- This is Bob.
Bob wants a pet snake.
Bob googles, "How to care for pet snake."
Bob finds lots of different information,
but he thinks he knows well enough to get the snake.
Bob buys the snake.
Bob continues to research snake.
Every person that tells him how to care for snake
says something differently.
Bob has a mental breakdown.
Bob goes to therapy.
Bob is admitted to a mental asylum
and slowly withers away,
along with the snake, due to neglect.
Sometimes, it's possible you feel like Bob,
and I don't want to contribute to that,
but at the same time, I want to share my opinions
on lots of little things in the reptile community.
So, my advice is, "Take all information
"with a grain of salt."
As a grain of salt.
And remember that most people overcomplicate reptile care.
That in itself is probably a controversial sentence,
but I don't care.
Also, it's true.
Reptile care is often a lot more simple
than people let on, and there's just
a complete overload of information,
and I'm actually gonna do a whole video about
how I think reptiles are completely overcomplicated
to a completely unnecessary point.
So, what I'm trying to say
is if you use aspen for an animal,
if you want to use aspen for an animal,
you can most likely use aspen.
It's not gonna kill them, the world will not explode,
but I am going to talk about why I hate using aspen
and why you might want to consider avoiding it.
Coconut fiber, cypress mulch, aspen, sand,
these are probably the four most popular
loose substrates for reptiles,
and many people, like myself, do not recommend sand
for pretty much any reptile,
for a bunch of various reasons, which you can research.
But the three others, along with many others,
like reptile chips made by Zoo Med,
there's plenty of different things you can use.
These are pretty much always recommended
for various animals, but aspen is, in my opinion,
the worst of the bunch
and I do everything I can to not use it.
I'm gonna go over some general stuff about aspen
and then I'll cover the use of it with arid,
dry species of reptiles,
and I'll cover the use of it
with more moderate to tropical species of reptiles.
So aspen is made from aspen, believe it or not.
It's pretty lightweight, it's made of wood,
it's a light color, and it's delivered in
multiple different fashions,
most often, in little chips,
which you can find in, I think it's called
Lizard Litter by Zilla.
It's also called Aspen Shavings by Zoo Med.
There's various different ways you can find it.
It's also made by Kaytee for mammals,
which, apparently it's not a great brand
from what I've been told,
but I don't actually know much about Kaytee
since I don't keep any mammals,
other than a really annoying cat.
(cartoon chomping)
(cartoon punching)
And generally, with reptiles,
people are going to be using the shavings and the chips.
It's advertised to be used with
a lot of different reptiles, not so much amphibians,
thankfully, I don't think anyone really
uses it for amphibians,
but it's well known for a lot of snakes,
including ball pythons, corn snakes,
pretty much every colubrid, python, and boa,
and it's also used for many lizards,
but we're mostly gonna be focusing on snakes.
With that said, if you keep lizards,
you can use this same information to learn about them.
Let's go over the great things about aspen.
First off, it's super cheap.
It's probably the cheapest substrate you can find,
and many substrates are cheap in bulk,
like coconut fiber is extremely cheap
if you buy 50 pounds of it,
and it's even cheaper if you buy a whole pallet of it.
Most people don't want to buy that.
I do want to buy that, but I don't have
anywhere to store it.
But aspen, you can buy in super small amounts,
and it's literally just a couple dollars.
Second, it's completely non-toxic.
There are other wood substrates like pine and cedar,
but these release oils that actually irritate reptiles
because although you can find reptiles
in natural pine or cedar areas,
there's a lot more air flow and it's not going to be
all congested in a small enclosure.
But if you're keeping a ball python on cedar
in a glass enclosure or a plastic tub,
there's not much ventilation
and that overwhelming scent of oils
can cause a lot of irritation.
So yeah, it's completely non-toxic.
There's no oils and it's just nice and dry.
Third, it's very easy to find.
Pretty much anywhere you live,
you can order it, you can find it in pet stores,
and they always have it in stock.
It's also pretty renewable.
It's not the most renewable resource,
it's not as renewable as coconut fiber,
but it is more renewable, and easier to grow,
and damages the environment less
than stuff like cypress mulch.
Now cypress mulch, I still like to use,
even if it's not the most environmentally friendly,
because that's also non-toxic,
and that has its own qualities,
like it's actually able to hold more moisture.
Now aspen is often advertised to actually be very absorbent,
and it is, it absorbs water like crazy,
like, one and a half times its weight
it can hold in water, basically.
But, that comes along with some issues.
For example, if it gets moist, it molds very quickly.
No other substrate that I've used molds
as bad, as quickly, or as much as aspen.
I've used many different brands of aspen
and I've used it with dozens of animals,
and as soon as water touches it,
it begins to mold very quickly,
and bacteria is so good at growing on it,
and believe it or not, you don't really want mold
around your animal.
The nice thing is it is very easy to spot clean
and if you check on it very often,
it's easy to pull out and toss some more in
to keep your enclosure clean,
and hopefully, you'll be spot cleaning anyway.
However, even keeping a water bowl on the aspen
has caused issues with us
where every time we fill that bowl,
a little bit's gonna drip out.
If you're pouring quickly, if you miss a little bit,
if the enclosure moves, if the tub is pushed,
if it's in a tub,
and even just the animal getting into the water bowl
or drinking is going to push a little bit of water out,
especially if it's filled up pretty well,
and any water that leaks around to the bottom
instantly starts molding that aspen.
This has happened both with chips,
and I've tried multiple different brands that make it,
like Zoo Med and Zilla,
and the same thing happens with both.
Now, say you do a perfect job
where moisture never ends up in the substrate,
the bowl is always clean,
and you check it every day to make sure
there's no moisture.
However, you're using it with an animal
that prefers more humidity.
Let's say ball pythons.
They're not super humid, they're not tropical,
but they generally prefer 60-70% humidity,
which is not a ton, it's not 100%,
but they're also not an arid species.
Even though they are from
a pretty dry part of Africa,
they tend to find more humid areas to hang out,
and aspen is not a substrate that you can spray
and make humid without it molding.
It also get very just gross when it's wet,
it clumps together and it drips a lot,
and so if you keep a snake that needs humidity
on a very dry substrate,
it's gonna run into multiple issues.
Most common, problems with shedding
and problems with its respiratory system,
because a dry animal in a humid setup
or a humid animal in a dry setup
will both frequently have respiratory infections
and respiratory issues, including wheezing
and trouble breathing, because it's just not the air
that they are looking for,
because humidity is the amount of moisture in the air.
Now, there is a solution for shedding,
and that is a humid hide or a humid tub.
It's very easy to make them,
you just get a plastic tub, you punch a hole,
you put something wet in it,
whether it's moss, or paper towel that's sprayed,
or coconut fiber, or anything that can
actually retain moisture without getting gross.
You then put this in the enclosure
and the animal eventually finds it,
and generally, it looks like they know pretty well
to go into that hide if they're about to shed.
They can then use that tub or hide
to complete their shedding so it all comes off well.
And animals from more naturally humid environments
look for more moisture to shed
because they need the extra kind of lubrication
to get it off comfortably in one piece.
And so they can do this in the hide and it's good,
it's one piece of shed, problem solved.
You can look in the comments,
I'm sure many people are saying
how good of luck they had using a humid hide,
but there are some issues coming along with that.
One, if you're lazy, it's just another thing
to maintain and check on.
Two, whenever a snake sheds with us,
they go around the entire enclosure,
and so it's very obvious that snakes much prefer
using as much space as possible to get the shed off
and it's pretty much always wrapped around the large hide
or around the edges of the enclosure.
No matter how big the enclosure is,
they always follow the line,
and instead of having to do it in a small tub,
which, granted, you could use a really big tub,
but it can never be as big as the enclosure,
so that's just a small thing that I see.
Again, if that was the only problem, it's not a big deal.
And second, humid hides,
they're humid, they're very wet,
and people normally over-spray them,
and since it's such a small, confined area with moisture,
it gets extremely wet in here,
and substrate that is too wet can cause scale rot.
Scale rot is not fun to deal with,
although it's treatable and it won't
instantly kill your animal,
it's basically when the scales cannot dry off completely,
and over time, they literally start to rot.
They frequently turn red,
and if your snake has a red belly,
it might just be shedding,
because that's also a normal characteristic
of going into shed,
but if it's not shedding and it does still have
a red stomach when it doesn't usually,
that's most likely scale rot.
So don't freak out, you can google pictures
to see what it looks like,
and this is very common with humid hides
and substrate that's over-sprayed.
This means that you have to actually
remove and put in the hide
based on when your animal is going into shed,
and that kind of just seems like a pain to me.
It's doable, you can figure it out,
it's not that much extra work,
but why bother when you can just use a substrate
that's actually ideal for humid animals?
Like, for example, coconut fiber.
It holds moisture super well,
you can make it as dry or as wet as you want.
For a ball python, you can just give it
the very occasional spray, and even maybe
just a little bit of spillage from the water bowl
is enough to keep it humid enough
where you can basically squeeze the substrate
and no moisture comes out,
but there is still moisture in there,
meaning it's not so wet that it'll
give your animal scale rot,
but it's moist enough where it adds moisture
into the air and your animal can shed no problem.
The other nice thing about this
is you are not going to have respiratory infections
if the entire setup is actually set up properly.
Because I see, say, a ball python on aspen
with a humid hide...
It just doesn't even feel like
an adequate setup to me.
Why would you only give them the proper humidity
in one area of the enclosure
when you could do it just as easily in the whole thing?
Throw coconut fiber in there,
give the occasional spray for a ball python,
if it's something more humid, spray it more often,
add more moisture.
Some animals, like amphibians, you can just
dump water straight into it,
cause they actually do often want to sit
in, not necessarily standing water,
but very damp substrates so they can
absorb the moisture.
And maybe you just don't like the look of the dirt,
I don't know.
You can use cypress, cypress is another, more shaved look,
it's generally in a mulch form,
and this actually does retain moisture without molding.
It's pretty nice, I recommend it.
You can even mix them.
Some people will mix aspen with these others,
but it's still gonna mold.
You can mix coconut fiber and cypress mulch, though,
and even sphagnum moss in there,
that's what I like to do,
and it looks really good and it works.
Cause aspen, let's face it, is kind of ugly,
in my opinion, it looks like the classic pet store setup
if you just throw aspen in.
It's like you put a little hamster glue in there,
you're gonna put a hamster wheel.
It feels like it's gonna be some cheesy,
three year old's pet hamster
when it's actually your ball python,
but you put it on aspen.
It just looks ugly in my opinion.
So the main problem with using it with humid animals
is one, it's not going to be moist enough
for them to properly live and thrive,
and two, if you do fix that by putting a humid hide in,
you're just gonna cause a bigger inconvenience for yourself
when you could just use a different substrate
in the entire enclosure.
Now I don't know much about reticulated pythons,
but we have gotten one in,
and now that I have learned more about them,
I've learned about how just so many people's
reticulated pythons have respiratory infections.
It's just extremely common,
it's something tons of people deal with,
and this is pretty much always because they're on
too dry a substrate.
A lot of people use paper towel and newspaper for them,
which has a similar humidity to aspen
cause it's completely dry,
and the one that we got
had a really bad respiratory infection,
and it came on, I think, newspaper or paper towel.
It was some kind of paper.
What was done to fix this awful respiratory infection?
We put it on coconut fiber.
The infection completely went away by itself
within a few weeks.
Nothing had to be done, no antibiotics,
no treatment, literally just changing the substrate
from a dry one to a more humid one
completely fixed the issue.
Like I said, this is normally because
people use newspaper with retics
cause so many retic owners are extremely lazy
and just overall have terrible setups.
It's such an easy fix
and it's the same idea with aspen.
Just that little switch can really make a big difference,
especially if your animals are having respiratory problems.
Next up, let's talk about why I don't even use it
with arid or dry animals.
I used to use it with sand boas
and hognose snakes and stuff,
but now we've switched them to coconut fiber as well.
Now, coconut fiber is known to have a characteristic
of being pretty dusty when it's dry,
but aspen has shown to be even more dusty
when it's dry for us.
When the aspen is shaved down by the companies,
it's going to cause a lot of sawdust,
and the sawdust sits in the substrate and in the bag,
and it's naturally going to get in there,
and it moves around very easily.
If you dump aspen really quickly into an enclosure,
you'll see, or at least we've seen,
a fume of dust just come up,
and that is likely being inhaled by your animal,
where even dry species could have respiratory issues,
the same way you inhaling dust would not be comfortable.
Obviously it settles, but it's still in the enclosure.
Any time you spot clean, it's gonna come up.
Again, there's that problem of water bowls spilling,
it still molds, even in my sand boa's enclosure,
it was constantly molding almost every day
because the water would get pushed around
by the sand boa burrowing, and by me filling it and stuff,
and so even the driest animal had that issue.
I also put plants with my sand boa,
and there's no way to keep plants alive
that are not super arid while having aspen,
so it would've been way better if I used, say,
dry coconut fiber, which, again, it's dusty,
but it looks a bit less dusty than aspen,
and it also has those other benefits.
Okay, as much as I may not be fond of certain people,
you could even get the patented,
I've never used it, I don't know if it's good,
believe it or not, they're not sponsoring me,
but the patented Brian Barczyk bag of dirt.
I don't know what it's called,
but apparently they have a patent on it,
cause they shake the dust out or something.
(clicks tongue)
Yeah, you can find it.
The other downsides with a dry and arid species
is the substrate, especially in the shaving form,
tends to be pretty sharp.
It's not the sharpest, it's not gonna
just completely cut you open
the instant you touch it.
Although these two things have not happened with us,
I frequently hear reports of one,
eyes getting infected, irritated, or scratched by aspen,
and two, some animals with very soft body parts,
like leopard geckos, for example,
actually getting cut on their stomachs.
Now, I would not use any loose substrate
with leopard geckos personally, but some people do,
and it can work.
I would not use aspen or coconut fiber
with leopard geckos, but again, you could.
Personally, I tend to use just paper towel
and the more boring stuff,
and you can even use tile, which looks nicer,
but that is an example of where
most substrates were not gonna
cut your animal open just because they're on them,
while aspen, although rare, it can happen.
If this was the only concern with aspen,
then yeah, I would still use it,
but there are all these other things.
Cause that concern is not very high.
Especially a lot of arid animals like, say, sand boas,
and hognoses, they're burrowing species
and they're going to be all through there,
all through the dust, all through the sharpness,
and it's not very comfortable.
And then there's the more moderate species
where it's kind of case by case,
where there are various issues.
So, using aspen, it's not gonna instantly kill your animal.
It cannot cause impaction, I mean, it could
if they ate a lot of it, but a little bit of ingestion
would likely not cause impaction,
and it's not toxic, it's not horribly dangerous,
it's just, to me, a complete inconvenience
and not worth using when there are so many
other good options.
There are so many people
that put all of their animals on aspen,
I don't know why, even other YouTube channels,
aspen is everywhere and I don't get it.
I hate it, it's a pain, it's annoying,
and this is why I don't use aspen.
So, what do you think of it?
Let me know in the comments.
Even I have old videos talking about my favorite substrates
and aspen was one of them,
but now that we've had so many new animals
come in since then, I've changed my mind on it
and this is my newest opinion.
I will be editing some of my kits,
cause I haven't done that in, like, a year,
where I show the different stuff that I use.
You can check the description to see what supplies I use
and I'll be updating those over the next few weeks.
If you click any of those links, actually,
that go to Amazon, no matter what you buy,
I actually get a small commission,
so it's a good way to help me out
where every time you buy something,
I get a few percent of what you paid,
so that's pretty cool.
I can buy more aspen to burn.
If you want to more directly support me,
you can join Patreon where you get early access to videos,
you can talk to me personally,
a private Discord server, private Livestreams,
and a other bunch of stuff,
a bunch of other stuff.
And there is some new merchandise,
which I'm not wearing right now,
but I'll be showing that shortly,
which you can find in the link below.
So leave your thoughts in the comments.
What are your aspen experiences?
Do you use it, have you not used it?
Whatever.
That's it for this video.
I'm Alex and thanks for watching.
(hip hop music)