Shedding

We have been in shed-central for the past few weeks.  First it was Slither, the Gum Zombie's anery Kenyan sand boa, who went through what I think must have been the longest shed cycle extant but came out of it beautifully shiny and perfect.  Then Lucy (our female cinnamon ball python) went into blue, took a bath, and shed out about a week ago.  Next, Lucy's cohort Scales, a male of the same morph, went blue and surprised us with a minimally fussy shed in one beautiful piece.  Finally, there's Sarah.

Sarah is my female Kenyan sand boa, and if there was ever a snake with the intellectual capacity to hate anything, it's her... and that's saying something considering sand boas in general are a rather primitive species of snake.  She's a little pistol, and there's nothing that makes her more miserable than a shed.  Normally Sarah lurks below her substrate.  When she goes blue, though, all bets are off.  She's on top of it, laying there as if she's near death.  She stares fixedly at the walls of her vivarium, refuses to enter her humid hide (Slither spent the majority of his shed sitting in a tiny tub filled with damp sphagnum moss), won't eat, and is in general a mass of misery until she's done shedding.

I swear, she's got the reptilian version of PMS.

Adding insult to injury, last time Sarah shed it was an incomplete job.  Her skin came off from her neck down, but she had a "cap" of shed stuck on the top of her head and over one eye.  Yipes.  So that resulted in two days worth of forcing her to hang out in a humid hide for an hour each day until the shed softened enough to be carefully pulled off with a pair of tweezers.

And no, she didn't care for that either.

So here we are again with her, at Shed #2.  Plus it's Feeding Time at the Zoo tonight, and as I mentioned previously Sarah doesn't like to eat while she's in blue so unless she somehow managed to shed today, she'll be an awfully hungry snake come December 27th.

As a side note, the Gum Zombie has kept both Slither and Scales' shed skins, enshrining them as if they were holy relics.  My snakes' shed skins, however, he immediately claimed to donate to his science teacher.  The hope is that this time Sarah will shed in one fell swoop and I can start my own skin shrine.

Ahem.  Or not.  I'm pretty sure his science teacher will have another opening...