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Make your Own Poop Float
Not to be confused with rootbeer or coke floats...PLEASE!
I have been asked several times how to do a fecal exam at home. I will try and cover the basics here as best as I can. But be warned. There are a lot of things floating around in snake poop that freaks people out. Mostly rodent hair. Bit's of rodent hair looks kinda like worms under a microscope. Normally you won't find worms in a fecal. Usually just eggs and occasional larva...but eggs are what you are looking for. Plant cells and spirals, bug legs and other misc parts found in the feces of animals that eat such things can also produce some pseudoparasites. Yeast cells look an aweful lot like roundworm eggs. Air bubbles look like roundworm eggs except in reverse...roundworm eggs have a dark nucleus...airbubbles are light in the middle and dark on the edges. It is a good idea to find a good book to reference so you can properly ID what you are looking for.
Equipment needed:
Microscope with a light source and a moveable stage. It doesn't have to be an expensive one. It does have to have at least 100x though and 400x is great. 1000 and up is magnificant to have but you will never use it.
Slides and cover slips
test tube rack and some sterile test tubes
sterile mixing jar and something like a swizzle stick to stir and mash and otherwise degrade poop into mush.
floating solution (fecasol) which is just a name brand of sodium nitrate. Will plain water work? No. eggs are heavier than water and do not float. Is there a way to make this stuff at home? Yes and it's painfully easy. It takes about 24 hours to make at home. Get a clean jar fill it most of the way up with water (tap water is dandy) Pour table salt in and stir. wait awhile...stir some more...when all the salt is desolved, pour in some more and stir. keep doing this till it won't disolve any more salt. You now have a saline solution that is heavier than parasite eggs and they will now float on it. carefully pour this into another jar leaving the sediment behind. This solution will dehydrate your samples if you don't work fast too so ...work fast.
put your poop sample in a mixing jar and pour a bit of solution in...smash and stir till it looks like your snake has been eating too many 2 week old bean burritos then scoop some into a test tube. and fill the test tube with the solution that you have or made till it is just short of spilling over the rim. There should be a bubble on top that is visible above the rim of the test tube at eyelevel. place a cover slip over the bubble. It should make contact with the liquid. Wait 20 minutes and gently lift the slip off keeping it level and be careful that the drop of liquid on the underside doesn't drip off. Quickly but carefully place it on a slide. If there were parasite eggs in the stool then they will be eagerly awaiting your discovery on your slide now. I can't stress how important it is to properly identify what you find before medicating or even if they should be medicated. But anyway it's loads of fun and you get to play in poop!
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