Does anybody know why an apparently healthy snake would suddenly die?
I found a juvenile De Kay's brown snake in the x-ray room at work (weird place for a tiny snake) around September and took it in, figuring that with an injured tail and winter coming on it might be cruel to release it again. Since then it's been living in a tank in my room. The tail seemed to heal up fine. I've been changing the water and substrate regularly, feeding it what I can find (earthworms and slugs small enough for this thing are hard enough to find even before the ground starts freezing, and no bait shops are open in the winter, but a few sources said mealworms would probably work too and it did eat some of them) but definitely giving it something to eat about every five days. It lived four and a half months and probably grew about two inches. But this evening when my brother and I got home he went to check on it and it was dead, with a mealworm nibbling on it (ironic, huh). Not sure about yesterday because I was out all day, but it was still alive and moving around normally the day before yesterday.