This is a special page of Corn Snake pictures - kept separate from
the rest of the main Snake Picture Galleries, because it is devoted to Alice, my
female corn snake, who shed her skin recently.
Described and shown in
pictures, here is the whole process of a snake shedding it's skin, from the
first signs of pre-shedding mode to a final picture of Alice with her brand new
skin.
It all started around 10th February 2003, when I noticed Shaggy and
Alice both sitting very quietly one afternoon. I particularly noticed them
because of the way they had arranged themselves, face to face, as it were. The
second picture was taken quite sometime later, to show just how little they had
moved... This is one of the first signs of them going into shedding mode and as
with most other things lately, Shaggy and Alice do things together... Another
clue at this stage was that their skin colours were beginning to get darker than
normal. I would have taken a web video of it but my current fast broadband
connection hadn't been put up by the time this took place.
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A couple of days later and it was obvious - the three pictures
of them below here show them both still curled up together under the rear 'hide'
in the viv and that the colour of their skins has changed dramatically - you can
also see Alice has blue/grey eyes in the left hand picture.
This is due
to the oil secreted by the snake, under it's old skin, which helps the old
separate from the new. The eye of a snake, as you may know, never shuts - they
have no eyelid like you or me. Instead, they have a transparent scale over the
eye, just like a window; and this scale, like all the others, is shed when the
snake sloughs off the old skin...
The other two pictures, on the right,
were taken a couple of days later - the oil has mostly gone and Alice's eyes
have now cleared again and her skin colour has become a bit more like normal.
But now Shaggy's are definitely blue; he is pretty well blind at this stage -
only vaguely able to see movement in front of him - hence, one of the reasons
snakes can get a bit tetchy or easily upset when about to shed their skin.
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| And so to the actual shedding... Five days after the previous
pictures, Alice woke up, did a huge yawn to stretch the skin around her jaw and
became very active, moving about the viv for the first time for over a week. In
the picture on the right, you can see she is vigorously rubbing her nose up
against the black side wall of the viv, to break the old skin away from her
upper lip. The picture is a little blurry because she was moving quite fast and
wouldn't stop - sorry!
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After wriggling around some more, here you can see Alice has got
the skin peeled away from the top of her head and has squirmed her way in
underneath Shaggy, down near the left front of the viv, by the green water dish.
Next, she pushed her chin along the chippings to break the skin away from her
lower jaw. At this point I lifted Shaggy out and put him in another viv to keep
him out of the way while I was taking these pictures.
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So the next picture is a couple of minutes later... Alice has
now headed off round to the rear right area of the viv and is starting to get
the skin peeled off down her back - the skin coming off inside out as it peels
back. She now moves forward slowly and steadily, so the skin doesn't break.
Notice also, the bright colours of her neck as it emerges from out of the old
skin.
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As she moves slowly forward, the skin stays
still, so after a while, her tail disappears down the mouth of her old skin.
On
a technical note, these pictures were taken in bright indoor lighting with no
flash. I resized the pictures in my photo editing software but made virtually no
adjustments to colour etc. Looking at these pictures I am satisfied that what
you are seeing is a fair representation of reality. However, on different
monitors and using different browsers to view web pages, colours will obviously
vary a bit, but even so, you will easily see the difference between Alice's old
and new skin.
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Meanwhile, back at the other end, Alice has made her way through
the hide at the rear of the viv and has moved along to the left end and doubled
back again - the skin still staying stationary as she eases herself forwards and
out of it. Bear in mind, she has to travel at least twice her own length from
start to finish when shedding her skin. And being around 40 inches long, that
means 80 inches of moving - more than twice the length of the 36 inch viv.
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Conveniently for me taking pictures, Alice now started to slide
up and over the hide near the front of the viv. The first gives you a fairly
good view of her eye - they are just like the button eyes on a teddy bear. The
other picture, looking down on her, gives you an idea of her colours right after
shedding.
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About twelve minutes after starting, Alice is now very nearly
finished shedding her skin - just the last couple of inches to go.
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Alice relaxing a few minutes after the strenuous effort of
shedding her skin. Compare her colour now with how it was when her eyes were
blue - quite a difference!!!
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And finally, to finish off, a picture of the old discarded skin,
which came off in one piece except for the last six inches or so, where it broke
once.
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And so that is it - I have finally got some good pictures of one
of my snakes shedding it's skin on the site for you... Many people have been
asking about it, so now you can see how it happens. I hope you find it
interesting and informative. One thing you can't see in the pictures is the
peculiar wriggling motion snakes make where the skin is actually separating from
the body - it's a kind of rippling of the muscles. You'd need to watch a video
clip to see that - or else, hey, get your own corn snake: then you'll see!!!
You
might be wondering why I have no pictures of Shaggy shedding his skin - because,
as you can see in these pictures, he was at about the same stage in the shedding
process as Alice was.
Well, being the crafty old thing he is, he shed his
skin later that same night, long after I'd gone to my bed - so he's evaded the
camera yet again!!! Ah, well... :-)
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