(cool music)
- Hey good morning everybody welcome to the vlog.
I hope this start of your day is incredible.
You know what?
We're gonna start our day with this.
That's right, a beautiful ball python
on a beautiful clutch of eggs.
I mean, oh my gosh, I love this time of year
and it's so exciting.
What an absolutely beautiful snake
with what looks like a beautiful clutch of eggs.
Let's go ahead and set an egg box off.
Before we pull that clutch of eggs
I wanted to show you the male like I've been trying to do.
This is actually a Pewter B lesser bongo.
So it's a pastel, a spider, it's a cinnamon,
it's a lesser and it's a bongo,
that's a lot of genes and a lot of beautiful genes.
And of course we're mixing with the pastel female
so we could get super pastels of any of that combination.
So let's go ahead, see how many eggs this girl has.
All right momma, ready?
Oh my gosh she's a pretty animal too.
And even though it's just a single gene pastel,
mixing it into a bunch of different morphs
can really make a powerhouse of an animal.
Sometimes people discount single-gene animals
a little more than they probably should.
Oh look at this,
this one is what I would call an extreme boob egg.
Not sure if that one would hatch or not
because there's only a little bit here
but there's always a chance.
What happens when you do have an egg like this
is that they'll usually hatch out super super tiny.
Oh and this female is fired up.
Come on girl, don't bite me, don't bite me.
It's okay baby, it's all right, come on,
we're just gonna take your eggs, I'm sorry.
This will be better for you in the long run,
I promise you, because we'll get her cleaned up,
we'll get her all situated and then we'll of course
get these eggs in this nest box
and then by next week hopefully
this girl will be back onto food.
Come on momma, you're good momma, you did really good.
So okay so we're gonna do this,
we're gonna have to separate this one egg out right here
just because it's actually attached.
Now if you can get to these eggs soon enough
they actually peel off pretty easily.
Once they actually totally adhere
after 10 or 12 hours,
you have a tendency of having a chance
of ripping an egg so we always wanna
get to them as soon as we can.
We have two, four, six, seven really good ones
and one extreme boob egg.
So at least seven good eggs,
maybe an eighth good egg,
I definitely wouldn't call that a slug,
I would just call that an extreme boob egg.
So momma, you did absolutely incredible,
again the combinations of these eggs are unbelievable.
We'll get this in the incubator
and we'll go ahead and wait 57 days
until we can cut this clutch and see what's inside.
Now I wanna keep teaching you guys
a little bit about breeding.
Again a lot of people get concerned about
lack of copulations or locks.
This girl was only locked one confirmed time
and that was January 20th, that's it,
that's the only one breeding we ever saw it doing.
Now that doesn't mean that there wasn't something
that we missed but we keep a pretty good eye on them.
My point is, sometimes one breeding is enough.
So if you're breeding ball pythons
or any snake for that matter,
and you only have one breeding
don't get too stressed out
'cause it can certainly be enough.
Look at, that was a beautiful clutch of eggs
with only one breeding.
We're gonna try to do a little experiment here, right?
So Bruce came to me and he said
he was doing a little research about
the quantity of food that monitors should have.
You said that about 6-8% of their body weight--
- Depending on time of year typically.
I was reading between 8-10% on the summertime
because obviously it's a lot hotter
and then obviously in the winter time
it's less, 6% typically.
- So as of now we just kind of feed things
until they stop feeding but if we can start weighing
we can have a more appropriate sized food.
So we're gonna start with Beetlejuice here
but it's a little bit hard because we're, again,
socializing Beetlejuice so we don't wanna
stress it out too much.
So we're gonna try to get it on--
- We're gonna get it on Jessica first, yeah.
- Jessica first, and then hopefully
we can get it over here to the scale
and get a weight and then we can start
actually judging about how much
food we should actually give it.
So let's just give it a go and see what happens.
So the easy part is, again,
we're gonna entice him with food,
and you can see right now even
he's immediately like, oh, I know Jessica,
and I know that means food's coming
and he's already coming down right here
and he's coming right over to her, see?
He's coming right over there 'cause he's so smart
he understands, he's starting to see it,
and now look at, he comes right out,
but he's gonna kind of come back.
We're gonna get him over here, come on,
come on monkey.
- All right, so I'm gonna try
a different tactic here Jessica.
So what I want you to do--
- He gets on you pretty good if you want me to--
- So what I want you to do is that,
and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna
try and get my hand under him.
- [Brian] Let's see, we're just slowly kind of
getting him going and stuff like that.
The hard part is here is we wanna keep them
not afraid of us so it's this slow dance
that we have to do and now that we have him out,
now he's out-out, we can maybe entice him
onto the actual bin here.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa. - It's okay, it's all right.
- Come. - It's okay buddy.
- You got a piece there. - Come on, there you go.
You're okay, you're okay buddy.
You're all right, slow, slow thing, there we go.
There he goes.
And so what we have here,
it's kind of hard to get an actual thing.
We're gonna just go ahead and get him back in now.
Slowly get him back in, there he goes.
And it wasn't a completely accurate thing
but about 400 grams, roughly.
So just really quick calculation means
that we're looking at, what?
About 35 grams of food, right?
Is that right? - That actually sounds
about right too.
'Cause if we're also factoring in like,
whole prey and essentially bone matter, things like that,
it's essentially we're looking around
that same amount, yeah.
- So about 35 grams of food
so let's go ahead and, again,
we're gonna vary it from pinkies to fuzzies
to other type, like Bruce said, bone matter,
to steak, to chicken, to fish,
whatever the case may be.
So we're gonna go ahead and just get an idea
of what 35 grams of food actually looks like.
So I've got some frozen thawed fuzzies right now.
Now first off we don't like to feed our monitors rodents
a lot, you know, it's a supplement thing, right?
So we actually wanna feed beef,
we wanna feed chicken, we wanna feed fish,
maybe eggs, all kinds of different stuff.
But every now and then rodents,
maybe every fourth or fifth meal,
something on that lines.
We wanna go about 35 grams of food with Beetlejuice per week
but we're gonna feed him about three times a week
so we want roughly about 15 grams,
12-15 grams in this particular meal.
So we'll just go ahead,
plop these guys on here 'til we get about 15 grams.
That's 17 grams right there so it looks like
we're gonna have about two fuzzies worth of meal,
about three times a week.
Again we're gonna sometimes do beef, fish, you know,
all kinds of different stuff.
But for now this will be the perfect meal for him.
And now again it's just that kind of reward for Beetlejuice
so he has that positive thread in his mind
when we're done with him after going through
the weighing and stuff like that.
So come on, Beetlejuice.
And again you can see Beetlejuice right on it,
absolutely right on it.
Didn't take him long to forget that last experience,
that's for sure, and again,
right back up here, he's right back up again,
there you go Beetlejuice, there it is, look at that.
How awesome is that?
What an amazing animal.
He's so cool. - Wow, he downed it.
- Isn't that awesome?
Again now we'll just see what he does here,
he's just hanging out, sniffing around and stuff like that,
being a good boy.
These are those little threads that we're building
so hopefully eventually he can just come out
and we want him to look at us like we're his friend, right?
So that's pretty awesome
and that's the perfect meal for him.
Now that we have that kind of scientific formulation
we have a pretty good idea that we're not gonna overfeed him
which can give him fatty liver disease
and all kinds of stuff.
But we're not gonna underfeed him so that's perfect.
So good job guys, that went perfect.
- Booyah, that was awesome.
- Good job guys.
Remember yesterday when Lori and I actually checked
and there were a couple Brooks kings laying?
Well we're gonna go ahead and pull them off their eggs.
This is actually an albino jelly Brooks right here,
absolutely stunning, Brooks king snakes.
And Brooks king snakes are cool.
They're kind of a bigger king snake obviously
from Florida and they are just absolutely, oh my gosh,
they are amazing and look at that clutch of eggs!
Hoo hoo, doggy, that's nice.
Let's go ahead and just get these guys out of here
and we'll put them in the vermiculite.
Come on little monkeys.
Ah, we'll get these over here.
These up here.
Now let's see she had two, four, six, eight, 10,
12, and that was an albino jelly tail, albino jelly.
So they should all be albino jelly Brooks
but that is absolutely incredible, 12 eggs.
Now they hatch pretty quick,
most clovers go about 60, 62 days.
These guys typically hatch in about 50 or 52 days.
So that's good, again, Lori's been killing it
with production so far so
let's go ahead and pull that other Brooks clutch.
And then the other Brooks king that actually finished
laying of course is this beautiful Anery girl.
I mean just look at how gorgeous this is,
that is one pretty snake there.
I remember when we had the very first Anery Brooks kings
and I loved them to death.
The truth is back then the fertility was really bad
and that happens with new mutations sometimes,
it takes a couple generation to get
new blood in because they say all recessives concentrate.
So you're recessing a phenotype or that color phase
but you're also having some other health issues,
right, with the eggs.
So a lot of fertility issues in the beginning
but now you can see they're absolutely beautiful.
That is one gorgeous clutch of eggs right there.
And this is actually just bred to another Anery Brooks
so all these babies should be Anerys
and they are possibly white-sided.
But we've got two, four, six, eight, 10, 11 good eggs.
So 11 good eggs, and actually,
I think there's actually one more
king snake clutch for the day.
So we're starting to heat up here.
And then this one is a super egg-citing one,
if you get the pun there.
Regardless this is actually a lavender California king snake
that's half snow and it's actually bred
to a lavender snow male.
And it's actually this male right here
which is basically an all purple snake.
So all of the babies in this clutch
are gonna be lavender like her
but half the babies are gonna be lavender patternless
which are solid purple snakes, absolutely wonderful.
So let's just go ahead,
it looks like momma just finished up,
these eggs are as fresh as could be right here
so we'll put these over here.
There's two, four, six, seven eggs.
Momma you did such a good job.
We just always like to check our females
just to make sure that they're all out of eggs
and all that other stuff and it looks like
from a health standpoint they look good.
We'll get some water in with her
and get her all cleaned up and ready to go.
So that's amazing, so three clover clutches today,
things are heating up.
This is gonna be pretty interesting to be honest with you
'cause I'm not really sure how much Elvis weighs,
I have no idea how much he weighs.
Once he comes out and kind of comes up
Bruce will get a chance to step up with him,
Bruce will hold him.
We've already zeroed out Bruce's weight on here,
then we'll get an idea.
My guess is about maybe 20, 25 pounds?
But I could be completely off, I have no idea.
- I think 20, I think on the lower end of 20.
- It might be yeah, I have no idea, I don't know.
So this will give us a little bit better chance
and again we're talking somewhere between
that 5-10% body weight feeding-wise.
Let's step up and see what we got.
All right so Bruce is gonna step on here
and we're gonna see what the weight is.
Actually 26 pounds, interesting!
He's actually bigger than I thought
'cause usually I overestimate.
I'll be like, oh, he's like 50 pounds,
so I was really thinking like 20 or less
to be totally honest with you.
But 26 pounds, so that's absolutely pretty cool.
So again if you kind of extrapolate that out
we're at about a pound and 1/3, that's once a week, right?
So we're gonna actually feed him probably
three to four times a week.
So every time we're gonna feed him
we're gonna feed him somewhere about 1/3 pound,
coming up on 1/2 pound, something like that.
So that gives us a better idea
of how much we should feed
so we can keep these guys at their ultimate health.
We do have a spotted python that laid eggs right here,
I'm just gonna slowly pull her out,
set her right here and we can see
that we have a couple eggs that are outside her body here.
She's wrapped around a beautiful clutch right here
but you can see these eggs here
and if you notice, those eggs are pretty dimpled up,
which means she probably laid them like late last night
and they're kind of drying out.
I'm gonna show you a little trick
of what I'm gonna do because we wanna try
and rehydrate those eggs if at all possible.
So I'm gonna set those guys in here like this,
we'll just set all four of these eggs
right near each other 'cause we want them to be
as near as possible.
This one looks kinda bad,
see that little sweating right there?
That's usually a bad sign
once they start to sweat
oftentimes that means the embryo has died,
not a good situation.
But nevertheless let's go ahead and get mom out,
she looks like she's got a beautiful clutch of eggs
other than the ones she laid outside her thing.
Oo, where you going momma?
There's one little slugger in there for sure.
Oop, now we're in trouble.
We have the eggs go all over the place
so now have to candle them.
No big deal these ones are good.
These ones right here we'll go ahead and candle these eggs
just to make sure that they're good.
All the eggs look a little bit dimpled,
shouldn't be a problem.
These should pop out no problem.
These ones a little bit dehydrated for sure
so let's go ahead and get momma back in there,
we'll get her cleaned up,
of course she has one little slugger here,
and she had two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 13 eggs.
13 eggs from a spotted python, not bad at all.
As a matter of fact I think that's the first
spotted python clutch of the year.
We had Stimson's pythons, we have childrens pythons,
but the first time we've had spotted pythons this year.
We'll get her in and I'll show you the trick
of how we can hopefully save these eggs.
So I just have a little bit of sphagnales moss,
this is damp, it's not wet,
because if you put something wet on eggs
oftentimes the eggs will go bad.
So we just wanna put a little bit of damp sphagnales moss
just like that on top and while we're at it
we'll just go ahead and put a little bit on these eggs too
'cause they're a little bit dehydrated.
And of course that's gonna raise the humidity
in the actual egg box itself.
I'm gonna check on these eggs everyday
because as they start to plump up,
if they get too plump they can actually drown,
so we don't wanna do that.
Now there's different ways of doing this
I mean you can use like a paper towel on some eggs
but I've noticed with thin eggs
like childrens and spotted pythons,
if you use paper towel usually you drown the egg.
When I use damp sphagnales moss seems to be
the best thing so I'll keep you updated
on how this clutch is but not bad.
Hopefully we'll get some more tomorrow.
- Well number one on my list today
is to fix what Brian has destroyed, story of my life.
So all the different areas he cut up and stuff in here,
now I have to go back and caulk and dust.
So, yeah.
Well I think I got it all fixed, only time will tell.
Hopefully he does not destroy it again,
but again, only time will tell.
- Now that we're getting all these eggs,
if you guys are looking for your baby snake fix,
you can actually check this playlist right out here,
that's all the baby snakes that hatched last year.
You can also listen to my podcast if you don't mind
called "Checking In" you can check that out
and subscribe right over there.
On this side you can actually
subscribe to this vlog channel,
turn your post notifications on, if you don't mind.
Have an absolutely wonderful day,
remember be kind to someone and I promise,
I'll see you guys tomorrow.