To start off, this species is actually the one that ever got me into starting with venomous snakes. It was at a reptile tradefair once, when I just saw a glimpse of this beautiful snake that I immediately fell in love with and I was determinded from that moment that I just had to buy some and keep at home.
As all of the species in the genus Parias they are the big (130 cm+) and egglaying snakes within the Trimeresurus complex. As babies they look just the same as juveniles of P. sumatranus. The hagenis doesn't change color as much as the sumatranus does with age. From what I know there are hageni's on Nias island that have more black in the coloration as P. sumatranus has, but I have to this day never seen a specimen that looks like that.
As babies as mentioned above they look almost identically the same as babies of P. sumatranus. What happens instead of gaining black coloration in the scales is that the tail and the small diamonds on the back turns from a pinkish tone into a more nice and red tone. Some keep the pink stripes on the head but usually they also fade away with age or turn blue. The cheeks turn from a yellowish-green color to finally become a stunning mint-blue color! And not just the cheeks turns into this color, also the EYES!!!
The mother of the babies below
I bought a small male at first, it seemed hard to find a female for him. They seem to be pretty rarely captive bred in Europe. I only know a few except me whohas bred them in Europe.
However, after a while I got 1.1 more and then later an additional big female a year later or so. So all in all I kept a group of 2.2. All originating from Bengkulu, Sumatra.
When they were about 3 years old I started to introduce the couples to each other, I saw one couple copulation the 2nd day and the copulation lasted for more than 8 hours.
After i separated them, months went by. Nothing happened, nothing happned, nothing happened. I know that some specimens do have a very long gestation period so i didn't bother too much.
But as I had seen no ovulation, no real increase in girth, I started to suspect the mating hadn't been sucessful. And then! After 127 days as I was going to clean for one of the females, I noticed her holding eggs!!
The eggs...
So I quickly took the 13 eggs out and put them in the incubator. I could at once see that 7 eggs were not fertilized and 1 additional turned bad later on.
At a temperature of around 30C, 4 of the eggs had hatched. 2.2 nice and healthy babes had come out after just 34-35 days (3 after 34, 1 after 35)!
The babies were between 23-25 cm's in length at birth, no weight recorded, but it was below 20 kg's!
...hatched!
I waited for a few days extra for the last 2 good eggs before i decided to manually opened them.
Inside the last 2 eggs were two dead babies that looked fully developed with the exception that they had a hole in the stomach, it was not the umblicial cord.
So if they were deformed I have no clue about, but I can't rule it out.
Unfortunately my biggest female died, she had a huge number of eggs inside her (22 if I remember right), that didn't have time to develop
Drinking its first drops of water, still with vermiculite on the body...
"What?"
As babies they are very nippy and nearly impossible to feed with anything else than frogs. If you are lucky and patient you can get them to eat pinkies (they are big enough to eat fresh born pinkies at birth). I have spent many, many late nights just to get them to feed on pinkies and quite frankly I don't see the point in it anymore.
Adults are acually hard to get to eat rodents as well at times. They have periods when they eat well, and when they don't. Especially with the males just as with other "Trimi"-males, the males have their off and on periods, so they can be a bit tricky to feed. I would say if not exclusively, you should at least as a complementary food source give them frogs.
So I would like to recommend people that are thinking about buying this species of snake, prior to buying the snakes to aquire and maintain a stable population of feeding frogs.
A good species for this would be the asian species R. leucomystax. A big and easy to take care of foam-nest laying frog that grows pretty big, so big that even adults can eat them all through their adult lifetime.
Rhacophorus leucomystax in the Philippines.
Foam nest of frog species above
Unfortunately I seem to have lost most of the pictures of my adult animals I used to keep, but I hope you at least enjoy these pics!
Fri 16 May - 21:41
