today we're going to continue our series of five reptiles that make great pets from every
continent today we're going to start with the continent that is the cradle of civilization
africa the one that i'm going to give a pretty softball one too but maybe talk about some ones
that you don't necessarily quite think about so we're gonna start off one that i think it's
overlooked quite a bit and that is the house snake or the cape house snake sometimes referred to as
these guys occupy pretty much all of sub-saharan africa so that means is there's the big sahara
desert pretty much everything south of there they can occupy they prefer areas where it's kind of
like a dry savannah but with usually places with you know heavy or consistent sources of water
and you'll find them often around areas where humans are they probably both choose
those areas for the same reasons and a lot of times you'll also find because of humans
the house snakes which is why they get their name they're in and around houses attracted by
rodents that are attracted by people they make wonderful pets these guys are very mild tempered
they don't get very long only about two to three feet and they have several different color morphs
to them i don't know if morphs is necessarily the correct term for that but maybe phases so they can
be kind of like a light olive brown color they can be sometimes a dark chocolate color even to
almost black and lots of times you'll actually see those is the olive house snake or the black house
snake or the black cape house snake these guys are really cool they're fairly diurnal because they're
an active collubered species they do like to bask so if you want to give them some nice uvb
um give them nice places to bask plenty of places to crawl move around
and again because this is an active clipboard species if you give them the space you will see
them utilizing more than like say a ball python or a bullet constrictor or something like that um
they are really cool but another really cool fun fact about these guys is that their family or lamp
for fear day um or yeah no sorry lampa lampa fide there we go lampa fide that family is actually
very closely related to a lapids so the cobras the mambas the sea snakes those things
so genealogically the black house snake is more closely related to the black mamba or
several types of lapids i don't know necessarily black mamba but elapid type snakes then they are
two other kalu bridge which is absolutely crazy this next one i think is really cool for a pretty
obvious reason and this is the spiderman agama so these guys come from pretty rocky dry arid
regions around tanzania rwanda kenya and they get their name for a pretty obvious reason although
that is just the males this is a fairly sexually dimorphic species where the males have that bright
red and blue coloration and the female are more drab which doesn't necessarily have to do with
like defense about watching the babies or the nests because they don't really do that a whole
lot but it's mostly used to get attention for the females um these guys make very good pets and they
do turn up in the trade in the hobby i believe both in europe and in the us um they're very
so these guys are in a gum so sometimes it's also called the spider-man iguana or the spider-man
rock agama not iguana agama that's a big species lizard um has a whole bunch of ones like bearded
dragons for lizards they're all agave lizards sorry about that um very active very diurnal
very crazy high-energy insectivore where as far as lizards go so when you have their enclosure
you want to make sure you give them lots of large heavy rocks for them to move around
climb bask they will do their little agama head bob like you'll see bearded dragons do too if
you have quite a few of them i would recommend not having multiple males in the same enclosure
maybe have different groups of like one male to two to three females but who knows if you had
a whole room you could have a huge colony of them which i think would be really really cool to watch
um but these guys are really fun so if you're gonna have them set up make sure that you give
them a nice warm hot basking spot over 100 degrees but plenty of places for them to get away because
they will only come out and bask for small amounts of time and the rest of the time they'll be spent
in other parts of the enclosure also making sure you give them some place that has a little bit of
humidity like a nice little human height like an overturned half log or something like that
all right i had to do it i had to talk about it i don't normally like to do the easy ones
that's why i don't do a species spotlight on these guys because everybody already knows everything
about them or most people think they know everything about them but i gotta talk about it
because they are arguably the most popular pet reptile although bearded dragons are a pretty
heavy contender for that um ball pythons so these guys are found in sub-saharan tropical africa
out of togo ghana a little bit of benin these guys are heavily exported for a very long time
although the numbers are finally starting to go down a little bit so everybody knows about
the ball python so this little python known as the royal python in the rest of the world
they achieve you know four to five feet its length sexually dimorphic females being larger although
there are in one part of the range in the northern part of the range which is in the cradle of the
volta mountain range where a specific bloodline and groups of them seem to be larger and those
for the most part are considered the volta or the sub-saharan ball pythons where those are the ones
that can achieve that close to six foot six foot plus length but those are very few and far between
even from animals with that lineage these guys are very good pets for obvious reasons
between just this normal one like kalamazoo here who is a wonderful animal ambassador um for their
you know fairly docile disposition for their fairly sedentary lifestyle and for the crazy
amount of morse that exists which these guys are essentially what changed the entire reptile hobby
i did a whole video about that you want to check it out hopefully i remember put it right here
technically it started with the albino burmese pythons but these guys put it into every house um
i do really like them everybody poo poos on ball pythons they call them the pet rocks even i do it
but these guys do make very good pets they make great ambassador animals and i do in fact love
ball pythons they are really really really cool another final fun fact about these because there
is a little bit of misinformation being thrown out there although i don't really like that term so i
probably shouldn't use it but so there's a thing that's been going around for a little while these
guys are being found up in trees and so there is a little bit of truth to that so basically
what they're saying is that these guys it's an argument to the rack systems essentially but when
you look at this animal this heavy body the short stubby tail this animal is not built for climbing
trees it does not mean that they will not but that doesn't mean but they don't actively do it often
so what they found is that these guys will go out venture out out of their little animals out
from you know while they're hunting at night they do leave their space they do utilize lots of room
that's why i advocate for 4x2 enclosures for single adult ball pythons as pets
but when they found these animals up in trees it was during the dry season there was a shortage
of food there was an over abundance of animals in the area so they were seeking out prey where they
normally would not do so all i'm saying basically is that these are not semi-arboreal animals will
they climb trees yes do they do it also yes but is that where they normally will be found
and have normal behavior not always the case is all i'm really saying is that you don't have to
give them a six foot tall enclosure do i think that'd be really cool sure but you probably
won't find them that high ever moving right along i'm actually going to keep kalamazoo out i like
having a little snake in my arms i honestly don't do it enough with these um fives with
like you know the top five lists where i don't always have the animals in my collection so
i'm just gonna keep them out for this next one and uh also because the last one is not gonna like me
very much um so this next one is another lizard and actually i think a really good pet lizard
and that is the uremastix so uromastics are found in the kind of saharan more era dry northern parts
of africa into eurasia areas there are quite a few different varieties of them they're also known as
the shield tail lizards or the shield tailed or spiny tailed agamas this is another agama blizzard
the largest wide variety of uh lizard species out there there are more species of gammas than
anything else as far as lizards go these guys are really cool but i'm mostly referring to
one species um that is the malia gamma or there there's a bunch of different ones the mole your
mastics essentially they're usually called the red saharans or the yellow mollies it's the same
species two different morphs they occupy the kind of same large area but they're the ones that you
see usually most often in pet stores and honestly are probably the best pets of all of the different
species these guys are really cool they're very intermediate level ones that have very simple
husbandry but very specific requirements these lizards require enormously high basking temps
these are the ones that do require the temps well over 100 degrees with lots of uva and uvb
lighting however they don't need that all of the time but they do still need to be very warm so
you need to give them enough space to properly thermal regulate as well as there's a lot of uh
you know argumentative information that is fairly misleading different ways about humidity and
things like that these are herbivorous animals they stay in nice easy size about you know
two feet ish length from nose to tail um they're really really cool they eat a wide variety of
vegetables as well as like different legumes like lentils um sometimes they little mullet and things
as far as substrate that's another big thing that comes from there um they do very well on very fine
substrate like playground sand um they do very well on that because that's where they're actually
found give them plenty of places to climb to bask to hide under they do very well and if you want a
more detailed um resource for if you want to try to keep any species of your mastics essentially i
recommend go checking out arids only i'll put their name right here they know quite a bit
they do breed quite a few different species of urmastics and euromastic type lizards they know
infinitely more than i do and i have no problems throwing their name there and going to go check
them out they are really really really cool and now for i'm gonna go grab the last animal on the
list who i absolutely adore but they hate me all right so this one i don't show these off very much
because they hate me and i'm still getting them used to being over here not my face please
although you're not gonna tag me from over there um i'm still getting them used to being handled
so this is the angolan python um this might be arguably the rarest animal in my collection so
these guys um you'll notice some i'll get into that in just a second so these guys are from
obviously angola and parts of um namibia obviously they get their namesake from angola these guys are
very closely related to the ball python for and you can see quite a bit of similarities their
body style their head shape even a little bit of their pattern although it's a little bit different
um these guys are really cool although the space they occupy is very different than the ball python
so angola namibia those are very dry climates and actually the area that these guys are found
is incredibly diverse the summers or the dry season i should say can get well
over 100 degrees in length i'm going to swap you around there we go and at night it can dip
below 32 degrees and this is you know in fahrenheit so over 130 degrees fahrenheit
down below 32 degrees fahrenheit but where these guys are found is little mountainous areas and
they essentially are the perfect examples of microclimates where they occupy small little areas
under caves outcroppings and under rock crevices where their temperatures stay much more consistent
and these guys are really cool and you are doing much better her boyfriend does not like me at all
um but if you look one of the main differences other than their client well because of their
environment is their scalation so the ball pythons have those very small smooth soft scales which are
really good for expanding and holding on to those mammalian pr prey items these guys also
feed mostly on prey on mammalian animals but they do feed a little bit more on birds as well but if
you look at their scales they are more rounded and almost bead like and that's what they're known for
is that bead-like scalation and essentially this scalation and how tight and close-knit they are
is made for water retention and holding on to that so ball pythons they come from the very
humid areas and while yes they do spend time in very consistent temperature in humid areas
for good portions of their day these guys do as well but it's just drier in general
and so that's what that scalation is for um these guys are known to be a little bit more diurnal
although i think that's not necessarily correct it's more gropuscular because they will spend more
time thermoregulating and basking in areas than the ball python necessarily would because of their
climates and you are just going crazy um another small difference about these guys is that they
usually get a little bit longer so ball pythons they kind of average that four and a half feet
these guys typically exceed five with a lot more regularity these guys are threatened or vulnerable
depending on i've read a couple different articles but essentially vulnerable are threatened
they are fairly rare in the hobby both in the both in europe as well as in the u.s
not because they are cities but because of the angolan civil war that was going on for a very
long time and while that is over uh the area where these guys are found is literally riddled with
land mines so a lot of people don't really want to risk even though the payout would be quite a bit
um and i mean more so than probably a lot of like the ball python stories because of how much these
guys are worth still right now because there are no morphs this is what you're looking at
they are worth quite a bit more than any of the ball pythons out there right now
um but nobody really wants to you know risk dismemberment or death uh to go collecting
these guys but they are starting to gain in popularity um and a lot of people are
doing that right now um i am looking to get one more unrelated female to get a really nice trio
and hopefully i will be doing some really cool stuff with that um forgive me it looks like i am
kind of like a little bit afraid of her a little bit almost on the camera but basically i'm doing
my utmost to not show a bite on video because even though i'm sitting here talking and explaining it
um i don't like to show that i don't like to contribute to that in any way and this is a good
way of me moving around constantly keeping her attention not on my actual hand moving
but not agitating or aggravating her this is a very good way to show that while she's not
entirely comfortable with handling yet this is how we are working on that so hey twofer for this one
hopefully you guys did enjoy this video if you have any questions please let me know down below
i will 100 be making a species spotlight about the angolan pythons man is so cool i don't have
her fully out like this as much as i should but i'm working on it um and she's just gotten so
much bigger when i first got her and she is um a fair bit bigger than her uh boyfriend
but yeah i just they're so cool i love these guys they also typically have a little bit more of a
more docile temperament but these two don't but we're working on it again um so hopefully you
enjoyed this video um again i'm going to be doing all of the continents and i will probably be doing
like in mainland asia and then like in indonesia as well as a central and a south american because
i think there's enough biodiversity of reptiles to justify that so if you guys have any questions
comments concerns please let me know down below good um i do my best to not misspeak
but i do miss some things you know i in the pythons may not have heard a video i said the
teamwork pythons were found on the island of timor that is not correct um lots of takes i missed it
um for the european reptiles one there was a lot of different information about the jeweled lacerda
where because we have like four or five different species that we call jewel assert in the hobby
i may have had pictures of an animal of one species that didn't necessarily represent the one
that i was talking about so the people who called me out on that thank you very much 100 meant that
take responsibility for that and i'm going to continue to do so to educate myself as well
as educating all of you so thank you so much i appreciate your support please like and subscribe
if you can check out my patreon hope you're having a great day and we'll check you next time