(upbeat music)
- Hey, good morning everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is incredible.
I am absolutely excited right now
because I actually caught this female Ball Python
laying eggs, she's right in the process.
This is actually a Lori Pinstripe
and it's bred to a Lori Ball Python,
so we can produce a bunch of super Loris,
super Lori pinstripes, a bunch of stuff like that.
It's rare to really catch them in the act of laying.
It looks like she's got three, maybe four eggs out,
so I'm just gonna sit back, kinda watch her,
and hopefully have her lay the rest of her eggs
in front of us.
This is just a great way to start the day.
Again, something I very rarely see with Pythons so,
let's just sit back and watch this and hopefully,
she's gonna have a wonderful clutch of eggs.
(upbeat music)
While that girl's laying, we actually have another
clutch of eggs here.
This is, ironically enough, just a normal Ball Python.
We don't have a lot of normal Ball Python females,
this is just a leftover that we've had for a long time,
but it's actually bred to a pretty cool male,
a Fire Spider Spinner Blast,
and this is that male right here.
Again, it's a banana, it's a fire,
it's a pastel, it's a spider, and it's a pinstripe,
so there's a lot of genes going on.
So, the fact that there's all of those
incomplete dominant genes, even with a normal Ball Python,
we'll get a combination of a bunch of really cool animals.
Let's go ahead and see how many eggs
this girl has right now.
C'mon girl, she's not a big girl at all.
She's probably only 14,000, 15,000 grams,
so she's definitely a small animal,
not expecting a really large clutch of eggs
by any stretch, but it looks like they're kinda
that perfect size egg where they're kinda big enough
to be good but not too big where there's only a few of them,
so that's a beautiful clutch right there
from a female of that size,
and again, just a cool combination with a whole bunch
of different stuff, especially that banana stuff.
You can get all kinds of things.
We just have two, four, six eggs, so again,
that's a pretty small clutch.
Six eggs is probably gonna be one of the smallest clutches
we have 'cause most of our females are much, much larger.
I mean, they're 25,000, 35,000 grams.
So, regardless, six eggs, can't complain.
We'll keep an eye on this other girl and pull that clutch
later in the day.
Just a normal day down here in the dungeon, you know.
Hey RJ, what's going on, bud?
You all right?
See ya.
Ivy's still looking good here.
Of course, she's getting ready to shed
in the next couple days.
She's cleared up.
Last time, it took her like, three or four days.
I'm assuming she's gonna shed today or tomorrow,
I'm not sure, and we'll find out if she sheds in the water,
if she sheds on land, I have no idea.
In the meantime, I can get this cage back on.
Lori seamed everything, everything looks absolutely amazing.
We've sealed everything up now.
Now the Caiman lizard can't get behind or do anything else.
Now they have to actually clean it up.
All this is actually silicone and dusted,
where she sealed everything back up,
so it's gonna actually be dirty, right?
I have to just spray this down and then I'll have
to keep draining the water to get all that stuff
out of there, and then we can put the Caiman lizard
back in here, hopefully it goes well.
So, let's go ahead and just clean this thing up
and hopefully it works this time.
(upbeat music)
All right, so it's time to give it another shot.
Let's hope this time it works out well.
Just fed this little monkey so he's all set
and ready to go.
I'm just gonna go ahead and do the same thing
I did last time and put him right here,
and this time hopefully he stays in the enclosure.
I do have to put the screen top on really good,
that's the only thing I didn't do yet,
but in the meantime, I'll let him just kinda crawl around,
see what's going on.
So, fingers crossed, hopefully this time it works out.
(upbeat music)
You can see she probably still has maybe
three or four eggs left in her,
but she's making some progress.
Now, you don't really wanna disturb a snake too much
when they're laying, although they do kinda go
into a trance-like state, to some extent,
so they're really not thinking about much, right?
But I wanna make sure to give her a little bit
of distance to her, and you know,
ovapositioning, or laying of clutches of eggs,
can sometimes take a matter of an hour, two hours,
sometimes it could take eight or 10 hours,
so I'm not 100% sure what she has,
but she's definitely making progress, which is pretty cool.
Looks like she's about to actually move one more egg out.
Like I said, my guess would be maybe three more eggs
and she'll be done.
This is pretty exciting, they look amazing,
and again, it's something I don't get a chance
to really see that often, so I'm enjoying it,
hope you guys are, too.
(upbeat music)
- So, you guys know I've talked to you about variety
of diets here at the Reptarium,
and today, lucky for us, someone donated a Pacu.
This giant fish is gonna be some good eats
for our animals, and I've never fileted a fish before
but let's see how it goes and how to give it
to some of our monitors.
(upbeat music)
So like I said, I've never fileted a fish before,
but I don't think I did half bad.
All the animals seemed to love it, so that was awesome.
- You guys know that I work with Universal Rock
on all this stuff, the turtle pond,
all the enclosures, ivies, the backdrop, water bowls.
I'm really excited to tell you that right now,
you can go to universalrocks.com and you can actually
get 10% off anything that you want.
Just use the promo code REPTARIUM, all caps,
REPTARIUM, and if you wanna get some cool backdrops
or water bowls or whatever the case is, go check it out.
Those guys are amazing people, I love them,
I support them a tremendous amount,
and now you can save 10%.
Again, their promo code, REPTARIUM, all caps,
I'll put a link in the description too and,
who knows, maybe you can build some awesome cages like this.
All it takes is a little creativity and their product,
and you can make some pretty amazing things.
Looks like this Brooks King is actually done laying,
is actually out of her box,
so I'm just gonna go ahead and steal her box here,
see how many eggs she actually has,
and as always, what we do is we clean up the cage,
get water and get all that other stuff,
but let's go ahead and see.
Oh okay, looks good!
Unfortunately, just one little slogger here,
just one little bad egg, but other than that,
looks like a beautiful clutch,
and again, this is just another Anerythristic Brooks King
that's bred to Anery, so all these could be Anery.
Of course, they're also possible half or White Side,
so we could produce some Anery White Sides, you never know.
Two, four, six, eight, nine eggs.
Dude, I love it, man, and Brooks Kings will hatch
a little bit quicker, they'll actually usually hatch
in about 50, 52 days.
So, another Coluber clutch going on the shelf.
And I absolutely love the Coluber breeding season.
Of course, this is actually a Head Blizzard Corn Snake
right here, we're gonna see what she's got going on.
Oh my god, what a beautiful clutch of eggs,
and she's actually bred to this amazing male right here.
A Blizzard Corn, of course, is an albino-type B,
or what they call muted or charcoal Corn,
so it's just got that white color,
but that is a gorgeous clutch of eggs right there,
so take a look at that.
Oh, just go ahead and pull her off, get her in here again.
We'll get her all cleaned up, get her some water
and all that other stuff, and then we'll see
how many eggs we've got going on.
Again, Corn Snakes have larger clutches of eggs,
but you know, interestingly enough,
you don't want more than maybe about 18 eggs in a clutch,
and the reason I say that, unless you have
an enormous female, once you get to 20, 22 eggs,
the babies start hatching small and are harder
to get started, so let's see how many eggs we have here.
Two, four, six, eight, 10, 12,
14, 16, 17 eggs (chuckles) so, we're right in that thing.
But you can see, these eggs are relatively big,
you know, they're pretty big eggs,
and that just basically means that you're gonna have
a pretty good size Corn Snake hatch out.
When they hatch out super tiny,
they just have problems feeding.
So, you really want bigger eggs, you know,
again, anywhere from 14 to 18 eggs is typically perfect.
So, that is a beautiful clutch right there.
Figured I'd take a quick break and give you
a little bit of a tour of my incubator room.
This is a walk-in incubator room,
it's about eight foot by eight foot.
Of course, we just have shelves on it.
Now, the walls their self, actually, are two by six,
so they're actually six inch walls
that have R-22 insulation in the actual walls.
Then this is actually two more inches of foam insulation.
You can see, I've wrapped all the walls, the ceilings,
everything, taped all the edges,
literally so I just have the best R value,
just basically keeping the temperature settled, right,
because we want the temperature from this side,
all the way to this side, all the way down there,
to be exactly the same.
The only thing that's not insulation is the concrete floor,
but we actually use an oil-filled heater here
and it's on a Vivarium Electronics thermostat, right?
So basically, we have this set at 89 degrees,
and it's a proportional thermostat that actually
runs this all the time to keep the temperature
at 89 degrees.
Now, the actually concrete, after running this for about
three weeks, will actually heat up to 89 degrees which,
again, keeps a more thermodynamic type
of a situation, right?
So, really, if you take the temperature at the far part
of this and all the way down on the other side
over here, I'm within a half a degree of 89 degrees.
So, now I can put eggs anywhere on these shelves whatsoever.
These are my Ball Python eggs so far this year.
These are the actually Spotteds and other Python eggs
that I have.
As a matter of fact, remember that Spotted Python clutch
where I had a few eggs that were dimpled a little bit,
desiccated, you know, just shriveled,
and I put some sphagnum moss, let's go ahead and see
if we can find them and see if it actually
helped them out.
So, let's go ahead, this is the clutch right here,
and again, you just have a little bit
of sphagnum moss right here.
I'm gonna open this up, and you can see,
this is what happens sometimes.
Those eggs were desiccated, right?
And ultimately what happened was that
they were just a little bit too dry.
I'm gonna pull this one egg off here
'cause this still looks good, but these two eggs
ended up getting too damp with the sphagnum,
but I was kind of in a position where
they were either gonna pop out or they were gonna go bad.
So, we lost those eggs, unfortunately.
This egg still looks like it has some promise.
The rest of the clutch looks good.
That's just kinda egg maintenance, that's what happens
and that's how you kinda lose them, regardless.
Spotted Python, Savvy Python, Ball Pythons,
this incubator's gonna be filled up here
in about 60 days, it's gonna be absolutely incredible.
I just wanted to take a quick break to show you
the incubator, just for people that were interested,
how I actually incubate these eggs.
Now, let's get back to the shop.
(upbeat music)
All right, looks like my girl is finally done,
so we're just gonna go ahead, get her down really quick,
c'mon girl, oh my god.
Mama, you did so good!
What a gorgeous snake, I love that combination,
the Lori Ball Python just kinda makes it kinda muted.
It's got a really cool-looking head pattern on it,
and again, the mutations with the Super Lori side
can be pretty amazing.
So, let's go ahead, take mama off.
Again, these are fresh, she literally just finished,
and that is a load of eggs right there.
She did really good.
So, we'll go ahead, we'll just gently try
to take these eggs away, and here we go.
Wow, that's perfect, they're gonna fit perfectly in here.
I'll go ahead, give mom a bath, and we'll get her cleaned up
and ready to go.
She should be back on food in no time.
She had two, four, six, eight, nine eggs.
I think when we caught her, she had three eggs out,
if I'm not mistaken, so we got a chance to actually witness
her lay six or seven eggs, whatever it turned out to be.
Regardless, that is a beautiful clutch
and a rare opportunity to see something so awesome.
Obviously, we have a few clutches of Colubrid eggs today.
We've got more coming tomorrow, so you're doing,
first off, you're doing an amazing job.
Are you excited about this year?
- Oh, you know what,
I'm always excited when it comes to breeding and producing
because, how can it not be exciting?
- Yeah. - You know, you sit there
and you put the work in and whether it's eggs or live babies
it's always fun, even if it gets overwhelming really quick,
it's fun for a little bit (laughs)
before you're like, oh god, what did I do?
(both laughing)
- Well, I don't think, you know,
our old Colubrid colony was that way,
where it got outrageous. - Yes.
- This is, now it's not that bad.
- No no no, and I always keep that in perspective too--
- Yeah. - Of the days of like--
(laughs) - Yeah, back in the day,
literally, I'm not kidding, I think like,
what was it, I think our largest day of production colubrids
was 2,100 eggs.
- Yeah. - At one time,
we had like 200 clutches in a day.
- (laughs) - And that would go on
for like, a month and a half of production,
then you get into second clutches and, you know,
so for pretty much like, four months,
I would spend sometimes eight hours a day
just collecting eggs.
So, now, a few clutches is fun.
- Yeah, exactly. - You know, this is exciting.
So it's good, but I can't wait, you know,
this year's gonna be amazing and it's all 'cause
you worked your butt off.
(both laughing)
This next clutch is pretty cool,
this is actually an Okeetee, that's Heterixalus Corn Snake.
Let's see what she has going on, and I'll show you
the male that she's been bred to that's absolutely gorgeous.
Again, an Okeetee has those nice kinda black bordering
around the saddles, looks like a beautiful clutch of eggs.
Before we pull them, I just wanna pull down
and show you this male that we're breeding it to.
This is actually an Abbotts Okeetee Scalous
that just shed out and looks absolutely wonderful,
and again, half the clutch should be
Scalous Abbotss Okeetees.
The other half would be, of course,
Hatfor Abbotts Okeetee, so that is amazing.
So, let's go ahead and just see how many eggs
mama has here.
You did such a good job, mama, oh my god,
look at how beautiful that clutch of eggs is right there.
So, she has two, four, six, eight, 10,
12, 14, 16 perfect eggs, that is amazing.
So far, Lori killed it when it came to Colubrids.
We're only 10 clutches into the year but so far,
they've all been amazing.
So, a long long way to go.
I hope you guys are enjoying the journey
of collecting these eggs and again,
not too long and we'll be hatching babies as well.
So, it's, I love it, I mean, every day is like Christmas
here this time of year.
And that wraps up the Colubrid egg collecting for the day.
I told you, it's amazing, I'm just so excited
about this year, I mean, we've worked so hard.
We have a lot of animals up this year that we've been
working on for a number of years, so it's gonna be amazing
not only to see these eggs being laid,
but also when these babies hatch out.
Oh my god, it's gonna be incredible.
How awesome was that to catch a snake laying eggs
and see the process?
Again, even I don't get to see that very often.
I hope that you enjoyed it, and if you did enjoy it,
here's an entire playlist of snake eggs you can just
roll through if you want to.
If you're not sick of me then, you can actually subscribe
to my podcast channel called "Checking In."
Of course, always subscribe to this channel.
I really do appreciate you.
Have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to someone, and I promise,
I'll see you guys tomorrow.