- Hey.
Good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
Today is gonna be amazing, and I hope the start of your day
is amazing because my friend's Desiree,
of course Forrest's wife, and Steve are coming
and they're bringing us something that we wanted
to get in here since the beginning of Reptarium.
It's gonna be absolutely incredible,
but first we actually have to set that cage up.
- What is going on guys?
Today is the day.
So, today I actually find out that I get to see my big boy,
the crocodile monitor, that we've been waiting
for so, so long.
I've been obsessed, I mean absolutely obsessed,
with crocodile monitors, guys.
I've been reading, researching,
watching all these cool videos.
All these awesome people out there doing great, great work
with them, and man I can't wait to be one of those people
doing the same thing, so like, man I gotta get started
cleaning some of the glass.
Get a few of those little smudges 'cause I don't know
about you guys, but I've been drooling over this cage
on a daily basis.
Make it look really, really nice for this boy
'cause we really wanna make him happy and make him feel
at home, so let's get started guys.
Let's do this.
(upbeat music)
- Down in the dungeon, which means, what?
Down in the dungeon, which means what time is it?
Snake time.
And I'll tell you what, we have a banger clutch right here.
This is a crazy, crazy cool clutch.
It's actually a pastel enchi.
Bongo.
Look at this girl.
Oh my God that is such a pretty animal
and she was actually bread to this banana clown.
That's right.
So, everything is gonna be hefri clown.
There's gonna be banana hefri clown.
There's gonna be banana bongo hefri clowns.
Potentially enchi pastel bongo hefri clowns.
I mean there's all kinds of stuff.
It's gonna be incredible.
One of the coolest kind of future clutches that I produce
this year to be honest with you 'cause we'll probably hold
back most of these animals and hopefully down the road
we can actually produce a banana pastel enchi bongo clown.
How crazy would that be?
So, let's just go ahead and see what kind of eggs
this girl has.
Looks incredible.
Okay momma.
Time to get off your eggs.
Oh my God.
It looks like a beautiful clutch, too.
Absolutely perfect.
Not even one bad egg.
Oh my God.
I am so excited about this.
We're gonna just slowly get these eggs off here real quick.
Get 'em off the paper.
These eggs here.
And the final few eggs over here,
and we have two, four, six, seven good eggs.
Oh my gosh.
When these things hatch out, you cannot believe
how excited I'm gonna be.
This, down the road, is gonna be
an absolutely exciting project.
I cannot wait for 57 days to see what's in these eggs.
Next up is actually a yellow belly female that's actually
just bred to a pastel ivory, so ooh.
It looks like we might not have some good eggs in here.
We're gonna take a look.
Oh mama.
Oh, it's okay.
Yeah, we definitely have some slugs in here,
but we also have some good eggs.
Good.
At the top, all I saw were these three nasty slugs
and I thought, "Oh no, an entire slug clutch."
But the good news is down on the bottom here, no.
Mama is upset.
Down at the bottom here we actually have
some pretty good eggs, so we're gonna go ahead
and try to get the top without mama trying to bite me.
It's okay girl, come on.
So, we're just gonna go ahead and put this.
Mama is angry for sure.
So, in the end it wasn't that bad of a clutch.
We've got two, four, five good eggs.
Three slugs, so like I said, when I first saw those slugs I,
oh my God.
We really haven't had, I don't think even one full slug
clutches here.
Fingers crossed I didn't just jinx myself.
The point is, still the fertility's been great this year
and that's it for ball pythons for the day.
Well, we're having a pretty good year with these guys,
aren't we?
- Yeah, the cave geckos.
There's one more that should hatch out pretty soon.
This one's in shed right now.
- [Man With Long Hair] Oh my gosh, it's so cute.
They're so tiny.
This one's more tinier than the other ones I think.
- You wanna see it next to a leopard gecko?
- [Man With Long Hair] Oh my gosh.
And this gives you an idea of the difference between
the size of a cave gecko and the size of a newly born
leopard gecko.
Definitely pretty interesting, right?
But we got lots of cave geckos this year.
(upbeat music)
(drilling)
Certainly something I've been excited about
since we opened up like you guys know,
my good friend Forrest was supposed be bringing up
a croc monitor, you guys know the story,
obviously he passed away.
We're really excited today, Desiree and Steven
are coming up.
They're bringing the croc monitor,
so we have the cage all fixtured out, all planted out now.
Get a couple little final touches and then we're gonna be
getting a croc monitor today.
I am beyond excited and I know Bruce and Justin are excited.
This is a pinnacle animal when it comes to monitor lizards,
so I think we're all set here and now we're just waiting
for this beautiful animal to arrive.
Like I've been mentioning, for a limited time you can get
your cool shirts here, of course Ivy and Lucy,
and they are absolutely super comfy, as you can see.
Wrap around itself like that.
They're my favorite merch that we've done as far as comfort
and just kinda cool.
If you like it, link in the description.
They'll be available for the next couple weeks.
(upbeat music)
So, obviously we've got Des and Steve here.
I know, Bruce, you're super excited.
- Oh dude, I'm shakin'.
- [Man With Long Hair] Shakin' so, we obviously,
it's just not only an animal we've been dreaming about,
but emotionally it's probably, there's a lot to this animal
for me, and for you guys too.
- Yeah.
- [Man With Long Hair] So, what we're gonna do first
is we're gonna actually weigh the container
because you said it's a little bit tricky.
- A little bit, yeah.
- [Man With Long Hair] Bruce, so what we're saying is,
so Bruce has his work cut out.
Croc monitors are super intelligent,
but with that intelligence comes some danger
because they're very just, they're teeth are unbelievable.
We don't want any accidents, so we want to get a baseline
of weight before we start knowing what to feed it.
The good news is you guys said that it'll take it off tongs.
- Yup.
- [Man With Long Hair] So, that's great.
Feeding off of tongs, that makes your job a lot easier.
We want to know how much body weight it has
so we can see what percentage of food we feed it,
so we're just gonna weigh this, and then we're gonna put
the croc monitor away, and then we'll go back and weigh
that empty and we'll subtract
because it doesn't sound like we're gonna be able
to actually put the croc monitor on the actual scale,
so let's just go ahead and try it.
- [Bruce] 9.5.
- [Man With Long Hair] 9.5.
All right, so 9.5.
Four point?
- [Bruce] Four kilos.
- 4.4 kilos, so we're gonna go ahead
and get the croc monitor out now.
I'm nervous.
I'm excited.
And Bruce should be scared, but we're gonna go do that
and then we'll see what happens from there.
Okay, here we go.
I just can't wait to see this animal.
It is so cool.
So, Bruce is gonna go in here.
Des is gonna just kinda help a little bit.
Again, we want as little stress as possible.
We want him to get settled in, and we may even have to build
some hiding areas in here,
so that it feels really comfortable.
This is just a starting point, so let's see how things go.
Oh my gosh.
That thing is ridiculous.
Oh my goodness gracious.
Oh my gosh.
Oh.
He immediately.
Now he's just kind of in that flight mode
where he's just trying to figure things out.
It's gonna take him awhile.
Again, this animal is something brand new and stuff
like that.
We're gonna take plenty of time to let him settle in,
but this is literally like one of, a lot of people
with monitor lizards will say this is like the pinnacle
of all the monitor lizards.
It's absolutely gorgeous, and of course,
a captive bred animal.
Forrest, and Des, and Steve have been loving this,
these animals forever, and we're just so grateful
that we can now have something like this
that is so amazing and I'm not gonna lie to you,
it's more than a lizard.
It's just something that I can remember every day,
and I'm so grateful for it.
Thank you Des.
And thank you Steve for letting me do this.
We're gonna take care of this guy so well,
and we're gonna love him and Forrest is gonna be so proud
of us for what we're gonna do for this.
We're just gonna sit back and enjoy for a little bit, okay?
(upbeat music)
And now that the croc monitor's kind of settling in,
we do want to reweigh this box,
just to see how much this weighed,
that way we get an idea approximately
how much this guy weighs, so this was at,
now it's at 8 pounds,
so it's about a pound and a half roughly.
Right in that range.
And again, once we get it calmed down,
we can get a much more accurate weight,
but at least now we have a jumping off point,
about a pound and a half, and then we can feed it about 8%
of its body weight for a week, but I'm overjoyed.
I'm, I can't even explain all the emotions
that I'm going through right now.
You know, happiness, sadness, all kinds of different things,
but it's amazing that it's here and to me, in a way,
that completed The Reptarium now.
That was the one thing that we're kind of
still not done with, and now it's done,
and that's amazing, and I know that we're carrying on
two dreams, my friend Forrest, because he dreamt
of owning a zoo, and I know he'd be proud of us right now,
and he knows how many people are gonna have amazing
experiences with his croc monitor, and I can't thank Des
and Steven enough for coming up and bringing this beautiful
animal to us, and I can't wait until you guys come visit
to see it, but wow what an emotional rollercoaster.
It's awesome.
That's all I have to say.
It's been pretty amazing here, we've just been kind of
watching him for the last maybe 10 minutes
and after he got settled in, you could see he turned
to kind of an intelligent mode, right?
He's just looking around, sniffing, he's seeing,
he's visually kind of taking it in.
He's taking in the senses.
He's kind of just walking around wanting to know everything,
right?
And I hope that he really settles in to this environment.
Again, if we have to make some changes, we will.
We want this animal to really, really calm down
and feel secure and confidence, and I mean,
it's just amazing to see how smart they are.
It's next level.
I mean, this is what I dreamt about for this closure,
since we opened, and again, like I said it's emotional,
but the fact that we have that here, and I can again
remember Forrest every day when I look at this animal,
and it's gonna bring so much joy to so many people,
and I know he would love that so much
that it's so important, so I've always hoped that one day
I'd have a croc monitor, and it's amazing
that we now have it here at The Reptarium.
Guess what time it is?
Colubridae time.
That's right.
Clubridae time.
And this is actually a second clutch
from a Mexican black king snake.
And of course second clutches are often times smaller,
but she looks really good.
For laying two clutches, this girl actually looks wonderful.
So, we'll go ahead and get her again, cleaned up.
We'll get fresh water in with her.
All those good things.
Let's see what kind of clutch she has.
Hopefully it will be good eggs.
Ooh yeah.
Look at those.
Those are not a lot of eggs,
but boy big old eggs right there.
Look at that.
Beautiful.
Those are four eggs that are perfect.
I think she laid six eggs the first time, so all and all,
10 eggs this year from the Mexican black king.
Not bad at all.
Love those guys.
Super popular.
So, they'll be hatched out in a couple months.
This next girl's actually an albino jelly brooks king,
or a South Florida king snake.
You can see how absolutely incredible she is.
I mean, look at how beautiful that snake is.
I love the South Florida stuff,
and these guys are really gorgeous,
and she laid a huge first clutch.
I remember her first clutch was 20 eggs,
so let's see how many eggs she has this time.
And here we go.
Oh my gosh.
Another beautiful clutch.
Certainly not 20, but still a big, big clutch
for a second clutch.
Got two, four, six, eight, 10 beautiful eggs.
That means she laid 30 eggs this year.
That is a good female, and the thing is,
is that honestly when you're hatching babies from animals
that have high fecundity, which is a lot of egg count,
you actually produce babies that can then have
a lot of egg count, so you can manipulate the amount
of babies produced believe it or not.
If you want big babies with less eggs, you can breed
that through generations, or if you want smaller babies
with lots of eggs, you can do that as well,
so this girl has nice big eggs, and a whole bunch of 'em.
(upbeat music)
So, there it is guys.
What an emotional rollercoaster here with this animal.
It is unbelievable.
I mean, croc monitor, dream animal.
The story behind it is amazing.
We're gonna have so much interesting experience
with this animal.
I cannot even tell you how awesome it's going to be.
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Have an absolutely wonderful day.
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