They do not have good vision and will go based on heat and smell, making it possible they could get your fingers confused with the mice if you do not use tongs to separate your hand from the food. As constrictors, Honduran Milk Snakes will often strike and constrict their mice. You should be careful to wash your hands before feeding so your fingers do not smell like mice and to use long feeding tongs. An adult Honduran Milk Snake will most likely take Jumbo mice, or Small Rat Weaners. Milk Snakes don’t tend to have the same obesity problems as King Snakes, as their appetites aren’t quite as voracious, but you should be careful not to overfeed. A hatchling will eat a pinkie every 5-7 days, juveniles every 7 days, and adults every 7-14 days depending on their size and needs (breeding females may eat more often). Honduran Milk Snakes generally have a good appetite and will readily eat defrost mice or rats in captivity. They have no other social needs and will lead perfectly happy and healthy lives never meeting another snake. Well fed adults tend not to try to eat other adults, but it can still happen, and they could certainly try to eat smaller individual.īecause of the risks, all King Snakes and Milk Snakes should be housed individually, and only introduced under supervision if necessary for breeding. They are particularly cannibalistic as hatchlings, and hatchlings housed together have ended up both dying from one attempting to eat the other. Your heat mat should always be controlled by a thermostat.Īll members of the Lampropeltis family – that is primarily King Snakes and Milk Snakes – can be cannibalistic. Heat mats are a more old fashioned method of heating and are not suitable for larger bodied species, but since Honduran Milk Snakes are relatively light weight snakes, you can get away with using a heat mat even with an adult. The heat mat should be well covered by substrate – you do not want your snake to sit directly on it, and should also be kept dry. If your tank is made of glass, you can put the heat mat underneath. At night you can allow this cooler temperature to be steady throughout the tank.Ī heat mat is a device that goes underneath the substrate or against the back wall of a wooden tank. On the unheated cool side of the tank your ambient temperature should be around 70F – 75F (21c – 23c). All your heating should be on one side of the tank, and this should provide an ambient of 85F – 90F which is 29c to 32c. This is so they can thermoregulate – choose between hot areas and cold areas depending on their body temperature. You need to create a hot and a cold end of your tank for your Honduran Milk Snake. Honduran Milk Snake Heating and Temperature Hatchlings can be housed in smaller, but once 6 months or older we find this species does well going straight into it’s adult vivarium. Your temperatures will be slightly different for a Honduran Milk Snake, but your equipment remains the same. The setups we have for these on our website are labelled Corn Snake setups. The perfect vivarium for a Honduran Milk Snake would be going a bit larger, a 48x24x24″ would be a great space for them for life. These should never be housed in pairs as they are cannibalistic, see the social needs section for more information. We recommend a minimum of a 48x18x18″ or 36x24x24 (which provide the same floor space) for a single adult. Although it’s not weighty at all, it is an active snake that will explore and enjoy a large environment. The Honduran Milk Snake is a fairly large colubrid. The Honduran Milk Snake when cared for correctly should exceed a twenty year lifespan in captivity. These bright colours are designed to deter predators and mimic deadly snakes, but Honduran Milk Snakes have no venom and are completely harmless to humans. In captivity there are also a variety of different colour morphs. The head is black and orange or cream, and there may be black speckling on the orange banding. The classic wild type colouration is a beautiful deep red base, with cream to orange bands surrounded by a black band on either side.
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