Quote Originally Posted by reed_Kamsler View Post
my vet said something about stargazing, crud i forgot, something like it was contagious or something and he said should not be kept with other snakes or near a collection

i forgot his actual words though ill ask again

Just to clear things up, stargazing is genetic and is result from severe inbreeding. It's not contagious and it's something snakes are born doing. It to my knowledge has also been pretty much proven to be a recessive gene that has been brought out by obsessive inbreeding (hence why it has shown up in the most popular snakes- corns, ball pythons... etc)


Stargazers from what I understand don't do very well from the start, don't grow much and die young. Necropsies and studies on stargazers reveal NO clues and there is nothing different physically speaking between their brain and a normal snake's brain, so it is still puzzling as to what causes it. (this may have been updated since I last read up about it... so don't take my word for everything here) Stargazers act up more-so when they are excited. They stick their heads into the air and wobble a lot. My little guy is the same way all the time... he just really doesn''t have a preference as to which part of his body faces up! He also doesn't wobble and he's growing as fast as he can! I call him cute not because of what he does... just because I happen to find all baby snakes VERY cute and I find him cute in the sense that it seems he has no idea that he's not acting normal

As for mama snake, yes she was very ill when i recieved her and I am not sure how the idiot who owned her previously overlooked such a thing. All of this snakes brothers and sisters came out as slugs except for two. One died two months after birth. The surviving one doesn't do this.

on the last note... does anyone else here know what I mean when I say that snakes do express pain? They don't do it quite the same way we or other mammals do... but I could tell when my ratsnake had a mitebite that became infected that when I touched it, it hurt her. She would jerk real had and pull her skin away from me.

thanks to everyone who supports my idea of loving my weird little one