- Hey, good morning everybody
and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is amazing
or whenever you happen to be watching.
I'm not gonna lie to you,
my day's a little bit stressful
and I'm about to tell you why.
I'm climbing in with my girl Ivy here,
and Ivy is just hanging out in her water.
(water splashing)
But the last couple of days I've kind of noticed
that she's been gaping her mouth just a little bit.
Every now and then I'll just see her up here,
usually on the rock
and she'll have her mouth open just a little bit.
These are little things that you notice
when an animal might have a little respiratory
or sickness infection.
And I'll be honest with you last night before I left
I spent a little time with Ivy,
and she had a couple little bubbles
that were coming out of her nose.
And like I said,
she was having a little bit of a hard time breathing,
just barely, but I figured this was a great opportunity
to number one, talk to you guys
about what's happening with Ivy,
and maybe help you if you ever have this situation,
and what to do next.
You guys know that Ivy is legitimately top three animals
that I've ever had in my entire life.
I mean, I love this animal more than anything,
and if anything were to happen to her,
I literally don't know how I'd recover.
I mean, that's how important she is to me.
I love her so, so much.
And to be honest with you
I'm really happy coming in here this morning.
You can see we put a thermometer here in the water,
just to start getting an idea what the temperatures are,
because that's the first thing you're gonna wanna look at is
what's the cause of a respiratory infection
or a slight cold in a reptile.
Now I will say that the water was about 82 degrees
which is above where we want it,
and she's acting really good.
You can see her tongue is coming out really good.
She's moving around well.
I don't see any more bubbling and stuff like that
and she seems to be okay.
But I definitely have to nip this now in the bud
rather than letting it get worse.
Because once your respiratory infection settles in
deep into the lungs of an animal,
it becomes a major problem.
So what do we do?
What do we do if we have an animal like Ivy
that is just got a slight respiratory infection?
And you can see my guy, Aries over here
is doing extremely well too.
And that's kind of the whole thing.
And again, it's so weird.
Look at how Ivy is, she'll just be sniffing my feet.
She kind of just kind of hits (indistinct),
that's good, she's acting normal.
Her tongue response is good.
She's not gaping her mouth all the time, she's in the water,
all these types of things, but you have to remember
that reptiles are what they call ectothermic,
coldblooded, right?
So whatever the environment is,
is what temperature they are.
And you know with humans
we actually get a fever raise the temperature
to kill off bacteria, reptiles can't do that.
So the first thing I'll do,
is make sure that we figure out
what the temperatures are in here.
And to be honest with you when we checked,
the hotspot was about lower 80s, 83, 84 degrees.
I would actually like,
this is so good to see her come up, just emerging like that.
I mean I'll tell you what guys,
that's why I love this animal so much
and nothing can happen to her.
And like I said, that's why I got in the water this morning
and wanted to really check her out.
She's acting so normal, so good.
Now there's a couple of things I have to work on.
Again, now work on the temperature.
So what we're gonna do is number one,
we're gonna up the wattage of the bulbs.
Try to get locked to the hotspot,
maybe upper eighties, lower nineties.
The other thing we're gonna do is
this is the first time we've had this part of the reptarium
here in the winter, right?
'Cause we opened up in March of last year
at the end of the winter.
And of course we've got the doors right over here,
which are probably a little draught coming in here at night
with the heat lights going out,
the temperature may be dropping a little lower
than what we want, right?
So what we're gonna do is not only switch out the hotspots
to a little bit hotter bulb
so that it'll get a little warm in here,
but also at night we're gonna have red lights come on.
So that there's heat in here, 24 hours a day.
Now 90% of the time, especially in the very early stages
like Ivy is right now, we're probably gonna be okay,
and she's probably gonna kick this
within a very short period of time.
But I'm gonna definitely keep an eye on her
in the next steps that we would do if it got worse
which I don't think is gonna happen
is we bring our vet in
and start talking about potential medication.
But right now, if you ever have a snake
that just slightly gape, maybe a couple of bubbles,
maybe just a couple little things you notice,
I'm gonna take you through the steps again
of what we're gonna do to try to make sure Ivy is good
and that your snake can actually get too.
Because like I said guys, I can't,
nothing can happen to this snake, I love her so much.
And by the way, I have a little guest here.
What's up Aries?
What is up with anacondas man?
I mean, it's the weirdest thing.
I didn't even know he was by me.
He just all of a sudden crawls right up.
I mean, I know Aries does it, Ivy does it
maybe all anacondas are like this.
It is the weirdest things, I'm gonna be honest with you.
But the other thing is I wanna keep an eye on Aries too
because Aries is in the same environment as Ivy, right?
So if he's acting and seeming completely normal
like he does, that's a great sign, right?
That means that he's doing well.
If both of them were starting to get sick,
I'd know the temperatures are way off
and I had to correct something immediately.
I think there's just a little bit of tweaking
that needs to happen, but nevertheless,
I mean, as much as I think Ivy is the most curious
and unbelievable animal, I mean come on guys.
An anacondas just crawls up to just out of nowhere.
He was over there, crawls up
and just kind of like hangs out with me
like, "Hey dad, what's going on?"
Fricking green anacondas and here's Ivy.
She's like, "What's up too?"
She's over here, I think,
my gods guys I love anacondas and like I said,
I'm so happy she seems to be acting pretty normal today.
Last night I'm not gonna lie to you I lost some sleep.
I didn't sleep well last night
'cause I was pretty stressed out about her.
Just leaving last night knowing she had some bubbles,
gaping her mouth, really really bothered me.
But I knew I had to get in here this morning
and make those changes.
So let's go ahead, jump into those changes
and start talking about everything else
while these guys are just curiously snipping away at me.
What crazy animals.
So first thing that's so important
when you're keeping a reptile
is to understand what the temperatures actually is.
You can go and go, "Its the hotspot."
But if you don't know what the hotspot is
it's not gonna help, so we use a temperature gun, right?
There's a whole bunch of different temp guns
that you can get, some that are for the reptile hobby.
Some that actually are for other things
that you could use as well, its just a laser pointing thing.
So I know that the cool side is over here
where I'm pointing, you can see where the laser is,
right over by Aries and it's 82 degrees over here.
And that's got one hotspot on it.
This is the hot side of the cage and it's at 86 degrees,
almost 87 degrees, so it's really not that far off, right?
We want it probably right now about 90, maybe 91 degrees
at the absolute most, right?
You can see we have two heat lights on this side
and one heat light on that side
'cause we want that temperature gradient, right?
We want the hotspot on this side
and then the cool spot that they can get away.
But the thing you've got to remember
if we warm this entire cage up
by three, four or five degrees,
the water is also gonna warm up,
that's 82 degrees right now.
So if we can get the water to maybe 85 degrees,
the hotspot to 90, 92 degrees,
the cool spot still in the low eighties,
it gives them a chance to get away from the heat
if they want to, so by doing that what we're gonna do
is add another light over to the hotspot over here.
Lets do another heat spot over here
and then we're gonna add red lights
so that they will go on at night.
So these lights would go off at night
but the heat will still keep going.
It'll drop a little bit,
but at least it won't drop quite as much at night, right?
So the first thing we're gonna do
is just add that extra light up here
and increase the wattage just a little bit.
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(upbeat music)
You can see, I just added another fixer up here
and again, now we just need to add the red lights
but we like to use PowerSun if at all possible
'cause not only are they 160 Watts
so they're gonna put off a pretty good amount of heat
but also they give off UV light as well.
So it's kind of a good thing, much more expensive bulb
but it really does work well.
So with these now four lights for heat during the day
we should be able to raise that temperature
by at least five degrees.
So that should in itself hopefully solve the issue.
So that basically covers the temperature side of things
and trying to get things together
if you ever have this type of an issue.
The other thing that could happen is humidity, right?
If the humidity is too low or sometimes too high
it can cause respiratory or sickness as well.
In this case, we know the humidity is okay
because there's 500 gallons of water and a waterfall.
So there's plenty of humidity for these guys
which is completely fine,
so that doesn't have to be an issue
but it's something that you should pay attention to.
Get a hygrometer, make sure your humidity
for your particular species is where it should be.
with anacondas, we're looking at probably about 55-60%
which is at least that in here no problem.
And again, I'm continuously kind of monitoring
her actions, right?
I mean, she looks fine.
Her mouth is completely shut, not gaping at all right now.
I don't see any like excess bubbles or moisture
or anything like that, so I'm gonna keep an eye on her,
really for the next couple of weeks,
and hopefully this will be eradicated, 'cause like I said,
I'm less stressed today than I was yesterday.
Yesterday when I really noticed it, I was freaking out.
I'm glad that she looks even a little better today
which tells me it's probably not progressing.
Now the last thing that I'm gonna really do
with this girl is you gotta remember
that snakes have what they call air sacs,
which are like lungs, right?
But they run basically about three quarters of the body
all the way down here.
Now when you feed them
obviously that air sac is gonna get compressed, right?
And you know that we just fed Ivy a pretty big pig
just about a week ago.
That of course is gonna put a lot of pressure,
and you can kind of see.
I just wanna see what she's doing with her mouth right now.
Okay, she's going back in but she's not opening her mouth.
That was the movement that I saw yesterday
when she would kind of back up, she would open her mouth
and gape, a little bit of bubbling coming out,
so I'm glad that that didn't happen.
But again, that puts pressure on when you feed a big meal.
I'm gonna give her another week off of food,
just so that she can completely digest.
Then whenever a snake has even the slightest amount
of sickness, you wanna feed small meals.
So for the next probably two months
she won't get a giant pig.
She's gonna get two, maybe three pound pigs.
Maybe I'll feed her once every five to seven days,
small meals, keep that kind of nutrition going
'cause you want the nutrition to be there
so the immune system is at the highest it possibly can be.
That's the thing, when a snake gets sick
and then goes off of food,
that's the double punch right there
because now they're not getting nutrition,
their immune system isn't going up and they're actually sick
and that's when things can get bad.
So right now we're in pretty good shape.
I just figured this was a good opportunity
to teach you something as it was, as I was freaking out
about one of my favorite animals I've ever had.
So fingers crossed,
I'll keep you guys updated over the next little bit.
I think these simple fixes are gonna be enough.
And again, because this is our first winter over here,
we're learning, we have to learn these types of things
and I'm sure that this will really solve the issue.
But please send me positive energy guys.
Keep Ivy in your thought, she's gotta be okay,
but I think we're on the right path.
And I hope that this kind of helps you guys
if you ever have a similar issue.
Back to how snakes can get RI or get sick.
And RI just means respiratory infections
so a sickness and stuff like that.
You'll see bubbling, gaping of the mouth,
that type of stuff, wheezing.
It does happen, it's about really early detection.
Cupcake here is obviously very healthy.
You can see she's got a really good tongue response.
Everything looks good.
So basically what you wanna do is always get things early.
If you actually pay super, super good attention
to your animals,
you can actually get rid of those types of issues,
if you find them, right?
Again temperature, humidity, you can just see right now
I'm just feeling her, she's on the cool side of the cage.
And she feels a little bit cool, which is fine.
She's decided to come to the cool side of cage.
She can go to the other side of the cage that's much warmer
and I'm keeping an eye on temperatures,
I'm keeping an eye on humidity
and then I'm just keeping an eye on how she's acting, right?
You can see her tongue response is really good,
her eyes are really bright.
I talk about that sometimes their eyes seem to be bright
when they're happy and stuff like that.
So all those things are really important, right?
So early detection is the way to do it.
When people hear about a snake or a reptile getting sick
they oftentimes think, "Oh no, it's gonna die."
That's not the case at all.
If you can catch it early like we did with Ivy,
there's really a 99% success rate bringing it back.
As long as there's not some underlying issue
that's much worse
than say just a little bit of a cold, right?
So just keep an eye on your animals.
Really pay attention to how they're acting,
where they're acting and stuff like that.
And if it does happen to you, follow those things,
get the temperature up, get the humidity up,
do everything, small meals, stuff like that.
And there's a very good chance that your animal
will rebound very quickly.
Again, stress can be another thing.
Reduce stress as much as possible.
And it's not a death sentence by any chance.
But like I said, definitely gotta keep an eye on Ivy.
I'll keep you guys posted.
I know you guys love her as much as I do
so we'll get her good
but definitely a little bit of a stressful night last night.
Definitely feeling better about it today.
So again, I'll keep you guys updated on Ivy
and how she's doing,
and I hope that this will help you guys understand,
just what to look for
and what to do if you do see something like that.
And again, she's looking fine, she's,
those bubbles are air bubbles,
not anything else just coming out, her tongue's fine.
So I'll keep you guys updated again.
Please just keep sending those positive vibes.
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