Baby Boas

The beginning of the monsoons are an excellent time for baby animals of all kinds. I’ve realized over the years that most animals time their young ones to be born exactly when there will be plenty of food around to eat. And what better time than the start of the monsoons when there is plenty of greenery and fresh water. As a result, all baby animals have almost the same zodiac sign!

Frogs, insects and fish lay eggs in fresh water and the hatched babies in turn serve as food for bigger animals like baby reptiles and baby birds.

Sometimes though it might appear as though some events in nature are badly timed. For instance, in India, baby monkeys are born somewhat during the middle of the summer. It seems really strange that the baby monkeys should be born into the harshest season when there is almost nothing to eat, until you realize that for the first few weeks the little monkeys are feeding on nothing but milk. By the time they are ready to eat adult food the rains come in with a bang. Which means they don’t miss a day of the monsoon bonanza!

This year I rescued a Whitaker Boa at the end of summer. I kept the snake for a couple of days during which time I tried to feed it a freshly killed mouse. It refused.  When I inspected the snake I noticed it had quite a fat belly. I decided to keep the snake a few more days but the belly never went down. I began to worry that it might have some intestinal infection.

Then one day when I went to check on the snake I found the culprit behind the fat belly. Actually there were ten baby culprits responsible!

Boas don’t lay eggs. The babies are born live. I’ve hatched eggs of a number of snake species but never had the chance to experience live birth in reptiles. I was over the moon with excitement!

Most people are surprised to know that some species of snakes don’t lay eggs but instead directly give birth to live babies. They’ve been told that giving birth to live  young is something only mammals can do.

Actully live birth is a characteristic shared by many animals including scorpions, lizards, and even some species of fish. The only difference is that even though a snake might give birth to live young, unlike a mammal the mother snake does not nourish her young via a placenta or umbilical cord. The embryos inside her body are nourished only by the  individual yolks attached to them. So essentially the mother holds her eggs inside her body and releases the babies when they hatch.

New born human babies are usually quite wrinkly, disproportionate, and most significantly, absolutely helpless. These baby boas however were replicas of their mother. And even though they were just a few hours old they already knew how to defend themselves by mock striking like their mother did when I first rescued her.

The mother provides no care to her new born babies. So I seperated the babies from her immediately and placed them in a vivarium. Twenty minutes later when I went back to check on them they had all disappeared. I began to panic, until I realized that they had instintively buried into the gravel in the vivarium. I photographed them the next day and released them behind my house. A day later the monsoons hit Goa!