- Hey good morning everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is truly incredible.
I'm actually gonna get my day started with feeding
my little baby emerald tree boa, it's absolutely adorable.
So I thawed out a little pinkie here,
we're gonna go ahead and just feed this little monkey
right here, come on, come on little monkey, come on.
There it is, there she took it.
All right, just took a little bit.
Sometimes you have to tease these guys a little bit
as babies but that thing is absolutely incredible.
I love little baby emeralds, and again you know,
it's cool that they have that red coloration as a baby,
and then obviously go through that ontogenetic change
and then turn into a beautiful green color
as they get older, so, we have a lot going on today,
and actually Bruce is gonna be bringing in
a snake that is gonna be pretty cool.
I think he's bringing it in for Eric, ironically enough,
so we're gonna have a chance to not only
mess with this snake but also talk about
how that could pertain to the future of the Reptarium.
(techno music)
And of course, Ivy messed up her water pretty good again,
so this seems to be a daily task, that's for sure.
It's just about that big meal,
once she gets all of that waste out,
she'll go a week or two where we'll hardly
have to do any maintenance, but in the mean time,
every single day I've had to drain her water,
get in there and clean it,
so just one more task for the day.
But that's okay, I love that animal,
and she is completely worth it.
Oh and by the way, let's just push our problems aside
and have a great day together.
This is pretty interesting.
Of course our giant leaf tail gecko,
is a Uroplatus fimbriatus, is starting to shed,
and that's how a gecko actually sheds.
It's almost like a piece of clothing
is coming off like that, and interestingly enough,
geckos like this will actually eat their shed.
That's how they do it, so I'm sure there's probably some
nutritional value there, I'm not 100% sure why they do it,
but it's pretty interesting,
and I just caught her in the act of shedding now.
Here in the next probably half hour or so
that'll all be gone and she'll have ingested it,
which is pretty cool.
And look at those eyeballs, holy moly.
(upbeat techno music)
All right, so I found a clutch of eggs for the day.
We're still keeping one clutch eggs a day at least,
which is always nice, again like I mentioned before,
we're probably gonna be getting multiple clutches.
There's gonna be days where we have eight,
nine, 10 clutches but this is actually a pastel female,
so let's go ahead and take her down,
and we'll take a look and see what she's got.
Whoo, look at that clutch, whoa mama!
Whoa, she almost got me in the face there
as I was so excited about the eggs I forgot,
whoa, it's okay mama.
So let's go ahead, get this clutch of eggs.
Wow, that is a beautiful clutch of eggs right there.
Before we pull that female's clutch I actually
wanted to show you the male,
this is actually a super enchi pinstripe.
So the way that works because it's the super version
of an incomplete dominant enchi,
all of the babies are gonna come out enchi.
Every single of one of them in the clutch,
and then there are gonna be pinstripes,
there's gonna be pastels,
there's gonna be all kinds of different stuff like that.
So pretty cool, beautiful male,
not one of the highest end clutches I'm producing this year,
but nevertheless, beautiful babies should be coming
from this girl, let's go ahead and pull those eggs.
And back to my mama who is really fired up.
She is a good mom, you're being a great mama.
I know, I'm sorry girl, it's okay baby,
it's all right, it's okay, calm down.
But look at this clutch of eggs right there.
I love it when they lay 'em real flat like that,
it's okay, come on mama, come on, stay over here.
Gonna slowly try to get these eggs away right here.
Hopefully mama, oh, she's protecting good.
I'm gonna have to put mama aside for a minute
so I can get these eggs out of here.
All right, so now we have a little peace.
Poor mama was certainly excited,
and what'll happen is we'll actually clean this
enclosure out so there's no like,
smell of eggs or anything like that,
and that'll calm her down tremendously.
Sometimes we'll even put them in a little bit of a bath
with a drop of liquid soap actually,
and it just gets all the smell of egg off.
It just resets them from being that maternal kind of,
you know, protective animal, into actually calming down,
and then hopefully we can get her onto food
in the next week or so, and she'll be back and rebound.
But this is a beautiful clutch, we've got two,
four, six, eight, nine eggs.
I mean, nine eggs and she's not that big of a girl,
so that was a beautiful clutch, and again,
it's not a super exciting potential clutch,
but still some really gorgeous babies coming outta here
'cause again, everything should be enchi,
we could have pastels, we could have super pastel enchis,
we could have super pastel lemon blasts,
we could have super pastel enchi lemon blasts,
so there's a lot of really cool stuff that can come out,
and with nine eggs we have some pretty good odds.
So hey, I'll take that every day of the week.
(techno music)
Guys take a look at this, this is a true treat.
Of course Bruce brought this in for us
to kind of take a look at,
this is actually an Eastern copperhead.
And interestingly enough, I hate to say it,
but when I was 17 years old my first venomous snake
that I ever owned was a little copperhead.
I've just always loved these guys.
There's just something about how
absolutely beautiful they are,
and these guys, these broad banded Easterns
are just absolutely ridiculous.
Course these guys are venomous,
but they're not like super toxic or anything like that.
I mean, more or less what you have,
a little hemotoxin and a cytotoxin there,
typically relatively mild bites.
I mean, you still don't wanna get bit by something
like this, obviously, they're very fast,
they're a front fanged viper obviously,
and it's definitely a bite that you don't wanna take,
especially in these times.
So I'm not gonna take any risk whatsoever,
'cause I certainly don't wanna go to the hospital
in these times, that's for sure,
but nevertheless, most people just have some swelling,
sometimes some necrosis,
and more or less they're pretty good animals.
Really these guys are relatively docile too.
They don't strike a whole lot,
so there's not as many bites, but again,
something you wanna stay away from,
and they're an ambush hunter,
and that's where most of the bites come from
to be honest with you is one of two things.
Either someone is walking on a hiking trail
and this guy just blends into the leaves
like you can't imagine and they accidentally
step on it and get bit, the other way is obviously with
people that are actually handling the animal, right?
And that's what happens a lot is that people wanna
pick something up like this and then they ended up
getting tagged, and something that you definitely don't want
to do, again, you'll have some swelling, some necrosis,
some people can have a little bit worse reaction,
and that's the thing is you never know
when you're gonna be allergic to an animal.
So the best thing to do is just not get bitten, right?
So I've been messing with venomous snakes my whole life,
and I hope that I never get tagged by one,
that's for darn sure, but nevertheless,
copperheads are unbelievable, beautiful animals,
I love these guys to death.
Of course they're live bearing snakes too,
so it's pretty cool.
Could you imagine seeing just a little baby
copperhead out there in the wild?
Really cool, so I can't thank Bruce enough for coming
and bringing this guy in, it's been an absolute pleasure
to see how gorgeous it is.
And like I've been mentioning, Reptarium 3.0 is coming.
As a matter of fact if you haven't seen it
I'll put a card right up here, you can click on it.
That's the future plans.
So I've been kinda talking about how I really wouldn't
mind having a venomous section in 3.0,
and I understand there's some pitfalls to that,
you know, I mean obviously we've gotta make sure
that we have a protocol where no one would get hurt.
Not only the crew but people and so on and that,
and by the way, look at Bowser.
He is looking absolutely incredible this morning,
and you know, just how will that go?
I'm not 100% sure, I know Lori's completely opposed to it,
and I do have to respect that with her,
I mean, if she wasn't 100% on board, I wouldn't do it.
But I would love to have some venomous snake.
I've always wanted a king cobra.
A cool king cobra display kind of
like Lucy's enclosure here,
but for a king cobra would be ridiculous.
Like a real show piece for a king cobra.
Or maybe even like Ivy's enclosure, you know?
Have that, the show piece, I'm not sure.
I think it would be amazing,
but I do understand that there are some kind of dangers
to that, you know, we don't ever want anyone in the crew,
and certainly anyone else to ever get hurt.
So just something to kind of think of, will I do it?
I don't know, I've always loved venomous snakes,
I've been working with venomous snakes
since I was young, obviously, on and off,
and I would love that, and I think it would be a really cool
kind of addition to the Reptarium.
That being said, we are kind of a hands on zoo, right?
So we want people to be able to hold everything.
You can't hold any venomous snakes.
We wouldn't ever take any venomous snakes out,
'cause we wouldn't wanna endanger people.
So it may not fit into what we're trying to do here or not.
It's just food for thought,
I'll put it in the back burner, think about it.
When we get into actually the 3.0 expansion
we can look at it and see if there's a way
that we can work it out or not.
I don't know what I'm gonna,
let me know in the comments what you guys think.
But again, number one,
I have to always respect Lori's decision.
If she wasn't on board, it would not happen.
But hey, I can still dream, right?
- Well you guys are following the process of breeding
season this year, and we've hit a milestone,
and that is we've got sheds to where
they've gotten first lay boxes in.
So I have checked today, and we don't have any eggs,
but I have a feeling this girl might be our first,
Mexican black kings a lot of times are one of the first
to go ahead and go into their pre lay sheds,
so she's getting nice and comfy in her box.
The way that we put our lay boxes together
is we use a sphagnum moss,
and we get it nice and damp, not soaking wet,
but just damp enough to keep the eggs moist.
We got a little hole in the lid so they can
come and go as they please, it also helps keep it moist,
and gives them a nice little hiding spot
to go ahead and go hide their eggs.
We'll check it every day,
and probably within the next seven days,
we should have eggs.
- Pretty cool now that Salt and Pepper's enclosure
is so clear you can see the bottom really good,
and the reason I say that is guess
what we found in the bottom?
Little teeth from Salt and Pepper.
I don't know which one it is, Salt or Pepper's teeth,
but it's pretty cool, you know?
Now alligators actually shed their teeth all the time.
And an alligator can literally sometimes go through
a couple thousand teeth in its' entire life,
so it's really common for them to shed 'em.
But sure enough, we just saw down in the bottom,
little white specks on the floor, and got 'em out,
and they're little, tiny teeth.
I mean look how absolutely cute they are.
I think I might do like, a little piece of jewelry,
or something like that encapsulating these guys,
'cause that's absolutely adorable.
But again, it doesn't hurt 'em at all,
I mean, they grow back and stuff like that.
Completely common, so nevertheless,
Salt and Pepper are absolutely fantastic.
Loving this enclosure, and now that it's clear maybe we'll
find a bunch of teeth over the next several months.
Still been doing daily virtual tours.
I mean, every day, seven days a week, I do 'em.
So it's been amazing.
Thank you for everyone that has joined me on 'em,
it's been great just to keep me busy
and keep me able to show off animals.
If you guys are interested,
I'll put a link in the description.
Again, we've been crushing it on them,
and I really appreciate everyone that's done 'em.
(techno music)
Jessica, what do we got going on?
- We got some crested gecko eggs from these two.
- [Brian] So who is this?
- This is Snickers, and then Rowan.
- [Brian] Oh that's super cute.
All right, so--
- [Jessica] I like, I'm excited about his babies.
I haven't had any of these guys hatch out yet,
but he is a white out pinstripe,
so he's one of the nicer ones we've got.
- [Brian] Awesome, let's see what we got.
Hopefully she's got some good eggs here.
Oh yeah, they look good already.
- [Jessica] They're nice and white.
- [Brian] Nice and white.
- [Jessica] Awesome.
- [Brian] That's awesome.
We're actually doing pretty good with
crested geckos this year, aren't we?
- Yeah, we have a ton of them right now.
I just need them to grow a little bit,
we could sell them all.
- Yeah, it's crazy.
I didn't even know we were gonna have very many
crested geckos, seems like we have a ton of eggs,
so that's awesome.
- They're kinda like the leopard geckos,
where they just produce and produce and produce.
- [Brian] They produce and produce and produce?
That's awesome, how long do they take
to incubate, typically?
- These guys, closer to 70, 80 days.
But they could be a little bit less,
it just depends on temperature.
- On the temperature, gotcha.
All right cool, so, well these guys are beautiful,
and here in a couple months we'll have some more babies.
Been a minute since I fed my girl Bella a banana.
Bella, do you wanna eat, girl?
Come on girl, you want a banana?
You want a banana?
There you go, sweetheart.
There you go.
There you go, honey.
Oh, you're a banana monster.
Bella always loves her bananas.
Three bites, that's what she usually does.
One more bite, baby.
And she's usually done, we'll see if she takes a fourth,
but again, so many of these reptiles are
so predictable with the way they are.
We'll see what she does but I have a feeling that
she's gonna finish this bite and then she's gonna be done.
Bella, do you want any more?
You all done?
It's bizarre.
I mean, you don't think of reptiles as being like,
creatures of habit, but it's weird how Lucy always crawls up
into her tree, Bella always eats three bites and that's it,
and then she wants pets afterwards,
so there you guys have it.
I know it's been a while since I fed my
banana monster anything, so she's absolutely adorable.
I can't wait for the day that this place is full
of people again, and I know that it'll happen eventually,
but I am definitely really missing it today.
If you guys wanna go back and see how we built this whole
place, here's a playlist of building the Reptarium.
You can also listen to my podcast, Checking In,
right over here, or listen to it on Spotify
or Apple Podcast, whatever the case is.
You can subscribe to this vlog channel right over here.
I appreciate your guys' support,
I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to someone,
and I promise I'll see you guys tomorrow.