How to Incubate Pueblan Milk Snakes

Video Transcript

"A couple of months after your snakes have mated you'll start to notice that your female, her body is starting to get thicker. This means she is getting gravid; her eggs are developing inside of her. Near the end of her pregnancy, before she lays her eggs, you're going to want to put in a nest box. This is just a, a piece of Tupperware that is filled with sphagnum moss that is slightly dampened. You don't want it soaking wet, you just want a slightly damp moss in there. Then you want to put the cover back on and cut a whole in the top of it so she can go in there and deposit her eggs. Once she's laid her eggs, she might stay in there for a little while. During this time, you can just open this up, very gently remove her from the container, then take the eggs out and put them in an incubator. Incubators can be easy to make, they can be kind of expensive to buy as well. If you don't have an incubator and you have a warm reptile room or if you have a warm enclosure, some people will actually incubate their eggs inside another animal enclosure. Sometimes, what I do is I have a Leopard Gecko enclosure that stays a constant eighty-two to eighty-five degrees and that is the perfect temperature for incubating eggs. So, you can incubate them in another enclosure in a small piece of Tupperware just like this, or you can use an incubator. Here are some eggs, these are actually Leopard Gecko eggs, and this stuff is called perlite which you can buy at any flower store. What you want to do is put some perlite in there, put some water in there and then gently get all the water out and this will retain some of the moisture. Then create a little divot in the perlite for the egg, put the egg in there, and then have some perlite ready, some already moistened perlite, and sprinkle a little bit on the egg so it covers pretty much eighty percent of the shell. That will keep the egg humid to keep it moist. You don't want to keep it too wet because then bacteria can be introduced and mold can grow on your eggs."