can, then fill a shoebox with it and put the shoebox in the incubation area (incubator if you use one). When the eggs are ready I lift up some sphagnum from the box and put the eggs in, then put the sphagnum over the eggs so they are surrounded. If your eggs are ready now just use water around 80 degrees F to moisten the moss. I like to put a moistened paper towel over the sphagnum to keep it moist. I just replace the towel every week or so when it's dry.

 

[Jessicat]

I like to put a moistened paper towel over the sphagnum to keep it moist. I just replace the towel every week or so when it's dry.

Nice, I was wondering about how to keep my substrate moist enough over time. I think I will try this trick! Moss covering (and all around) eggs, and damp paper towel covering moss. I like it.

Do you guys use a spray bottle to re moisten the moss if/when it needs it?

 

[carnivorouszoo]

I have used a cup of room temp water to dampen the moss around the outter edges as needed, you don't want to get too close to the eggs when adding moisture if needed. Was going to try substrateless incubation this year but ended up going with moss lol.