Are they dead?

Hi, It has been a while since I posted (so long I needed a new acount) but this is an incredible story. I sell animals at the swap meets as well as being an avid newt and sallie keeper. I packed up my animals after the last show this Saturday, My styrofoam container has two levels I put the cold stuf (newts and salamanders) in the bottom with an ice pack and the warm stuff (frogs snakes...) on top with a heat pack. These are separated by a board. I had picked up a mess of frozen rodents and like an idiot I packed them in the bottom and put in the dry ice that came with them. When I got home 2 hours later everything was dead. I mean real dead an hour went by and everything is still limp and not moving. This is about 30 hatchling snakes, 50 odd newts some insects and frogs and one monitor lizard. I'm looking at a loss of over $2,000 in stock as well as many of my own babies it was crushing. I started to throw the animals away in the garbage and noticed a snake move. I looked again a few were twitching. I then took all the reptiles and heated them up in a single tank and they came back to life!!! Every last snake and lizard was moving. The amphibians took much longer, maybe an additional 30 minutes for the frogs and an hour before the first newt began to move. It was 5 hours before the tylototritons began to move. When all was said and done I have only lost one pacman frog, I assume he drowned in the water when he first started to come around.
My assumption is that the cold decreased the demand for oxygen, so the carbon dioxide was not as effective as it is when putting down rodents. Does anyone have any input on what happened biologicaly? I would like to know. Well here is thanking the gods or lucky stars or karma. whatever it was I got very lucky.

Hi David,
Actually most herps can tolerate high levels of CO2 for short periods of time which is why asphxia by CO2 is not a humane method of euthanasia for herps.

Ed

Well Ed it seems that the worst effected so far are the emperor newts. They seem to have some sort of dimensia. They walk funny sort of tripping over their own tails, sort of writhing.

it can take several days sometimes for their systems to shut down (die) the writhing seems to indicate that to me (are they just turning over and over in real slow motion arching their backs severely?) if its a condition to recover from they should start getting better-caudates have amazing regenerative ability -things like nerve cells are no big deal to them.