(mellow country music)
- Hey, good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog!
I tell you what, I've got some huge things
going on here at the reptile zoo,
you know we're always trying to improve,
expand, do things awesome.
Well, you know I've talked about it
in the past about this wall
and the fact that we are trying to expand next door
and I've got some big news about what's gonna happen there,
hopefully lots going on with that,
but I'm gonna check on that later in the vlog.
As for now, I'm gonna go over and check colubrids,
see what hatches today,
'cause I love starting my day with baby snakes,
because it's absolutely incredible.
Let's have an amazing day together, let's head over to BHB
and see if we have any baby colubrids hatching.
And like I've been mentioning,
I love starting the day seeing little baby snakes
and look at all these little corn snakes here.
Oh my gosh, oh, this is really weird,
you can see, this is actually a het plasma clutch,
which are actually lavender diffused corns,
but all of these babies here,
all these little corn snakes are just normal hets here,
but do you see one little hypo lavender?
I can't tell if it's a plasma yet,
until it actually comes out of the egg,
but it's definitely a lavender, it's definitely a hypo,
so it's interesting to see what's gonna happen here.
So that's really weird, odd,
that you'd hatch all these baby corn snakes,
and then there's at least one,
it looks like there's a couple more eggs to hatch too,
so we could have some more lavender stuff there,
I'm not 100% sure, but nevertheless,
still a beautiful clutch of corn snakes.
Oh, look at this!
These are actually Mexican black king snakes right here
and they're all just pipped out, none are on the egg,
just a bunch of albumin pipping out
and for those of you that don't know,
snakes actually have what they call an egg tooth,
which is on the very tip of their nose
and that's actually how they cut these eggs by their self
and that's just how they get out of the egg.
Alright, let's take a look at this, oh yeah!
Guys, take a look at this, hoo hoo!
These are the first scaleless corn snakes
of the year right here, oh my God!
Look at the cute little monkeys right there
and there's a bunch of 'em here too,
it looks like there's one, two, three,
four, five, six scaleless corn snakes
in this clutch right here.
Oh my God, that is so exciting!
And of course, scaleless corn snakes
is a recessive mutation that's lacking keratin,
which makes up scales, right?
So that is amazing, these guys are so beautiful
and what happens with scaleless corns,
because they don't have scales is they actually get
all the vermiculite kinda stuck all over 'em,
so what we'll do is we'll wash these guys off,
we'll get 'em set up and good to go.
Looks like we're about to have a can of worms here, guys,
things are starting to get on the move.
I'm gonna go ahead and shut 'em up,
oh oh, yeah, I'm in trouble, I'm in trouble, I'm in trouble.
Okay so now I've got a handful of snakes
and I've got to somehow get 'em in this box,
it's gonna be hard, so I'm gonna set the camera down.
There's the baby colubrids for the day, (laughing)
absolutely amazing little monkeys.
Oh gosh, yeah, I'm in trouble guys.
Oh boy, I'm in trouble.
Oh boy, there're snakes everywhere.
Oh, there's no way I'm gonna get these back in the box.
Okay, oh boy.
No, no, no.
Okay, alright, I just keep getting more snakes in my hand.
Alright.
Okay, phew!
I tell you what, that was sketchy as all heck,
but all the babies are back in the clutch,
no heads are caught and that does conclude
the baby colubrids for the day.
A lot of people ask like what we feed our leopard geckos
and the truth is that the majority
of what we feed our leopard geckos are mealworms
and animals like this sunglow bell
basically can live off of mealworms, but of course,
if you're gonna do mealworms as your primary thing,
you need to supplement them with vitamins,
so we definitely use a calcium
and then a multivitamin called Vionate,
we do one part calcium to three parts to Vionate,
and that's really important,
but the thing that I love about leopard geckos is that,
is that you can sustain 'em just on mealworms,
so people that don't like crickets,
you don't have to worry about any other type
of living bugs and stuff like that
and basically what we do is we just put mealworms
in the cage once a week,
we go ahead and put fresh mealworms in, we dust 'em
and then we leave 'em in there all week,
so you don't have to feed 'em every day
or three times a week, you can just feed 'em once a week,
whatever they're gonna actually eat in that bowl,
all those mealworms, it's really cool,
but we do go through a lot of mealworms
and just to give you a perspective,
we go through about 140,000 mealworms per week.
- With our breeders here, there's four females per group,
so we feed 'em all about 100 mealworms per week
and then I go through and check
and if they've eaten all their mealworms,
I give 'em a lot of crickets too just on top of that,
just to make sure everything looks nice and fat and healthy.
- Got a little quick unboxing really quick
and I think what this is is this is from our fan group
on Facebook, the Reptile Keepers for Brian Barczyk fan page,
so Michelle, Bill, all the people over there
said that something was coming today
and so I don't know what it is,
but I'm excited to see what they sent.
Let's see what we've got.
Okay, so what have we got?
Carnivorous plant, nursery, growing cart,
so okay, so it's a whole bunch of stuff
about growing carnivorous plants.
So they've said that it had something to do with,
oh, my gosh, look at this.
This is awesome!
So these are all like carnivorous plants
and it has like the whole package for 'em.
- And this is the medium obviously you plant them in.
- Yeah, you plant 'em in this
and then these guys have all these little plants,
I'm anxious to see what kind of plants are,
there's like those pitcher plants,
there's no Venus flytraps in here,
but I don't know a whole lot about plants
or carnivorous plants, but that's awesome.
So thank you, guys, again,
I've put a link in the description to that fan group,
amazing people, really great Facebook group,
we all know that a lot of Facebook groups aren't the best,
these guys are unbelievable, when it comes to like towers,
you can ask questions and they won't yell at you
for asking questions, really great people version there,
so thank you for the carnivorous plants,
so awesome, what do you think?
- Alright, let's set 'em up.
- Let's not kill these.
Okay, back over here at the Reptarium
and basically what it is is obviously this wall
doesn't look that impressive, right,
but the truth is is that I've talked to my friend,
that has a tattoo shop next door,
he is definitely gonna be moving not exactly sure when,
I hope by the end of summer, we can start it,
but what basically has to happen
is we have to make sure from an engineering standpoint
we can open this wall up here
and basically what I'm going to do
is I'll probably keep this where it's at,
I'll have a little bit here
and then maybe an opening goes from here to here,
like a nice archway that we can do some really cool rocks
and timbers and stuff like that and you'd walk in over here.
I've talked about before that I wanna do snake massage,
right, well of course there's a tattoo shop,
so there's like five rooms over there,
I'd probably blow out all the rooms on one side,
so we could expand, more habitats like this,
so we can add more stuff,
again, bigger habitats for Salt and Pepper maybe,
I don't know, something for RJ, I'm not 100% sure,
definitely wanna build a big anaconda display,
so that when I get a big anaconda,
I can have it over there, some more aquatic stuff,
really cool stuff, but I thought I'd probably
leave three of the rooms on the other side,
two of those rooms, maybe I could do snake massages,
so right, that'd be awesome.
The other thing is that we only have birthday parties
when we're not open at the Reptarium,
so now we'll have a room, where we could do birthday parties
or you guys can come and have a birthday party,
when we're open for the Reptarium,
not to mention we'd have twice the amount of space,
which would be absolutely incredible.
I'm not gonna lie to you, this next idea's kinda crazy,
it's kinda out there and I've got to show you really,
so that you understand what I'm thinking,
you'll probably think I'm insane,
but I think it's gonna be really cool,
I've talked about it a little bit,
but let me do a few things,
I'll get back to you and I'll fill you in
on this last insane idea I have for next door.
Again, continuing to update you guys
on the animals that we are hatching,
this was actually a woma lesser pin bred to a pinstripe,
some really beautiful babies,
when they hatched out, they were really incredible
starting with this little guy right here,
this is actually a woma pinstripe,
so the woma pinstripe together
just makes that kind of same pinstripe pattern,
just a little bit more reduction,
again they have a little bit of barring,
that goes down their sides
that you typically don't see with a pinstripe,
but I absolutely love woma pins,
a real simple, two-bang mutation, but really cool.
Here's another one of those guys, another woma pinstripe,
but this one's just a little bit lighter than the last one,
so it's just got a little bit different pattern,
but again that's the polymorphism within ball pythons
is that every animal, even if it's the same genetics
looks a little bit different
and that's what makes it so absolutely awesome.
As a matter of fact, I'm gonna show you a third,
before we jump into another one,
another one that I think is absolutely incredible
and different, again another woma pinstripe,
so we got three woma pinstripes in this clutch,
which is pretty cool,
but we have a bunch of other stuff too.
Look at this little dude here, hoo, doggy,
that thing is amazing, this is the woma lesser pinstripe
and for whatever reason
when you mix those three genes together,
you get this really soft, subtle looking animal,
that has a real reduction in pattern,
we produce the very first woma lesser pinstripe
I don't know, a long time ago,
so nevertheless whenever we hatch these guys,
I'm always super excited
and again, just like the woma pinstripes,
the woma lesser pinstripes are polymorphic as well,
I mean, they definitely see a difference
between that last one and this one,
so we have two woma lesser pinstripes in this clutch,
absolutely love 'em
and then we just have one little normal pinstripe
and remember I told you sometimes pinstripe to pinstripe,
you get just a little bit more clean
and a little bit more reduction of pattern,
this guy is gorgeous and then of course
we have just a normal lesser ball python too,
so this would just be the single gene co-dominant,
blue-eyed leucistic, why is my truck moving?
And this would be in the blue-eyed leucistic complex,
so if you breed lesser to lesser,
on average one in four are gonna prove blue-eyed leucistics.
Let's see what we have here, oh, okay,
so this is the combination of those two animals
I just showed you, this is a pinstripe and the lesser,
they call these guys kingpins,
of course the jigsaws are the pinstripe and the Mojave,
which are very similar animals,
the lesser's just a little bit lighter than a Mojave,
but still in that blue-eyed leucistic complex as well
and then of course we have the other combination here,
which is the woma and the lesser ball python
and again when you mix those two together,
you just get this really wacky, wild pattern,
kind of a cool color to it.
So anyways that's it for what hatched on this clutch,
we have a bunch more stuff that we're gonna be cutting
over the next few days and I think we've got one more clutch
that's gonna hatch that is absolutely incredible,
hopefully I'll be able to show you tomorrow,
or maybe the next day.
It's been mentioned over the last month or so
that again I want the vlog to be a little bit more
about the day to day grind as much as everything else
with the animals and stuff like that.
So of course we have a great crew
over here at the Reptarium, which means a lot of work
needs to get done every single day,
maintenance, feeding, watering, all that type of stuff.
Bruce and Andrea really head up
the majority of what we have here,
but we have a whole host of people that help out.
Today Andrea has got a lot of work to do,
so let's just follow her around a little bit
and you'll get an idea of what it's like
to take care of this many animals at the Reptarium.
(mellow country music)
Okay, so back to my insane idea,
all the units here have basements of course,
this is the basement room for the Reptarium,
that we're working on, building like a gecko room down there
and a couple of other things, a podcast room,
'cause we wanna start a podcast, but think about this, guys,
again I know this is absolutely crazy,
but next door there's nothing down there,
what if I built this entire stairway
kind of like a cave in trench, right,
so you'd walk in and it'd be all rocks
and you'd have to walk down,
there'd be some like lantern lights on the side
and stuff like that, you walk downstairs
and maybe there's a couple big, aquatic tanks,
I've talked about how I wanted to do
like a swimming where maybe you could get in with Alvis
or you could get in with a big python or maybe even RJ
and have that swimming experience.
Of course, you would have to book it in advance,
because it wouldn't be like just show up and we'll do it,
because we'd have to make sure that I'm here,
or some handlers are here,
but I thought that maybe the basement
would be a perfect area, 'cause we could do
some pretty big pools and it would be awesome.
So that idea may be a little bit crazy,
I'm not gonna lie to ya, it's a little farfetched,
but my point is is that the Reptarium
looks like it's gonna expand, get bigger, more animals,
more habitats, more opportunity to do cool stuff,
when you're here,
so let me know in the comments if you're as excited as I am.
We still have a long way to go,
again, it's probably gonna be the end of summer
before we can even really start looking at it
and then maybe it'll be some time
around the 1st of the year, before we're done
or even close to being done, I'm not 100% sure,
but certainly by next year hopefully
the Reptarium will be twice the size
and there'll be all kinds of new stuff that you guys can do.
- So today's big project is cleaning the tortoise pen,
we try to clean out at least one or two cages a day,
give 'em a little revamp,
but first we need to take the tortoises out,
so let's get to it.
(mellow country music)
- And hey, if we're gonna get Matilda out,
we might as well go ahead and weigh her,
remember when we got her, she's 107 pounds?
Not sure if she's really added weight or not,
but we're gonna find out in a second here.
Alright, ready, girl?
Come on up, baby girl.
Just put her on the bucket here.
It's 111 and a half pounds,
so she's gained almost four pounds, which is pretty good,
that's a lot of lettuce and veggies that she's eaten
for sure and she's on her way,
Matilda, you're such a good girl.
- You can see her stretch her legs.
- I know, she's gonna love it,
she's just gonna walk around like crazy,
oh my God, that's awesome.
So my girl is growing.
(mellow country music)
And that wraps up a pretty eventful day,
hope that you guys enjoyed the vlog,
let me know in the comments,
'cause I love reading about your beautiful faces.
Be kind to someone and I promise I'll see you guys tomorrow.
(mellow country music)