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What causes kinks? Breeders, please answer!

S

SnakeNutt

New member
I just discovered something disturbing about one of my 10-day-old hatchlings -- I can feel three "bumps" on top of her spine, at various distances down from the head. The bumps are hard, like bone (not soft and squishy). The bumps are on top of the spine, and you can't really see them looking down at her (her body doesn't kink off to the side, but looking at her from ground level, you can see one of those bumps on her spine).

A little more info about this hatchling. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that her parents are siblings, but neither one has any kinks that I can palpate. Five of the original nine eggs in this clutch went bad about 4 weeks into incubation (I suspected at the time that the sphagnum moss at the bottom of the container was too wet). I'm incubating all my clutches in my garage (the "room temp" method) -- temps for that clutch ranged from the low 70s at night to the mid-to-upper 80s during the day (not such a wide temp range in one day, of course, but over the period of 2 months). A clutch of 12 that hatched a week earlier had zero babies with kinks. This clutch hatched at 72 days. Of the four eggs that hatched, only that one snake has kinks.

Are those bumps on the spine considered kinks?

What causes kinks to occur? Genetics or incubation temps or what?

If kinks are genetic, is the problem from a recessive gene, one that both parents must carry? If so, do you get rid of those parents?

What do breeders do with kinked babies? I would guess that severely kinked ones are euthanized, but what about the slightly or moderately kinked babies?

If you choose to let a kinked baby live, will it face kink-related health problems down the line? If it's a female who gets bred, will the kinks interfere with egg-laying?

Has it been proven that a kinked adult produces kinked babies?

I want to be a responsible breeder, so if this one kinked baby has brought to light a genetics problem in my collection, I need to know what to do.

Please help. I would appreciate any and all comments from breeders who have experienced a problem with kinks. Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond.

Liz
 
IMO they are mainly caused by environmental conditions. Some are caused by post-hatching trauma. Some appear to be caused by incubation conditions.

That being said, I believe there's a genetic predisposition to it, too. Some clutches will hatch kinked babies even when under great conditions next to other clutches that don't hatch kinked kids. Some babies come out looking ok and then 3 days later have a bunch of kinks that were not there.

I bred a kinked hatchling to his mother, for the purpose of seeing if this would shed some light on the subject, and because my kingsnake was hungry. She normally threw horrible clutches of babies that were dying in egg at all phases of the incubation. This was quite a healthy clutch, in fact, and to my surprise, there were no kinked kids. (I still fed them all off to the kingsnake though.)

We also took a bunch of x-rays of corns last year (do a search on the photo gallery), and found that many corns have fused vertebrae and minor spinal defects that are not detectable otherwise. It may or may not have explained some of the kinked offspring I had gotten over the years, but it was too small a sample to try to draw any real conclusions.

Bottom line, use the healthiest corns you can find, and don't use them if they have noticeable spinal defects, unless it is the only way to propagate a brand new desireable gene. (And in that case, still select away from the bad stuff as much as possible.) If you have defective kids, either feed them off, euthanize them, or make sure they go to a place where they will not be bred.
 
Basically it seems that kinks just happen. I find that the Lavenders seem to have more than any other line I work with, but it is getting better over generations as I weed those animals out of the gene pool. I guess it's like anything else in that you can selectively breed it out of a line.

One thing that was interesting this year was a clutch of eggs that got dropped onto the floor the day after they were laid. They were sitting in a shoebox filled with vermiculite and got knocked off of a freezer top. The drop was around 3 feet or so, I guess. Anyway, none of them burst, so I just scooped them back into the box and arranged them as best they could and marked the container so I would know which clutch got dropped.

Amazingly enough every one of those eggs hatched without any problems whatsoever.

In another instance someone told me of a clutch of eggs he had drop about 4 foot onto the floor. I believe they were within a couple of weeks of hatching. Those all hatched out perfectly as well.

So evidently, eggs can take quite a beating (literally) and still come through. Perhaps there is some particular point in the development where this sort of treatment may cause a problem, but I wouldn't be willing to experiment to try to determine what it is.

But, if this sort of treatment does NOT cause kinks, I am really at a loss to figure out exactly what does cause it, unless it is just some genetic predisposition for this problem.
 
Rich, what about incubation temps or humidity?

Have you ever noticed kinks in clutches that may have had a temp spike (as someone else on this forum did this year) or that may have been exposed to wet conditions (too moist)?

Also, if you suspect there might be a genetic disposition, what do you do with the parents of kinked babies? Certainly, I can see not keeping the kinked babies to breed later, but what about the parents that may have created the predisposition to kinks? Do you cull those, too (even if they're really nice specimens who show no kinks themselves)? If not, where do you draw the line?

For instance, in my clutch where I had one kinked baby out of four total, do I continue to breed those two snakes together? Breed them to other snakes, but not each other? Cull them out of my breeding stock altogether?

Liz
 
I've had a lot less problems after lowering the temps, avoiding spikes, and lowering the humidity. I used to keep them as close to 100% humidity as possible. Now I only keep them as wet as they need to be in order to keep from denting in. It was a serious improvement.

The ones I've seen develop kinks from "trauma" did so while I was restraining them for a tube feeding and they pushed/pulled/writhed like crazy. (And I am not rough with them at all.) They didn't have the kinks 2 minutes before, but they did afterward. I've also seen other hatchlings throw the same kind of fits and they have no problems. I believe that clutch was just predisposed... the mom throws absolutely horrible babies no matter what male is used, and is no longer a part of the breeding projects.

The question of "what to do, and when" is a tough one. You have to draw a line somewhere and wherever it is, it will be arbitrarily chosen. I had a couple females that consistently threw problematic kids so I stopped breeding them.
 
I had one baby born this year with kinks AND only one eye. I had one baby born last year with kinks, from a different pairing. The eggs are all in the same type of containers in damp perlite with lids on the containers in a hovabator. No other babies out of 51 of them this year so far are kinked. I have 16 more left to hatch. So neither time, for me, was it due to over moisture or temp spiking or anything like that. In my case it seems to just have happened. I likened it to people and other animals giving birth, the odds are that out of X amount of births you're going to have some with birth defects.

Of course, if I had many of my hatchlings coming out this way, I would certainly be looking at the incubation method I was using as the most logical reason.

But I do agree with Serp in that I am sure, like anything else, some instances would be heridity orienated. I would say there are many possible factors that could cause it and if the circumstances happen to fall right, it will happen. But some are going to happen no matter how good the circumstances are.

I also was checking my containers, like I did once each week, to make sure they were still growing good (and by the way, I never had to add water to the closed containers at all) and one container slipped in my hand and all the eggs rolled out. It was about two weeks to hatching time and I thought I would loose them all. I put them back in, I am sure not the way they had been and watched them. They continued to grow and I got 14 nice fat, healthy hatchlings last week from those eggs.

So, I agree with Rich, maybe somewhere in the incubation time it would harm them, but it certainly did not harm at all to have mine rolling around. And I also agree on "I wouldn't try and find out when". That made me nervous enough.
 
I seem to recall hearing something about missing eyes in boas, and that they believed it was genetic. No clue beyond that, but I don't think something like that could be attributed to moisture or temperature. :shrugs:
 
I guess I worded that wrong. I did not mean to infer that the missing eye could have anything to do with temps or anything like that. That is strickly a "something went wrong in the mix" thing. Sorry, didn't mean it to sound that way. :)
 
heh heh, I didn't take it that way, but you know three months later there'd be someone on a forum somewhere saying "I read that high temps can cause them to hatch with no eyes." ;)
 
Now that I think about it, trauma COULD have been...

the cause of this one kinked baby. I had not noticed any kinks in this baby at all, until AFTER I tried to assist with shedding. As I mentioned in my first post, the baby's skin had bunched up a couple of inches down from the head and didn't seem to be making progress after an hour or so. So, I picked her/him up to let her/him wiggle through my fingers (there was nothing in the box for the baby to rub against except the slick sides of the container, a flat dry paper towel and a small slick-sided water bowl). Now that I think about it, the baby did writhe and jerk more vigorously than most do. It was only afterwards, after the skin was off and I was admiring the bright new colors that I noticed the kinks/bumps on the spine. So, are the spines of some babies simply more fragile than others? Are you really not supposed to handle them at all when they're only a week old? I know that the reptile store where I've bought some of my snakes will probe babies that are only days old, and they certaiinly writhe and jerk during THAT procedure! What's the soonest you guys will probe a baby for gender, considering that damage could be done to a spine?

Liz

P.S. I REALLY appreciate the replies you all have given on this thread. I try not to ask questions that have been "asked to death" by newbies before, but I couldn't find much when I did a search in some of the sections -- at least, I couldn't find anything definitive. But then, it sounds like there's not really anything definitive on this topic!
 
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