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RE: Sea Snakes, in captivity?
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by BGF on December 1, 2004
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We've been keeping true sea snakes for quite a few years now and have the only long term collection. The true sea snakes are very very delicate and extremely difficult to keep alive, made even more so by most occupying very specialised ecological niches that are virtually impossible to replicate in captivity and some eat only a particular prey item that may be difficult to get ahold of (e.g. deep water snake eels).
We've kept Lapemis curtus (spine bellied sea snake) and Aipysurus laevis (Olive sea snake) in captivity successfully for a number of years. They are generalist feeders so prey items are no worries. They are very space intensive (ours are in 100,000 litre tanks). Also, even though they are amongst the hardiest of sea snakes, they are still incredibly delicate. They have raging metabolisms, more like a fish than a snake, and eat large prey items 2-3 times a week. If they go off food for even a fortnight, this can result in their death from starvation. This means that mouth rot is a virtual death sentence since they won't feed while its there but to cure it requires handling and they stress out from handling and go off feed! A vicious circle. Their metabolism (a consequence of all the energy used for swimming) also results in a much shorter life span. They hit sexual maturity at 1-2 years and live only 4-5 years.
In contrast, sea kraits are much hardier. This is because they come up on land on an almost daily basis, so are used to being bashed by the waves. They also require less room than the true sea snakes in the tanks. Eels will be taken off of foreceps usually with no problems at all. There is no way that a true sea snake would survive the shipping to the US or Europe, but Lauticauda have been successfully imported before.
Cheers
Bryan
www.venomdoc.com
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RE: Sea Snakes, in captivity?
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by LarryDFishel on December 1, 2004
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Thanks Phantom, now that you post that, I vaguely remember reading it (I've read every word of every section on venomous at some point), but probably chalked it up to "probably something I couldn't keep alive anyway" and forgot about it. As I suspected, (but didn't bother to look up, thanks again), it's cross referenced to a chapter on invasive marine species...
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