- [Brian] Drama, the double smiley-faced bald python.
(electronic whoosh)
Egg morning everybody, welcome to the vlog.
Let me know how your day is down in the comments,
because I love reading about you guys.
As a matter of fact, I'm about to pull some snake eggs.
That's right, more snake eggs!
I love the fact that we are
in the snake egg production season.
I tell you what, it just makes me so happy.
This happens to be another Children's python,
and look at this, this one egg is out right here.
We're gonna put this aside,
and we're gonna actually candle that egg
to make sure that the embryo is up.
You guys remember from last year,
always want the embryo to be on the top side,
because it actually forms a little air sack,
and that's how the embryo breathes.
If it's flipped, it'll actually drown, it won't hatch,
but this girl is wrapped around a beautiful clutch of eggs,
and again, she is a Children's python,
Look at that, hooo-doggy!
That is a beautiful clutch right there.
We're just gonna pop it out, oop!
Looks like we got one little slugger in there for sure.
Let's see if we can get this out.
Momma doesn't wanna let 'em go.
They are looking really good.
Let's go ahead and set 'em down.
And again, this is a little infertile egg,
and it looks like we have another infertile egg here,
so we got two infertiles, which, hey,
that isn't bad, really, over all.
The other eggs look fantastic,
and there is two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 13, 14!
14 good eggs! I think we had 12 in the first clutch,
so 14 good eggs, two slugs, 16 total eggs.
That is an enormous clutch for a Children's python,
and I am so excited because we haven't really been producing
very many Children's python the last couple of years.
The vast majority of our anteracia,
which is, of course, the spotteds, Children's, and Stemsons,
were really spotted pythons that we'd been producing,
so now we have two beautiful clutches of Children's pythons,
and we have one, two, three, four more clutches
of Children's to come, and bunch of spotteds,
a bunch of Stemsons pythons.
Oh my gosh, what a way to start the day.
I am always excited when I get snake eggs.
Pretty soon we're gonna be pulling all kinds of clutches,
so it is getting absolutely incredible around here.
Let's go ahead and candle this egg,
and just make sure the embryo's on the right side.
And basically all I do is,
I come into our utility, our sink room,
and I can turn the light out where it's dark enough,
where I can use this little flashlight on my iPhone,
and I can look inside,
and make sure the embryo is on the right side.
Let's go turn the lights off.
And what I wanna do is just shine the light.
You can see that little red ring right there.
That is actually the embryo.
So that's absolutely perfect,
I mean, the egg was definitely right side up,
which means there's a good chance that it'll hatch,
which is really exciting!
I go ahead and put this back into the egg box.
And speaking of the egg box,
just for you guys that are interested in,
maybe, how we're incubating,
we use this material right here,
which is called HatchRite, which is basically just Perlite,
and then there's that water gel isomer
that basically is mixed in.
So basically, when you touch it,
it's relatively dry to the touch,
but it keeps the humidity very high.
To see some of that isomer, just kinda mixed in,
which just looks like a clear gel, really.
And that keeps the humidity really up.
We want the humidity to be like 95 plus percent in here,
but we don't want the eggs to be wet,
so we don't want them on the wet.
All we're gonna do, is just close this up
into a box that doesn't have any holes in it,
and we're gonna check these
every couple days to recirculate the air.
I take all of my python eggs home to my home incubator,
which is a walk-in incubator,
and it stays and 89 to 90 degrees in there.
These guys hatch pretty quick,
so I think that these guys will be out
in about 45 to 50 days.
(happy music)
Wanted to make it over the the Reptarium,
just kinda check things out over here as well.
Night Fury is absolutely stunning right now!
Just shed out, and unbelievable iridescence on this animal.
Hoo-hooo-doggy! That thing is absolutely incredible,
and again, it got its upgrade to its new cage.
Loving it to death.
Definitely using a lot of the climbing elements
all over the place.
It just seems to be happier than ever.
It certainly is beautiful.
Hopefully this week, he'll eat really good,
which will tell me he's settling into his new cage,
but as of now, I couldn't be happier
with the way it's acting, and it sure is looking gorgeous!
A lot of times you guys ask us to just be real, you know,
just be in the moment, stuff like that,
so I figured I would just spend some time with Lori
as she's switching males and female Colubrids
And just kinda chit-chat.
You know, for years, I was like the Colubrid guy.
I mean, I did everything.
I fed 'em, I watered 'em, I cleaned 'em, I bred 'em,
I pulled eggs, I did everything,
but really, to be honest with you,
my life is just so busy now,
and Lori kinda took over years ago,
then last year, Eric was kinda solo,
Lori decided to get back on, because she...
- (laughs)
No, there's nothing wrong with Eric,
she just thought that she would kinda get back with it
because we have more animals and stuff like that.
- I was listening to you babble
about you doing these, but it's been a very long time
since you've done Colubrids.
- It was like, two years ago.
Two years ago I bred all the Colubrids.
- You did not!
- [Brian] I did so!
- You did not.
- [Brian] Keep movin', you're not
getting any work done that way.
- You did not, you need to shut up.
- [Brian] (laughs)
- You are a liar.
- I think it really was two years ago that I bred Colubrids.
- [Lori] No, it wasn't!
- Three years ago.
- It was like 10, 15 years ago.
- [Brian] Oh my gosh.
- Go back through the old snake bite.
- No, the truth is that I think it was
two years ago that I bred...
- Yeah, back when they were in our basement.
How long ago was that?
- No, that's not true.
But Lori is really good at this,
and basically all we're doing
is just kinda going through,
switching males into females' cages.
Basically what we do is,
we'll do about one male to every three females.
Sometimes we'll do two males to, say, five females,
depending on the groups and stuff like that.
And basically, you just rotate them through
every single day.
We give 'em a couple days off a week to kinda rejuvenate,
as well as feed and stuff like that.
But that's basically it.
Look at that snake right there.
- Yeah, so we got a plasma male
to a hypo lavender female.
- Oh my gosh, that is so absolutely...
that's gonna be a beautiful clutch right there.
I love that plasma stuff, and the plasma stuff is actually
just a lavender-diffused corn, or a lavender blood red corn.
And then we just have, again, creamsicles.
And you can really see, with this animal here,
the influence of that emory rat, right?
Creamsicle corn snakes are albino corns
bred to an emory rat.
You can really see in that animal
how that emory influences...
And that's what causes that
nice, beautiful orange in the Creamsicle.
Again, you can see the emory rat
influence in these guys, too.
Those are actually het creamsicle scaleless corn snakes,
and honestly, you know, I'm not like a big hybrid guy.
Really, when they bred emorys to corns,
it was really similar, they were subspecies of one another.
Didn't really seem to be a huge deal.
Nowadays, I'm not really big on the hybrid thing,
but most people don't even realize
creamsicle corns are an actual hybrid.
These are our mandarin rat snakes right here.
Of course, we always keep
a little bit of a moist box in there,
just because they like that.
They also like cooler temperatures,
so we always keep them on the bottom row,
keeping them a little bit cooler
than the rest of the collection.
So, if you had to say, what do think...
I mean, it's looking like a good year for us?
- Yeah, actually I really do think so.
I'm really excited about it.
I think I was filming that the other day,
about our first clutches starting to...
First sheds for our first pre-lay sheds,
so I think we're really going to...
Really gonna have a good year.
- [Brian] If you're gonna guess,
what clutches are we gonna get first?
- As always, it's always Pueblans, Mexican black kings.
They always seem to be the first,
although I do have a couple corn snakes
that I saw yesterday.
- [Brian] These are Arizona mountain kings.
- [Lori] This is a hypo, yeah.
- [Brian] This is a hypo melanistic there.
Hooo-doggy, that thing is unbelievable.
What's the project that
you're the most excited about this year?
Look at those mole and dart fire, right there, oh my gosh.
- [Lori] It'd be great to produce these for sure,
so we'll see.
- [Brian] And you can see the hypo
compared to the normal mole and dart fire,
and how they look, that's amazing,
so with any luck, we'll get some of those.
That is definitely, I'd put that in the top five clutches
I was excited about this year, so that is really cool.
You can see, like this is a group that has two males,
so that male goes in there,
this male goes in here, goes into there.
Actually, that's three males,
so this male goes into the next cage, and so on.
And there might even be something to the fact
that that make actually smells the other male's scent,
and he may wanna breed out of a dominance thing.
Something that a lot of python guys will do
is actually take the shed of another male,
and put it in a female's cage,
and that male will wanna breed.
It's just a little breeding trick that happens.
Colubrids are probably the same type of thing,
so there's certainly the scent of that animal,
and this is a beautiful apricot Pueblan right there.
It's going in, again.
Same thing, we've got multiple males,
so this male comes out of there,
goes into the next cage, and so on and so on.
And that's just how we continue to do the Colubrids,
all the way down this aisle,
all the way over to the other side, so anyways,
there's your little "real" moment
with us just hanging out,
Lori going over and doing all the work,
and I'm just kinda hanging around
with the camera in my hand, right, Lori?
- Yeah.
(happy music)
- For those of you that are having Bella withdrawals,
because it's been a few days
since my girl Bella has been in the vlog,
she is doing wonderful as always,
and her target training is going so well!
Literally, now I take that blue ball out,
and she just runs right down,
and she knows she's gonna get something,
whether it's attention or food.
Like I had mentioned in the beginning,
we were always targeting her with food,
and then we went to every third time where we would target,
we'd just give her affection.
Now we're at the point where it's about 50/50.
Half the time we're doing food,
half the time, just attention,
and nevertheless, she has picked it up so well.
She is such a smart girl.
There are days when I just wanna kinda gawk at animals
and kind of enjoy 'em.
I wanna show you a few animals we held back last year
when it came to ball pythons.
This happens to be a really interesting fire red stripe
that we hatched out, but it looks different
from everything we've ever produced from the red stripes,
so I'm really not sure what's going on.
There's definitely some other genetics going on here.
I just thought it was absolutely beautiful,
and we actually hatched two of these
kind of mystery red stripes last year,
so we thought we'd raise 'em up,
and hopefully next year, we'll get a chance to breed 'em,
if we can get 'em up to size, 'cause they're both females.
And this was another really cool animal
that we hatched out last year.
This is actually a pastel Mojave,
or what they'd call a Pastave,
but then it's a bongo that's actually het for ghost.
It just is a really cool-looking animal,
has all those really cool white markings on it,
really an interesting color.
That bongo gene is really cool.
It's a little bit cinnamon-like,
but definitely very different overall.
I'm absolutely loving it,
and I'm hoping that this girl
will get up to size next year,
and hopefully produce some eggs as well.
And then check this one out here.
This is absolutely a ripper!
This is actually a killer bee bamboo woma ball python.
Hooo-doggy! That thing is just so weird.
When it hatched out, I was like,
"Oh my God, I gotta keep it!"
This thing is just too awesome, so there it is.
Hopefully that one'll make it up to size next year too.
And just for reference,
this is basically the exact animal
as that Pastave bongo het ghost,
but this is actually a pastel lesser bongo het ghost.
So you can kinda see a little bit of the difference,
how the lesser makes it a little bit lighter,
but nonetheless, still an amazingly beautiful snake.
I absolutely love albino cinnamons and albino black pastels,
and this one's a fiesty little monkey!
It's okay, little girl.
There's nothing going on here, girl.
You don't have to be a striker, it's okay.
But she is looking absolutely stunning,
I mean, look at how beautiful that animal is!
She is definitely not very happy right now,
that is for sure.
Okay, girl, I'll put you back.
Then again, for reference,
this is actually albino black pastel.
The albino cinnamon and the albino black pastel
is pretty similar, but you can see
there's definitely some differences.
The albino black pastel is just kind of a little more white,
and a little bit higher contrast,
an absolutely stunning snake.
Whoo! How 'bout this spied girl right here?
Of course, this is a spider pied. Wow!
The white on that is amazing,
and I always say, the white on a pied is even more white
than the blue-eyed Lucys or the black-eyed Lucys.
It's definitely the most white snake
out of any of the ball pythons.
Speaking of white,
look at the white on the side of this spider calico!
Some people call these calender ball pythons.
Unbelievable, the amount of white that comes through
when you mix those two genes together.
This one here is actually a pastel
super stripe spider ball python.
The super stripe is actually an allelic animal,
which is a yellow-belly and a specter-ball python.
And, of course, then it has the spider,
and it has the pastel gene on it,
and altogether, it makes one stunning snake.
Honestly, I'm keeping a whole bunch of other snakes too,
but you know I'm also keeping Drama,
the double smiley-faced ball python.
And again, there's probably another 60 or 70 snakes
I'm raising up, as far as ball pythons,
and a bunch of other boas and pythons,
as well as a turn of Colubrids,
and even geckos, and all that kind of stuff,
but I wanted to just take a little time,
show you guys a few things,
because like I said, sometimes I just need to shut it down
and just look at some beautiful snakes.
And that's what makes my day so amazing.
Real quick update on that emerald tree ball
that we got a while ago that someone donated,
remember, it came in with some, like, blisters on it.
It looked kinda pretty rough.
It also had some mites, I hate to say it,
and we were really careful about the quarantine process.
It's completely mite-free now, I'm happy to say,
because you guys know I hate mites.
I haven't had mites in my collection for years,
and I wanna keep it that way.
Thankfully, it's completely mite-free.
Shed out, and all the blisters look like they're gone.
You can see a couple little scars on it,
because the animal probably was wild-caught.
I thought it was captive when I got it,
but unfortunately, I'm sure it was wild-caught.
I'm also very happy to say, finally,
it ate for the very first time the other day,
which is a huge thing, 'cause it is kinda thin as well.
Now the one problem I will say about emerald tree boas
is that they can have chronic regurgitation syndrome,
so let's hope this animal actually keeps it down.
You can see it's got a pretty good lump right back here,
so with any luck, it'll digest it really well.
If that happens, I think we're
on the road to success with this animal.
But again, we're gonna quarantine this
for at least another few months
before we even think about putting it anywhere else.
Will say, our other tree boa that's over at the Reptarium
has regurgitated a couple times.
I've talked to my vet.
This week, we're gonna actually treat it.
I'm gonna take you guys along on the journey
so that you know what to do if you have that type of issue.
Nevertheless, this emerald tree boa
does look like it's on the right path.
I'm excited about it, and I hope that it does well.
But again, we've got a long way to go.
So far, so good.
As the night's kinda getting to the end,
I did wanna ask you guys a question.
Today was actually a lot busier
than the vlog might have seemed,
because we had a two-and-a-half hour
birthday party here at the zoo,
we had a Cub Scout tour,
and we had a Zoo to You as well,
where we took animals and did a party.
And I didn't really film any of them,
'cause I don't want you guys to be like,
"I just don't like that part."
So let me know in the comments,
do you wanna see little bits and pieces of that,
or should I film around it?
I'm not a hundred percent sure.
I could've taken my camera and done the whole thing,
but I just felt it was a little repetitive.
I don't know what to do about that,
but I do wanna know from you guys, again.
And I know some people like it,
some people don't like it.
Regardless, that is gonna do it for me today.
I'm gonna wish you guys an amazing day,
tell you I love you and your support is amazing.
I'm gonna say, "Be kind to somebody!"
and I promise, I will see you guys tomorrow.
(happy music)