I can’t believe I am replying to a message that is 15 years old, but things got pretty weird here. I have kept reptiles for over 50 years now, keeping, breeding thousands of snakes over that time. In all that time, I have never seen a snake devour a skin… Until last night.
I have three Dumerils boas in a fairly large two level enclosure. Yesterday I acquired another. This guy is about the same size as my other 3 year old guys, eating large / jumbo rats, maybe 4.5 to 5 foot snakes. The new one, however is supposed to be 5 years or better. I think he might have been underfed.
Anyway, I brought him home last night, fed him a medium/large rat in a box, and added him to my group this morning. I removed another snake that had just shed, and I got a rat for that one to feed in the box. I did that and looked into the enclosure, and there was the new one, alone in the lower level, mouth open, swallowing a big clump of the shed of the other snake. He swallowed it like it was a rat. I did not witness him start, nor see how or possibly why he approached it, but he finished it up like a meal. I actually took video, though if you really cared to see it, you would need to walk me through the process of uploading it.
Feel free to disbelieve me. I would have, though you never really know what an animal is going to do.