Babies are TINY and nights are cold...
I have two extremes of Fiji Boa size in my house at the moment:
Thomasina (vastly pregnant) I estimate at over 2m long, weighing almost 3Kg, while the two babies we just got from Taveuni, now three weeks old, are about 33 cm long and weigh 11 gms each.
The babies are eating one small frozen (and thawed) house gecko a week (straight from the floor of a feeding cup), while Thomasina really hasn't eaten much at all for the last 2 or 3 months.
It's the coldest time of the year here right now (down to 20oC at night) and the babies are spending all their time curled up into little balls hidden inside dried fern leaves, while Thomasina, who is too fat to coil up tightly, seems to be enjoying a "cushion" made of a locally woven coconut leaf bag filled with fern leaves.
My others are also all curling up under the smallest hides they can fit into at night, (sometimes it's a pile of 3 snakes with a hide riding high on top of them as they all push in at once). They seem more active than normal during the day, which is unusual for these nocturnal snakes - maybe they change their habits in winter so that they can hunt during the warmer days instead of colder nights. They have slowed down from eating every week to only accepting food every 2 weeks or so. Last year they stopped eating altogether in the two coldest months, so I may be able to save on snake food for a while.
Thomasina (vastly pregnant) I estimate at over 2m long, weighing almost 3Kg, while the two babies we just got from Taveuni, now three weeks old, are about 33 cm long and weigh 11 gms each.
The babies are eating one small frozen (and thawed) house gecko a week (straight from the floor of a feeding cup), while Thomasina really hasn't eaten much at all for the last 2 or 3 months.
It's the coldest time of the year here right now (down to 20oC at night) and the babies are spending all their time curled up into little balls hidden inside dried fern leaves, while Thomasina, who is too fat to coil up tightly, seems to be enjoying a "cushion" made of a locally woven coconut leaf bag filled with fern leaves.
My others are also all curling up under the smallest hides they can fit into at night, (sometimes it's a pile of 3 snakes with a hide riding high on top of them as they all push in at once). They seem more active than normal during the day, which is unusual for these nocturnal snakes - maybe they change their habits in winter so that they can hunt during the warmer days instead of colder nights. They have slowed down from eating every week to only accepting food every 2 weeks or so. Last year they stopped eating altogether in the two coldest months, so I may be able to save on snake food for a while.
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