(upbeat music)
- Hey, good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
You know here at The Reptarium, as it gets to winter time,
things don't really change that much, right.
I mean we keep it up all the time,
the animals are here, we're open,
we're always interactive,
but that's not the case over at BHB.
Obviously the breeding season coming,
brumation season's coming,
all that type of stuff.
So I thought today, I'd maybe take you guys on the steps
that I actually go through with BHB and all the processes,
it's not all the same for every animal.
So what do you say, we just head over to BHB
and jump right in and have an amazing day together.
(door creaking)
And again over at BHB we're kind of gearing up
for the next kind of phase.
When it comes to actually the brumation part
which is a key part of breeding snakes.
And basically these animals have been off food now
and you can see, some of 'em are even still shedding.
We still have to spot clean and stuff like that.
But this Mexican black king is looking really good.
Definitely still looks like he wants to eat, for sure.
But these guys are clearing their self out,
and that's one of the things that we do,
is for three to four weeks,
before we go into a brumative state,
which is basically about 52 degrees,
we need to clear their systems completely out because
they won't digest when they kinda go dormant.
Now they won't go to sleep, sleep,
they'll still move around and stuff like that,
but they're not able to digest.
So if we don't actually clear 'em out
they could potentially die.
So again, we're about three weeks into this
and one of the things I wanna do is go through
and look at each and every animal,
just to get an idea of like how they're doing, right.
You don't wanna put an animal into hibernation
that isn't doing well, you know, if it's a little bit thin,
sometimes we have to keep 'em out.
And that could be a number of things,
we could actually keep 'em out for
the entire season and just say, "Hey, these guys aren't
gonna brumate this year."
Or we might just feed 'em for an extra few weeks
to kinda get 'em a little bit more beefed up,
so that they're actually in a position
where they'll go through a hibernation state.
Now you may ask,
"Why do we even brumate colubrids, right?"
Like I mean what's the purpose of it?
And by the way, if you have a pet corn snake,
king snake, milksnake, or something like that
you don't have to hibernate.
Just like over at the Reptarium,
you don't do anything.
You just keep 'em up, you keep feeding 'em.
But when it comes to a breeding standpoint
it really does help in two ways.
Number one that dormancy oftentimes
is a great opportunity to get those animals
to have that period just before breeding
almost like a trigger, right.
The dormancy and then warming up is the trigger.
It's spring time. It's ready to breed.
Let's have eggs. Let's have babies.
The other thing that happens is that males
go through somethin' that's called spermatogenosis.
Which basically where they cool down,
often times helps fertility.
That way the next season when you go to breed 'em
you're gonna have a much higher fertility rate.
So it's kinda of win-win all over the place.
Not to mention it's kinda nice to be totally honest with you
to kinda get the animals out of our hair for a minute.
What I mean by that is not that we
are burdened by them, but we can then focus
on other things while these guys are sleeping.
And once we're in this kinda part of our process
where it's basically three to four weeks after
we've been feeding.
We actually go into a revamp mode, right.
So yeah, we'll still spot clean every single day.
And by the way, this is a tangerine Honduran milksnake.
Interestingly enough, see how it's going into shed?
I've noticed that just before they go into brumation
they actually go through a shed cycle.
And then interesting enough, right after they get
out of brumation they go into a shed cycle.
So again, shed cycles in snakes actually
act as kinda markers, right.
If they go into breeding, brumation,
any kind of a thing, they kinda
use a shed cycle as a marker.
So going into brumation oftentimes you'll see a shed cycle.
And then coming out of brumation
you'll oftentimes see a shed cycle.
Again, look at that perfect example.
This Albino Nelson's Milksnake just shed out
and is ready for brumation.
Again, much like the albino tangerine Honduran milksnake.
This is just a smaller species of milksnake.
Absolutely gorgeous, and again
it's a bittersweet thing, right.
Like part of me is like excited
to put him into brumation,
cause we can focus on other things.
And that means that the breeding season
is coming up and stuff like that.
The other part of me is bummed out
because you know I'm not gonna get a chance
to see these amazing snakes for a while.
Now don't get me wrong, we still go down
and check on 'em, and look at 'em almost every single day,
but you're not actually working with them.
You kinda want to leave 'em alone, right.
You just basically change the water,
make sure everything is good,
because sometimes in brumenation
an animal just doesn't go to sleep.
It doesn't calm down, and then
if it's really restless it can actually lose weight
and potentially perish.
So we want to keep an eye on the animals every single day.
Look at this rhino rat snake right here.
Oh my gosh, that thing is amazing!
Of course we have Pinocchio nextdoor at the Reptarium.
But I love these guys,
such amazing little Vietnam rat snakes.
So absolutely gorgeous.
So the next process is gonna be
to actually revamp all of these snakes.
We go through and we disinfect every part of the cage,
because again their immune system's gonna drop a bit
when they're in brumation.
So we don't wanna have any bacteria.
We want it to be really, really clean.
This tangerine therite, is beautiful.
And again this is just about ready to breed.
I think this one will have his first breeding season
this coming up year.
So hopefully, with any luck when this guy wakes up,
he's gonna be a daddy next year.
So once we actually get through the entire revamp,
we're gonna actually just transfer these guys
from right here into our basement
that cools down to about 52 degrees.
We have a room down there that stays that temperature.
And again these guys are gonna be basically be dark,
no light or anything like that.
We only turn the light on to check 'em.
Sometimes we even just use a flashlight
for basically three months.
(upbeat music)
Now pythons in particular ball pythons
are radically different than obviously colubrids.
Now I will say this, a lot of people do a cooldown,
which is like let's say it's 82 degrees,
84 degrees something like that on the cool side of the cage.
People will drop at night oftentimes
down to like 75, 76 degrees.
We personally, actually don't drop the temperatures
at all when we breed our pythons, but we do food cycles.
So basically what happens is during the summer months
we'll be feeding a maintenance style.
Enough to keep 'em happy and healthy
and kinda keep the same body weight.
And then right around the end of October
we start really increasing the food amount.
We'll sometimes double even triple
the amount of food that females will eat.
That basically just signals the fact
that the breeding season is coming.
There's abundance of food.
So they better produce follicles.
So once we do that obviously
we have to do the same thing.
Go through all our animals and just make sure
that everything is in good shape
as far as body weight goes.
We'll oftentimes weight them to make sure
that they look good.
And then we start to inventory
to figure out what males we should breed to what females.
And then unfortunately once
we get those breeding schemes done
we have to rearrange all the animals.
Disinfecting all the cages, and all the racks,
and stuff like that to get them into breeding groups.
That way if we have a particular male that goes
to say four or five females they are all in the same row.
The last thing we wanna do is be like
oh this male goes here and over there and over here.
Just makes it more confusing.
So we have to rearrange everything.
But the first thing we have to do
is literally go through all of the females
and make sure that they are all up to body weight,
see what males that are either good to go for breeding
or new for breeding, not to mention our new stock.
So it's a lot of work on the inventory side of things.
And kinda thinking through
what males we should put with what females
because what do we wanna actually produce.
There's so many options when it comes to ball pythons.
It's absolutely amazing.
And you have to make sure you know what you wanna to breed.
You have to understand the genetics behind everything.
And sometimes you have to think
out two or three or even four years.
Maybe I'm going like, I wanna breed this male
to this female and I know
I'm gonna produce triple hets or quadruple hets.
And it's gonna take me four or five years
to eventually produce, hopefully, what I want to produce.
But you have to think those things through.
Get the inventory together, but as far as
the actual care all that really changes
for us is an increase amount of food.
The things is, is that this time of year
is so exciting, because again you have animals
that have bred in the past or maybe
you have new animals that are up to size
that are super exciting.
So you don't really know what is gonna happen.
I always talk about when you're a snake breeder
or a reptile breeder or maybe any animal breeder
oftentimes you have to think way in advance.
You know I might be thinking two or three years ago
that oh my God I cannot wait until
this particular animal is up to size
so I can put it in with this female and so on like that.
So really the things I do today
may not seem as exciting as hatching snake eggs
or cutting eggs or having babies,
but the truth is what the work we put in today
really is gonna dictate how 2020 is gonna go.
So although those kinda payoffs
are the exciting part of it.
The truth is this part's exciting for a snake breeder.
Finding out what to put together,
ultimately putting 'em together,
and just in a couple of weeks we're gonna
have males in with females.
And hopefully we're gonna have the first locks
of the year, which is super exciting.
Which will ultimately lead to those amazing videos
that hopefully we'll be shooting next summer.
Of cutting amazing clutches of eggs.
Now a lot of other pythons are just like the ball pythons.
Take for instance the Stimsons, spotteds,
childrens, savus, all those type of animals,
we breed the exact same way.
We don't really cycle the temperatures,
we just cycle the food amount.
So we're starting to increase food on these guys.
We put 'em together during the cooldown.
That's the thing that's interesting about pythons,
is they actually breed while they're cooling
or in this case increase amount of food, right.
So during that kinda monsoon season
where maybe the temperatures drop just a few degrees.
That's when they're gonna breed, unlike the colubrids
that breed when you bring 'em out
and start warming them up.
These guys breed during the kinda dormant
or slow down season.
Again they will continue to feed
throughout the entire season.
That's what makes them so different
then lets say colubrids, is the fact
that your feeding even more in
what would considered kinda the dormant
or cooldown season, if that makes sense.
So pythons pretty much all do it that way.
Now interestingly enough, when it comes to rainbow boas
and even some other boas
they'll actually cool down a little bit
and go dormant a little bit more than say pythons.
So we actually do drop these guys down
to about 76, 77 degrees, something like that range.
But we do continue to feed 'em through that period.
We're not gonna like over feed 'em,
but we're gonna continue maintain feed them
through the cooldown period,
which is typically 2 or 2 1/2 months.
And then when they warm up,
they go in together and start breeding.
So unlike the pythons, which is kinda weird
that they breed during the winter months,
these guys will actually breed during the spring months.
Leopard geckos have their own kinda thing as well.
Like I said we do brumate these guys, much like colubrids,
but they're a little bit different.
In the sense that we also take them off of food
for about 3 weeks before we put 'em
into a brumative type of state.
So we wanna make sure that all the females
are nice and big, and all the males are big
so they can handle it.
But we don't cool those guys down to like 50, 52 degrees
like we do the colubrids.
Typically we're like again, in that 65 degree range.
And that's gonna give them a nice dormant period,
which again helps with kinda that trigger
to breed as well as actually spermatogenesis with the male.
Interestingly enough, although we brumate our Leopard geckos
typically the end of November
pretty much through the beginning of the year,
you can actually manipulate their season all year long.
So if you were to actually
to have like lets say a refrigerated room
that goes down to 65 degrees, you could brumate
these guys in June and July
and then produce geckos off-season.
A lot of the big gecko producers actually
have like 6 or 8 colonies per year.
So as one's going into brumation
the other one is coming out.
Which is pretty cool that you can
actually manipulate the cycle like that.
But nevertheless, we make sure all our animals
are big, fat, and healthy before going into brumation.
And then we'll go ahead and put these guys down.
Just like the colubrids, they go dark
for about 2 months, a little bit shorter than the colubrids,
which are typically 3 months.
And then they come up and they start breeding.
And now I'm gonna throw another wrinkle
in this big, hug boa constrictor.
Probably one of the biggest boas
I've ever seen in my entire life.
But they breed a little bit different than all of 'em.
These guys actually typically breed
around the early October period.
So you're cooling 'em off.
You're putting 'em together, much like the ball pythons,
but they even breed earlier.
So if you wait until November December
oftentimes it's just too late.
You really need to get males and females together
during the October season.
And then unlike ball pythons, typically you wanna
just have one male and one female.
If you kinda spread it to 2 or 3 or 4 females
oftentimes you don't have as much success.
If you just keep a male in with a female,
like this girl right here, for like 2 or 3 months.
Oftentimes these guys will ovulate
in like December January or maybe as late as February.
And then they go into what they call a post-ovulation shed.
So from the time that they ovulate
to typically birthing there's usually about 105 days.
And this girl here, I hope she had about 50 or 60 babies,
cause this is one big boa.
And breeding reptiles can be a little complicated
because there's no kinda roadmap
that everything follows the suite, right.
Colubrids go into brumation where
they go really cold and go off of food.
Pythons we don't cycle the temperature we use cycled food.
Rainbows actually cool down a little bit,
but we continue to feed.
And then there's blue-tongued skinks.
Things like northerns and easterns,
that literally cool down again.
Much like the rainbow boas down to the mid 70s
sometimes even low 70s,
but these guys actually go off of food.
So we don't feed them during the cooldown period.
So everything is a little bit different
and that's what makes it so exciting.
Is to kinda figure out which animal needs what, right.
Every python isn't the same.
Every boa isn't the same.
You know, with the blue-tongue skinks
they actually go into that dormant period
and then as soon as you bring 'em out
you start feeding 'em up
and then you put 'em together and it's absolutely amazing.
And there's some really gorgeous blue-tongue skinks
that we are excited about.
This happens to be a hypo or what they
sometimes call a carmel, which is amazing
and absolutely gorgeous.
And then take a look at this sunrise right here.
This is just an animal that is bred
for that bright yellow pattern and color to it.
Absolutely gorgeous.
So this is what they would call a polygenic trait.
Again just breeding specifically for yellows.
And you can breed for all kinds
of different colors in these guys.
But again, this is a northern sunrise and hoo-doggie,
I hope this guy's gonna father some litters next year.
Take a look at this, this one's kinda bred
for a more pink color, and it's absolutely gorgeous.
Again this is a boy, he's ready to go into brumation
or kind of that cooldown period.
This will be the first time he breeds this coming year,
and I cannot wait to pair him up
with some really beautiful females.
Again it's kinda what reptile breeders love the most
is that although we love hatching and producing animals
the truth is we love the kinda mechanism behind it.
And the beginning of the breeding season is sometimes
just as exciting as the actual breeding season is.
So because you sit back and you think oh my gosh,
what is gonna come of a beautiful animal
like this just in a handful of months?
Back here at the Reptarium
with this absolutely gorgeous Mandarin rat snake.
And again, if you guys are keeping reptiles as pets,
you don't need to brumate, you don't need to cool down,
you don't need to do any of that stuff.
Much like here at the Reptarium,
we keep it the same all year long.
These guys continue to eat.
They thrive. They do everything all in all.
But I wanted to kinda teach you guys a little bit,
if you do wanna breed reptiles sometime in the future,
the different things for each type of species.
And keeping in mind, just because I do it
and have had success this way,
doesn't mean that someone else doesn't do it
and have success a little bit of a different way.
I wanted to give you, I don't know,
the State of the Union of BHB and where we're at
as far as the breeding season and
where we're going with brumation and all that stuff.
It's gonna be an absolutely amazing year.
So I know that although we may not
be hatching a bunch of snakes.
Although we do have one more colubrid clutch
and one more ball python clutch coming up
that we're gonna be able to cut pretty soon.
The fact is that it's still exciting
around here in the off-season.
And we have a couple projects coming up
that is gonna take us through the entire winter season.
That I think you guys
are gonna really enjoy being a part of.
In the meantime, if you guys like this video,
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Remember to have an absolutely wonderful day.
And you better be kind to somebody.
I'll see you guys tomorrow.