- Just like this into this egg box,
we're gonna dimple them in just a little bit.
Oh my god, that is awesome!
Look at the size of that egg.
These guys are more like banana eggs.
(upbeat music)
Hey, good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
I'm about to share an exciting thing.
Of course, we're looking for eggs and guess what?
This girl actually started to lay yesterday,
so we knew there was a clutch in there,
but I haven't looked yet to see what's going on.
This of course, is an albino South Florida king
or what they would call a Brooks king.
Let's go ahead and take a peek and see.
Oh my gosh, look at that, hoo hoo hoo doggie!
That is one beautiful clutch of eggs, oh my god!
Girl, you did so good mama, oh my god.
That is our first colubrid clutch of the year.
How exciting is that? I'm gonna take you guys on a journey,
how I set this beautiful girl's awesome clutch of eggs up
and how we incubate 'em and hopefully,
successfully hatch 'em.
Typically, when I have colubrid eggs,
we have about a 92% to 96% hatch rate,
so oh my gosh, now I will say this.
This clutch is all stuck together,
but there's one little egg here.
So I always candle eggs when they're loose
because again, they can roll around
and we always want that embryo upright,
but let's take a look at how many eggs we've got.
We've got two, four, six, eight,
10, 12, 14, 16 eggs,
hoo hoo doggie!
16 beautiful eggs, what a way to start the colubrid season.
Again, I've been saying that we're gonna have
a really banger of a colubrid season
compared to what we've had over the last three or four years
just 'cause we've raised up a bunch of animals.
Obviously, we got Forest's collection
of cool scaleless corns
and a bunch of other corns, so it's gonna be incredible.
Let's go ahead and set these eggs up.
First thing that we're gonna do
is I'm just gonna get a bucket
so I can put some vermiculite,
and again, we use a vermiculite potting soil
that is just basically like this,
obviously it doesn't have any chemicals,
any fertilizers, anything in it like that.
It's completely organic, and that is the medium
we actually use for incubating the eggs.
Now of course this stuff comes dry
and you wanna keep your reptile eggs
kind of on the moist side.
You want 95% plus humidity, but you don't want
the actual medium to be really wet.
Colubrids can be damp.
A lot of pythons it's best to almost have them
on a dry substrate, but still having that higher humidity,
that's why we use HatchRite
which is a Perlite with a water isomer.
In this case because we have to many colubrid eggs,
it's more cost effective to use vermiculite,
plus we have great success.
So basically what I'm gonna do is who you what I do
to go through, which is the first thing,
pouring some vermiculite in the bucket.
(upbeat music)
Now what we wanna do is actually adjust
the water temperature to about 82 degrees or so.
And listen, after doing it as many years as I have,
I've kind of developed a feel for it,
but sometimes I'll just take a temp gun
and just make sure the water's
about 82, 83 degrees, right in that range.
And once it gets there we're gonna actually add
a weight to volume ratio, which is a one to one
volume to weight with water.
For me it's just a feel thing.
I have mixed so many thousands of batches of vermiculite
into egg boxes that I don't need to actually measure it,
so I go just by feel.
Then when I finally have the temperature
where I want it to be, I'm just gonna go ahead
and fill up a cup of water and pour it into the vermiculite.
Then what I'm basically gonna do
is just kind of mix my hand around, mixing the water
into the vermiculite til I feel like
I've got the right consistency,
and I just keep adding water until I'm kinda there.
Now remember, you can always add water
but it's hard to take water out.
So I always want it to be a little dry to start with
and I mix it around until I feel the consistency
is where I want I to be.
And just so you have an understanding,
what you basically want is you want the vermiculite
to clump like this, almost like a big vermiculite meatball,
but when you squeeze it, you don't want any water
to actually drip out.
So it's got the firmness that it actually sticks together
like a ball, but you can also break it apart
and stuff like that.
Now again, you can always add water as you go,
so I always wanna kinda ere on the side
of a little less water in there.
If those eggs over hydrate, they die.
If they start to dimple in a little bit after a week or so,
you can always add a little bit of water
and kinda pop 'em back out.
So again, clumping, good, dripping bad.
And even though I only have one clutch of eggs,
I'm gonna go ahead and fill up a bunch of egg boxes
because we're gonna have lots of clutches
over this next little bit,
and I use boxes that do not have holes.
And I gotta continue to stress the fact
that this is what works for me
and has worked for me for all my career,
and whatever works for you can be fine.
I'm just showing you my roadmap.
So basically what I'm gonna do
is I'm just gonna take about an inch-and-a-half
of this vermiculite and cover the bottom of these boxes.
(upbeat music)
And that's right about there.
And that's where the eggs are gonna actually go in,
and then I'm gonna put a lid on it.
I'll show you where I'm gonna put the eggs
and how I'm gonna actually put 'em in there
after I fill up the rest of these boxes.
(upbeat music)
So now that we have the boxes all filled,
basically all I'm gonna do is just put lids on these guys.
Also do is put blue tape on here
so we can mark actually on here with a marker
what is in the egg box,
that way we can kind of monitor and see
when things are due to hatch and all that other stuff,
not to mention when things are hatching,
we wanna know what the mother and the father is,
and so on like that.
So regardless, egg boxes are set,
so now it's the fun part.
So we're gonna take this clutch of eggs right here
and we're just gonna really gently move 'em over like this,
just like this, into this egg box.
We're gonna dimple 'em in just a little bit,
again just kinda making, you can see if I pull 'em up
you can see the little indentations right there.
That makes it so that they have a little bit of moisture
in 'em because they are actually gonna absorb moisture
for the first 30 or 40 days,
then they're gonna start expelling moisture.
That's why if you ever see snake eggs due to hatch,
they're usually dimpled in.
That's because start to expel that moisture from inside
so that the snake can actually hatch out.
So that's basically it.
We put 'em like this.
We put a lid on, like I said, we'll put some tape over here.
We'll mark in our clutch box which the female
and the male that bred it,
and then we'll go ahead and mark the same information
on this so we can cross reference from this box
to the actual egg box, and then we just stick 'em
right up there, up top on this rack, just like this.
We'll stick it up there just like that,
and we know that it's about 82 degrees up on that rack
which is what colubrid eggs want to be incubated at.
You can actually go as low as maybe 78,
as much as maybe 84, 85, something like that.
It's not like a python where if it fluctuates
a tremendous amount, the eggs will die.
These guys can go up and down.
But we know this spot stays about 81, 82 degrees
all the time because we climate control this entire room.
That's it.
Typically about 58 to 62 days later,
we're gonna hatch some eggs.
Now ironically enough, some snakes hatch sooner.
Brooks kings usually hatch at about 52 to 55 days,
so we are not far away from our first baby colubrids,
and that basically wraps up our first colubrid clutch
and how we set our eggs up here.
So colubrid season is on the way with eggs
and we are back down here with Kelsey,
excited about this one because this is one
I've been waiting for for quite a while.
Of course our first Stimson's python clutch.
You guys know that we wrapped up
the Children's python season.
And again, the first Stimpson's.
Let's take a look and see what she's got goin' on here.
Oh my gosh.
Oh, they look good, too.
Oh my God that is awesome.
You guys may remember we produced one good egg
from a Stimson's last year
and that baby hatches absolutely gorgeous,
but now a beautiful good clutch of eggs,
so let's go ahead and see what' going on with it.
Good job, mom.
- [Kelsey] These look like they're still pretty fresh.
- [Brian] Yeah these guys are really fresh.
- These are huge. - They are big eggs
for that little girl.
- [Kelsey] Look at those big 'ol Tic Tacs.
- Gosh, look at that.
Oh my gosh, it's crazy.
I always say, how does that clutch of eggs
fit into that snake right there?
And again, just like the Children's, she looks great.
She doesn't even hardly look like she laid eggs.
That's incredible, so how many eggs are there?
- [Kelsey] One, two, three, four,
five, six.
- Six eggs, okay.
So it's a small clutch.
Again, Stimson's pythons may lay smaller clutches.
I've only just produced the first clutch ever
in my facility.
Again, last year there was one good egg
and I can't even remember how many slugs,
but six good eggs.
We do have one or two more female Stimson's to go
and then a bunch of spotted,
so that's really cool.
Couldn't be more excited.
Baby Stimson's are gonna be so darn cute.
I am so excited, so good job Kelsey,
way to go. - Thank you.
- Sticking with python eggs but switching over
to ball pythons, we've got one clutch of eggs today.
What do we have?
- We have a Black Pastel Lesser
that was bred to a banana.
- Oh my gosh, that should be really interesting.
I mean that's all kinds of potential combos here.
It'd be really cool.
And I love Black Pastel Lessers.
Oh my gosh that's so beautiful.
Let's go ahead and see how many eggs she's got.
Again, this is the girl that we actually caught
in the process of laying,
so it's good that she actually laid.
And look at the size of that egg.
Oh my gosh.
That is a huge egg.
That baby's gonna hatch out like a 120 grams.
Man, that's crazy.
- Small clutch but these are massive.
- I know, that's not that bad.
And this is this girl's first clutch,
so I was excited when we raised her up.
It's cool to kinda see an animal
go from a baby like we do so often,
and have her first clutch.
So she is definitely a good mama,
and four really big eggs.
Again, not the largest clutch but hey,
I'm happy and I can't wait to see what hatches from 'em.
So once again Kelsey, keep me posted
and keep up the good work.
Weirdly enough we're checking through again
and there is another clutch of snakes.
This is actually a first time breeder.
Pueblan milk snake right here,
you can see this mama right here.
And I talked about it last year
where after they lay I always just kind let 'em
run through my fingers just to make sure
that there's nothing bound up in there
and stuff like that, just so that you know,
but regardless, this is the first time
she's actually produced, so we'll see how many eggs she has.
She's bred to a kinda interesting male right here.
It's the one that I showed you guys a few weeks back,
that has a really kinda interesting triad mark on it.
So sometimes that stuff passes on
so we figure we'd breed it and see what happens.
But regardless, let's see how many eggs are in this clutch?
Oh my god, look at how long these eggs are.
These guys are more like banana eggs, that's really crazy.
They're a pretty small clutch.
Because the eggs are so long and so weird,
there's only four eggs in the clutch.
That's what kinda happens is that
the larger the eggs, the less eggs,
the smaller the eggs, the more eggs.
That makes sense.
Regardless, these should be really monstrous, huge
baby Pueblan milk snakes.
By the way, just so that you guys know,
it does seem to pass on.
So females that have larger clutches
seem to produce babies that have larger clutches,
so the idea is to find that sweet spot, right?
You don't want so many eggs
that the babies hatch out small and are difficult feeding,
but you don't want such big eggs, like a four egg clutch
where you're taking the same amount of time
and energy on a female that lays four eggs
that could potentially lay seven or eight good eggs,
that the babies hatch out then are just as good.
So regardless, these'll be really big babies.
So we're just gonna go ahead and set these guys up,
just like we did the first clutch over there.
We'll just push these down right here.
And I wanna just go through really quick
what we basically do as far as marking these guys
so you know it.
So this girl is in aisle B.
She is on the 10th cage, so she's gonna be B 10.
And she's bred to this male, which is an apricot Pueblan
with the cool pattern, so basically what I do
is I just write down the clutch number,
in this case it's clutch number two
for the year for colubrids.
Then I'm gonna write down female B 10 Pueblan,
male, apricot, cool pattern.
I'm gonna do the exact same thing in my egg book here
that has all the information,
that way we can kind monitor everything and again,
with these guys about 60 days they'll hatch.
So there it is, colubrid season's on the way guys.
Clutch number two.
Taking a break from the snake eggs
to kinda hang out here over at the reptarium
and show you guys something I've been doing almost everyday,
and that's a little enrichment for my buddy Toothless.
I want him to be like Elvis when he gets bigger,
which means that I wanna have him out,
running around and kind of exploring the place.
But he's a little bit small right now
to just let him on the floor
and let him run around, so most days what I'm doing
is I'm spending like a half an hour,
sometimes even 45 minutes
just with him on this turtle barrier right here.
He just walks around, he'll climb up the pillar a little bit
and I'll let him just kind of explore.
I think it's a good way for him to just get
out of the cage enrichment.
He is such an amazing animal.
You can see there's absolutely no fear in him.
You can just pet him.
He'll hang out with you.
As I sit here like this
he'll oftentimes just climb up on my arm,
sometimes on my shoulder, and I think again,
with an animal that's as smart as Toothless and Elvis,
it's really important to give them a tremendous
amount of enrichment, so I just hang out here.
It's an amazing thing for me because I love just watching
and interacting with this guy,
and again, I think that it is just habituating him
for being an amazing animal,
even better than Elvis is when it comes to people.
He is so cool.
But as you can see, we have a lot of snake eggs going on.
By the way, these are gecko eggs,
and to give you an idea,
all of these tubs up on here are all gecko eggs.
And we just started the gecko season
so we're gonna have a lot of leopard geckos, as always.
It's absolutely amazing, but I love this time of year.
I love when we're starting to produce
and starting to ramp up, starting to get exciting.
We should start getting clutches almost every day,
and then of course hatching babies here in another
month-and-a-half to two months and that's gonna be
absolutely bonkers so I cannot wait for that.
As for now I'm gonna shut the vlog down.
Just wish you guys an amazing day.
Thank you for all your support.
Be kind to someone, and I promise
I will see you guys tomorrow.
(relaxed electronic music)