- Today, we have a new box of snakes to open,
and there's a bunch of babies in here.
They are garter snakes,
but what's really cool about them
is that these are our grand baby snakes.
(upbeat music)
There's a bit of a story behind these little guys,
but I think we're going to just start
opening them right away,
and then I'll tell you more of those details.
It's a really heavy box. - [Ed] Yeah.
- [Emily] Holy cow, that's why it's so heavy.
- [Ed] Yeah.
- [Emily] Are these cricket crystals?
- [Ed] Looks like it.
- [Emily] I think they are, I think that's cricket water.
That's a good insulator.
Oh, look at them!
Oh my goodness, they're adorable.
Oh!
Eaters?
That's right, she wasn't able to get all of them to eat yet.
Eaters and we must have our, that's actually pretty big.
If this is a non eater.
These must be the non eaters.
They're pretty big for not being good eaters.
I love the pill bottle idea for a little cave in transit.
That is genius.
So let's open these up and then I'll tell, oh my gosh,
there's more, holy cow!
How many are in each one?
Okay, three, three and three.
Okay, that makes sense.
We have nine babies.
Oh my goodness.
That's a beautiful little checkered garter.
Holy cow. - [Ed] Mm-hmm.
- [Emily] I'll take out one of the eaters,
and then I'll share with you their story.
Good idea, Chesney, taping the lids down.
Knowing how good of a escape artists garters are,
that was a good precaution you took.
Oh, look, they're even using their pill bottle cave.
I might have to use this idea when we ship garters.
That is genius, Chesney,
I love that you used that pill bottle.
I've never seen someone do that before,
but they're using it.
- [Ed] Two of them are.
- [Emily] Oh, oh, one, two and three.
Oh, they're so curious.
- [Ed] Are we getting food now?
- [Emily] Yeah.
Are you just gonna come out?
Hi, little babies.
Aw!
Baby checkered garters.
- [Ed] Big, baby checkered garters.
- Yeah, they are nice and big.
So what happened here was this was an accidental litter,
clutter of garter snakes.
We sold an albino checkered garter to Chesney
a couple of years ago.
I had sexed it as a male,
and so she put it, after quarantine,
with her male wild-type checkered garter snake,
but then about a month, or two months ago now,
she had babies all of a sudden in the tank.
So she had a male and a female.
It turns out the albino male that we had sold her,
I must have missed sexed,
It was totally my fault.
It must've been a female with a really long tail
which is why I thought it was a male,
and that can sometimes happen with teeny, tiny garters.
They are really tough to sex
since they're too small to probe and they're pretty fragile,
and I don't like to pop them because of how little they are.
The good thing is she had paired it with a checker garner.
So we still have pure checkered garter snake babies here,
that are, well, 100% het albino since the now mother,
the female, was an albino.
And the great news is that they look perfectly healthy.
They look amazing.
However, I felt really bad since I miss sexed that baby,
and she wasn't able to keep the entire litter, clutter,
so I offered to take them in,
and we're going to find them homes ourselves.
She has been doing a wonderful job taking care
of these babies thus far,
although working long shifts at a hospital
she's unable to take care of them indefinitely of course.
So she kind of got them started and then sent them to us.
So these are our grand babies snakes.
These are Fatness' grand babies, I guess.
So again, since their mother was an albino checkered,
and their father was just a normal,
wild-type checkered garter snake,
these are 100% het for albino,
which means if you were to breed
these the siblings together, which sounds weird, I realize,
but it actually is pretty normal in the reptile world
as long as they aren't line bred for many generations.
But anyway, if you were to breed a male and a female
from this clutter together,
you would get 25% albino checkered garter snakes.
If that doesn't make sense, we have a genetics video,
which I recommend if you haven't seen it yet,
check that out, that'll make it much more sense.
- [Ed] Those are cool 'cause these generally
don't get outcrossed that often.
- That's true.
- [Ed] They just breed two albinos,
the line's been around long enough,
nobody really works with outcrossing them
'cause they don't want to make normal babies
when they're albinos.
- [Emily] Yeah.
- We got some good bloodlines coming back
in a little bit.
- That's a really good point.
Yeah, these have a dad that's completely unrelated
to any of the albinos that are, most likely,
he's completely unrelated to any albinos in captivity.
So, yeah, they came from completely unrelated parents,
which is really nice to have when possible.
I'm sure you guys can already tell why
they're called the checkered garter,
but the scientific is Thamnophis marcianus,
but their common name, checkered garter,
comes from that checkerboard pattern
that runs along their back.
And it's really beautiful, especially in these babies.
They have some nice contrast with the checkers
and the background.
She did say that, of the nine babies there were a few
that she couldn't get eating very well,
so my guess is we've got the.
Oh, oh, here we go, poor eaters.
I didn't see the poor there.
I thought it just said eaters.
All right, so these three are our poor eaters.
Got it.
- [Ed] Which would explain why these ones look bigger.
- [Emily] Yeah, that definitely would explain it.
So, okay, I'm gonna put you back in here.
Here are some of the good eaters then.
So these I bet are quite a bit bigger.
Oh, oh yeah.
Yeah, you can tell that these have been eating well for her.
You are much chonkier!
Hi.
Hi, look at you, look at that fat belly.
Oh my goodness.
You're so chunky.
Okay, yeah, I can definitely see the difference here.
We have six that are well started
and eating all sorts of different food items
by the sounds of it.
So our plan is to set them up in baby bins,
just like we would any of our baby snakes.
We're going to ensure that they're eating regularly
and they look good.
I mean, they look good here,
but we want to observe them for a little while
before we rehome them.
And then we're going to sell them at a normal baby,
checkered garter snake price,
but we can't morally keep those proceeds
since Chesney gave us these babies,
so we're going to donate all proceeds
to the Save the Snakes Foundation.
That way it's a win-win situation.
Chesney doesn't have to take care of the babies,
we can find them good homes,
and the money will go to snake conservation.
Well, should we get them set up and baby bins?
- [Ed] Sure.
- [Emily] I think what we should do
is since we have six good eaters,
oh look at that chunky baby!
Oh, you are so fat!
You look great.
Of course these six good eaters are gonna be the ones
that we rehome first,
and we're gonna wait until the poor eaters
are eating well too before they go off to their new homes.
But I think we should house these six together
and these three in a separate bin.
What do you think?
- [Ed] Makes sense.
- [Emily] Now we can keep track of the poor eaters
compared to these guys. - [Ed] Mm-hmm.
- [Emily] Okay, well, let's get baby bins set up.
Just like any baby garter snake that we produce here,
we're going to use just paper towels as the bedding.
We're going to lightly mist them down.
And since the back of these trays will be heated,
we'll put a nice hide in the back here.
But since garters are so active
we are also going to ask some climbing structures
and other enrichment for them to explore too.
(upbeat music)
We'll add a couple rocks for them
to brush up against to shed and a couple of water dishes.
And I think we're ready for the babies.
Also kind of a fun fact,
in case you're not familiar with this type of writing
or sexing basically,
the first number would be your quantity of males,
the second number is females,
and the third number is unsexed babies.
So we have zero confirmed males,
zero females, and three unsexed in this container.
That's kind of how you read these numbers anyway.
Here we go.
We'll put our, guess since there's more of them
I think I'll put the good eaters in here.
Here you go.
Gonna check out your flower.
Aw, you're so cute.
(upbeat music)
- [Ed] Wow, he's chunky. - [Emily] Yeah, he is.
All three of these good eaters are nice and big.
(upbeat music)
Now for our picky eaters.
Here you go.
They still look good.
They don't look thin at all. - [Ed] No.
- [Emily]] Chesney, you did such a good job
raising these babies even though they were unexpected.
You did a fantastic job feeding them
and raising them so far.
- [Ed] I like how they all have an orange dot on their head.
- [Emily] Yeah, I think that's really cute too.
We've noticed that with like Prius's babies too.
Oh, we've got the choo-choo train going.
(imitates train chugging)
Go, go.
Oh, the train just stalled. - [Ed] Nope.
There he goes.
- [Emily] Oh, departure, go on train.
Go, go.
And into the tube. - [Ed] Tunnel.
- [Emily] Tunnel.
Oh my gosh, these babies are so cute.
I can't wait to breed checkers again.
- [Ed] Mm-hmm.
Speaking of that,
we actually got some other things
to help us breed checkereds.
- Yes, speaking of other garter snakes,
as many of you know, we did lose Fatness,
our big albino checkered garter over the winter
during burmation.
We don't know what happened.
We just checked on her one day and she had passed away,
which garters are unfortunately known for.
So we did not produce any albino checkereds this year,
and we were kind of bummed about it,
but then Ed came across an ad on Craigslist
for a female albino, checkered garter snake,
and we totally bought her.
We totally got her right away.
And it gets better.
We believe this is one of our babies from two years ago.
Based on where the previous owners got her
from somebody else in the Minnesota area,
we don't know of any other breeders in this area,
and we know it was picked up from a local breeder.
I think that breeder was us.
We are 99% sure that this is one of Fatness' baby girls.
And now she is a beautiful adult
and we are so excited to finally have a chance
to breed albino checkereds again next year.
So she was a fantastic pickup.
She looks awesome.
She looks just like Fatness too.
- [Ed] Mm-hmm.
- Maybe I'm just stretching it, I don't know,
but I think it's just too much of a coincidence
for this not to be one of our babies.
So we're so excited.
We're just going to assume it is one of ours,
and yeah, we cannot wait to breed her next year.
She should be big enough next year to breed.
- [Ed] So what kind of name
are we going to come up with for her?
If she's got to live up to her mom, Fatness-
- Mistress.
Fatness II? (both laugh)
- [Ed] Back with a vengeance.
- Fatness, back with a vengeance.
Yeah, I don't know.
- [Ed] Well we'll have to come up with some kind
of a punny name.
- It would be nice to keep
Fatness somehow in her name.
So if you guys have any recommendations,
comment them below.
But we need a good, Fatness the Second,
or Fatness Continued, Fatness Squared.
- [Ed] Fatty. - Just Fatty.
(Ed laughs)
- We could call her Rolly Ru.
- [Ed] Husky Hilda.
Maybe the comments can help us out with this one.
- Help us, please. - [Ed] Yeah.
- So yeah, lots of fun garter snake stuff
happening over here.
And we should have even more fun next year
with more albino checkered garter snake babies again.
Let me put Fatness II back,
and let's go back to those babies one last time.
Which actually that would mean she is the aunt
to these babies. - [Ed] Yup.
- That's cool, I didn't think of that.
All right, well here are Fatness',
well, that's Fatness' daughter,
these are Fitness's grand babies.
We've got a partial family reunion here.
- [Ed] Yeah.
- It's so cool to see her line continued.
So yeah, we're gonna hang on to these babies
for at least a couple of weeks to make sure
that they are eating well,
and well-established babies.
Even though Chesney has been giving me a lot of updates
on these guys as she's been raising them
and I know they're going to be just fine,
but we'd like to hang on to them for a little bit,
just to be safe.
And then we will be going through
our garter snake waiting list.
The people who are still on the list
'cause we didn't produce albino checkers this year,
I'm gonna see if anyone on that list
is interested in het albino checkereds.
And if we have any leftover at the end,
then I'll be putting them on the website.
So keep an eye on snakediscovery.com website
under available reptiles.
If we have any extra, after going through the waiting list,
we'll post them on there.
And again, since we would feel morally wrong
keeping proceeds from these babies from Chesney,
all proceeds are gonna go to the Save the Snakes Foundation.
It's an awesome organization that promotes the conservation
of snakes worldwide.
Thank you everybody watching today's video.
And as always thank you to our amazing Patreon supporters
for all of the support that you've given us on this channel.
And thank you too, of course,
those of you who are just here, hanging out with us,
watching reptiles and the learning about garter snakes.
Thank you everybody.
And we'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)