Rack 1 Moves Into the Snake Room
Rack 1 moved into the snake room today, and six more founders arrived from Soflo Sand Boas.
The move. The rack now sits in its own room, away from the living room where it was built. Two things changed on camera right away. The TV glare that used to reflect off the tub lids is gone, and every tub now sits against a plain white background. Both make the footage cleaner: fewer reflections for the motion tracking to mistake for a snake, and better contrast for telling the snakes apart by pattern.
Battery backup. The rack, its cameras and its heat now run through a UPS (an uninterruptible power supply). If the power blinks, the cameras keep recording and the heat stays on instead of everything restarting at once.
One camera needed a nudge after the move. The public stream for tubs QT-03 and QT-04 lost its camera connection while the rack was unplugged and kept sending blank grey frames until we restarted it. Recording on the server was not affected. Catching that on its own is on our list.
Six founders from Soflo Sand Boas. All six are females. Each one went through intake on the ID card under the camera: weighed, photographed for her identifying markings, and given her founder ID. They now share quarantine tub QT-04.
- F0-12, Paradox Snow Stripe: 35 g
- F0-13, Albino Stripe: 53 g
- F0-14, Snow Splash Pied: 41 g
- F0-15, Albino Stripe JPB: 43 g
- F0-16, Paradox Albino JPB het Neon: 50 g
- F0-17, Paradox Blonde Albino, high expression: 58 g
These six are noticeably heavier than our earlier founders, who weighed 13 to 20 g at intake. That made us check their ages. According to the breeder, all six hatched in July and August 2026, the same birth season as the rest of the cohort, as our Methods page requires. They're simply well fed: the breeder had them on live fuzzy mice, a bigger meal than most hatchlings get.
Telling them apart. With six snakes sharing one tub, the camera has to know who is who. These six make that easy: each morph looks different from the others. F0-12 is the only grey one, F0-17 the only yellow one with dark flecks, F0-14 the only pinkish blotched one, and the three orange girls differ in pattern (F0-13 plain, F0-15 striped, F0-16 netted). Once they had settled in, we matched each snake in the tub to her intake photo. For now the camera records movement for the tub as a whole. Because their colors differ this much, tracking each snake on her own is a realistic next step.
Keeping intake out of the data. Unpacking, weighing and photographing six snakes means hands in tubs and lids off for hours. We marked QT-03 and QT-04 as excluded from late morning until mid-afternoon, so that disturbance is recorded as missing time, not as snake behavior.
That brings the study to seventeen founders from four breeders, all in quarantine. One more breeder, SNK Kreatures, is still to come.