Critter heartbreak

See here first.

Today, I posted this on the forums at ball-pythons.net. If anyone has additional input from the blogging world, we'd like to have it:

I've been searching for a while now and coming up empty. We had a clutch of four eggs. When the first one pipped, one of the other eggs started to swell. It was a perfect egg before. Within hours of the first egg pipping, the indentations totally filled out, and the white of the shell disappeared, leaving it completely transparent. At this point, the snake could be seen inside, perfectly developed, but motionless. The bloated egg continued to sweat, while the surrounding eggs remained indented and unaffected.

By the time the other little ones pipped, this egg looked like a water balloon, only minimally larger at this point, but hub cut the egg open to reveal a perfectly formed, same size as its siblings, but dead baby. Heartwrenching.

What happened? None of the eggs was pre-cut. The egg was fine. We candled them and detected movement in all eggs in the clutch before the first one pipped. Within an hour or two after the first pip from another egg, this egg just filled with fluid, rounded out, and did the things mentioned above.

The rest of the clutch looks fine, although they're still pipped. We're not messing with them unless there is a danger posed by the egg remnants from the bloated egg.

Any help is much appreciated.

This is our fist clutch of the year. It's absolutely heartbreaking. The one that didn't make it had a beautiful pattern. The albino didn't prove out, but she gave off some very aberrant patterns to her offspring, and to lose one so close to the end is just hard. No other way to put it.

So, if you're a ball python enthusiast and you've ever had something like this happen, please let us know. I can't find anything on the net, and we lost a very gorgeous baby.

Gah.

To add insult to injury, Chester Junior got loose again. He's gone to gerbil heaven. We couldn't find him before the cat did.

Now, I'm going to type for colorectal surgeons, and I've already typed three reports on terminal cancer patients. Life is very depressing.

I think I'll go hand feed my bunny some hay.