(upbeat music)
- Hey good morning everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
We actually are gonna jump right into it today,
'cause this is gonna be an absolutely exciting day.
You know, it's always a good day when you're a snake breeder
especially this time of year.
And guess what?
We have some more sand boas!
This little tiny girl right here had some babies, I think.
Because there's an infertile ova.
So this is what basically an infertile egg looks,
from a live bearing snake.
It really does almost look like an egg.
And maybe later, I don't know,
give this to Jay as a cough drop.
- Oh that looks good, it's a nice grape.
(laughing)
- No, let's see what kind of babies.
I'm not expecting very many out of this girl 'cause she's
so small, but I love looking around for little baby snakes.
Whoa mama, relax.
Oh, here's one right here.
We got one little baby right here.
And we do have a second girl right here,
that's a much bigger animal, that I'm assuming
has a lot more babies.
But we'll see what's going on.
Let's see right here, so far we just have one little baby.
Mama it's okay.
Oh, I see two little babies right here.
So okay, so there's two, and look at how they look
just like the mom.
Isn't crazy, the fact that they're like little carbon copies
of mama there?
So, two babies, I honestly don't expect very many more
babies than this.
It might only be two babies.
I'm not 100% sure, but we're gonna keep on looking just to
see if we can find anything else.
Huh, looks like that is it, what, no, no, no.
Yeah, looks like just two babies in here.
That's okay.
Again, that's a very small female.
This girl looked a lot bigger, and I'm gonna set these aside
really quick because we don't wanna combine the two litters.
We wanna make sure that we know exactly
which litter is which.
Looks like we have a really messed up baby right here.
Oh, I hate when this happens.
This is really deformed.
All that spinal kinking and stuff like that.
We'll still set it up, we'll see if it survives.
But that one definitely has a long shot.
We've got another little infertile grape right here,
we'll set aside.
And then, it looks like we're gonna find some babies,
I hope anyways.
Because she's a pretty big girl, I would expect there's
some good ones.
Yup, there we go.
That's a good baby right there.
That's one good baby.
Let's see what we got.
Two good babies, right here.
And again, these are rough scale sand boas.
Let see, come on mama, don't bite me girl.
Aw, it looks like a bunch over here.
We got three, we got four babies right here.
All right that's a little bit more like it.
Five babies right here look at how beautiful those guys are.
Six babies!
That's a good litter of snakes right there.
There's six babies, oh mama don't bite me, don't bite me.
Six babies, that might be it.
Not sure, I'm gonna just kinda search around to see if,
Ow!
She just got me.
Six babies, and that looks like it.
We'll go ahead and get mamas all cleaned up.
We'll get these babies set up.
We'll try to see if we can salvage this guy,
with all the spinal kinking.
Not sure what's gonna happen.
So six good babies, from one with one kinked baby.
And only two babies from the other.
But hey, what a great way to start the day,
and I hope that you're having an amazing day too.
Things are really heating up here when it comes to
ball python clutches hatching.
And this was definitely, I don't know, top two or three
most anticipated clutches of the year.
This is actually a Lori leopard bred to a Lori.
So we could get the first ever, super Lori leopard
if we're so lucky.
There are two, four, six, seven eggs.
Odds could be pretty good, we'll see what happens.
But before we get started with cutting this clutch.
I wanna tell you the story behind the Lori ball python,
'cause some of you might be saying,
"what the heck is a Lori ball python?"
So, we'll start with that, we'll come back
and we'll cut this clutch and hopefully we'll get
a worlds first.
But before we get into how Lori balls became Lori balls,
you have to understand the origin of really the majority
of the mutations of ball pythons back in the 90's.
And the fact is, is that, over in West Africa,
Togo, Ghana, and Benin, they actually farm ball pythons.
Now what that actually means is that they're not actually
breeding them, they collect wild females that are gravid,
they let them lay their eggs, and then a percentage of the
babies that hatch go back into the wild
so that it's sustainable.
And then the other portion comes into the United States.
That's where the majority of mutations actually came from.
With them hatching sometimes over 100,000 babies a year,
and those animals coming into the United States,
people like myself, VPI, and Kevin McCurley,
amongst others, actually were in line to buy these animals,
when they came out very interesting.
So we used to bring in,
sometimes thousands of baby ball pythons,
and we would kinda scour through the bags,
to find anything that looked kind of unusual.
One year we brought in this shipment,
of about 1,000 ball pythons,
and as we're going through and really visually inspecting
each and everyone, to see if there's anything unusual,
'cause you gotta remember this was before
yellow belly ball python.
So people found the yellow belly ball pythons
in a normal shipment.
And we're like,
"oh we better breed, it's kind of an anomaly."
Lori actually found these two animals, that happened to be
in the same bag.
And just so you know, they used to ship eight ball pythons
per bag, so usually when you saw a couple animals that were
similar, they were probably from the same clutch.
I'm gonna be honest with you, the majority of my crew
didn't think too much of these two particular ball pythons
that Lori pulled out,
'cause they were a little bit different
but not very different.
So she went ahead and set 'em up in a rack,
she marked, "Keep Lori."
And that was basically the origin of the Lori ball python.
Now they turned out to be a pair, and as we raised them up
we bred the male to a normal ball python,
and to our surprise, about half the babies came out
looking just like the dad.
Now the female wasn't ready to breed yet, but we realized
that hey, this might actually be a co-dominant mutation.
As this was going on, the kind of ball python world
started to explore, cinnamon pastels, and pastels,
and other mutations like that,
were starting to get proved out,
so we thought, "hey maybe we have something going on here."
Now the following year, we were actually able to breed
the two Lori ball pythons together.
Now keeping in mind, we had never really planned on naming
them Lori ball pythons, they were just, "keep Lori,"
on the cage, so it was kinda crude calling 'em
Lori ball pythons, just to identify what they actually were.
And by this time, tons and tons of people had visited our
collection and actually saw the Lori ball pythons.
Well when we finally got four eggs from the
Lori ball to Lori ball, sure enough we hatched the first
super Lori ball python.
This blue and white unbelievably spectacular animal,
and it kinda really made a buzz in the reptile community.
And by that time everyone knew 'em as Lori ball,
so everyone was saying, "did you see Brian and Lori
hatched out super Lori balls?"
And that kinda just became what it was.
We planned on originally naming them something else,
but when everyone just started calling them
Lori ball pythons we just decided, hey,
we might as well go ahead and keep 'em that way.
And I think it's pretty darn cool, that my wife Lori
has a ball python mutation that's named after her.
Now that we know what the Lori ball python is,
and I think it's a really incredibly beautiful story.
It's just cool that Lori, my wife, has a ball python
named after her.
Let's just jump into this.
Oh my God my heart rate is up right now guys,
because I wanna hit some super Lori's and I definitely
wanna hit a super Lori leopard,
I have no idea what it's gonna look like.
Okay, here we go.
Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath, come on, come on,
come on, give me something amazing!
Okay, so the first egg is,
okay, the first egg is pretty cool.
It is definitely a Lori leopard ball python.
So that's pretty cool.
I mean you know we've already got a Lori leopard ball python
but this is another one.
So that's pretty cool, no super yet.
Let's go, number two, come on man, I tell you what,
I'm so nervous.
I wanna get a super Lori leopard so badly.
Oh, we got a super!
We got a super Lori!
The problem is, I don't know what a super Lori leopard's
gonna look like.
So the super lori's are almost blue and white.
And they're absolutely incredible.
I tell you what guys, oh yeah, I am like 99.9% sure
that this is a super Lori leopard.
'Cause they don't normally have the
stripe down their back like this.
Woo!
I tell you what, I think we hit it.
Okay, I'm gonna cut the rest of the clutch,
and if we get something else radically different
then I'll know.
But I am almost positive, we just hit a worlds first
super Lori leopard ball python.
Oh my God, how awesome is that?
That takes the pressure off.
But we still have a bunch of eggs to cut.
So let's just keep on going, and see if we get lucky,
and maybe even get more of 'em right.
Okay, what do we have here?
Looks like this is probably just a Lori ball python.
It could be a Lori leopard ball python,
but it's definitely not a super.
This is the biggest egg in the clutch right here.
So maybe we'll get lucky and get something crazy,
I don't know.
All right what do we got?
Oh no, not a super unfortunately.
Oh and this guy, is ready to hatch out too.
It's bucking me and everything in this thing.
People ask me all the time, are you ever worried about
cutting a snake?
And the truth is is that, as soon as they feel the pressure
they actually go down, and they'll move around.
I've never cut a snake, ever when I'm cutting eggs.
This one again, looks like a Lori leopard ball python.
So, so far we've been getting some pretty cool stuff.
We've only got three little eggs left.
So let's see what's in this one right here.
Okay, gosh that's really weird.
We've been getting a lot of Lori leopard ball pythons.
Which is pretty cool, because again, it's a combination
that isn't very often seen.
So it's awesome.
Two eggs left to go, only one super so far.
So that's a little bit disappointing.
Hopefully, we'll get at least one more super.
No this looks like a normal Lori ball python.
And then we have the smallest egg in the clutch right now.
And the last egg.
Listen, I'm still over the moon about this
super Lori leopard, and the more I look at it,
the more I realize it is absolutely a super Lori leopard.
So let's go ahead and cut this last egg.
And see if we've got something else.
Come on guys, come on, aw!
Just another Lori ball python.
So that's weird, out of seven eggs, we only got one super,
but I'm sure that super is the worlds first
super Lori leopard.
I wanna show Kelsey this, 'cause this is like Kelsey's
pet project, oh my God guys, that's awesome.
So that's it for egg cutting.
Just one clutch really quick.
I had to share that with you guys.
A lot of times I don't like to do
back to back egg cutting days.
But this was such a special clutch,
I had share it with you guys.
- Hey what's up guys?
Eric here.
Just glad you're checking in, we're very busy today.
So, you know, this year's been amazing for spotted,
and the stimpsons, and the children's pythons,
we've just had so many.
We've got 'em upstairs in the clubrit room.
They're starting out very well, but they're not eating
as good as I want 'em to be.
So we're actually gonna move 'em downstairs,
it's about four degrees warmer.
And all the other pythons are kinda down there anyways.
So I think that four degree difference will definitely help
them wanting to eat and keep eating.
So let's get it started, I gotta disinfect some racks.
We're gonna box these guys up, and move 'em downstairs.
(upbeat music)
All right guys, so you can see we kinda got these guys
moved down here.
I think they're gonna do so much better.
You could just physically tell it's warmer down here.
We're gonna wait a few days, let 'em settle in.
I gotta go back and put waters, and I didn't wanna move 'em
with waters of course, sloshing around.
So after they get settled in, in a couple days, we'll offer
'em food and I think they're gonna do pretty good.
- [Brian] Kelsey, I'm excited to show you!
We just got one baby, but I think it's gonna be
a pretty good one.
Looks like a super Lori leopard.
- Wow, oh my God!
We did it?
- [Brian] I think we hit it.
- [Kelsey] Holy crap!
- [Brian] Look at the dorsal striping on it.
- [Kelsey] Wow that's crazy!
- [Brian] I know isn't it awesome?
- That's so cool, oh my God, I can't believe it.
- [Brian] I knew you would be excited, I needed to show you.
Isn't that awesome? - [Kelsey] That's so awesome.
- [Brian] I can't wait till it curls up.
I'm pretty sure, the rest are some Lori leopards stuff.
- [Kelsey] Oh my goodness!
- [Brian] But just only one super,
but it looks like that one super is a leopard.
Because I don't think that the normal Lori's have that
dorsal stripe like a leopard, right?
- Yeah I haven't seen any like that.
- [Brian] So I'm pretty sure, so, there you go.
All your hard work.
- Thank you.
- Feels like it's been a minute since I've said,
"down in the dungeon with Kelsey."
But yes, we still have ball python eggs coming,
so we got a couple clutches to pull real quick.
What's our first clutch?
- First clutch is a het albino female,
bred to an albino male.
- All right good, we love crusin' albinos.
So let's go ahead and see what this girl has going on.
Looks like they're good, looks like a nice clutch of eggs.
Oh yeah that's fantastic, that's really nice, that's good.
And again, I told you, sometimes fertilities fall off
just a little bit as you get later in the year,
but so far so good, we're doing pretty good.
We had that one clutch that was like 50% fertile,
but everything else has been good, so that is amazing.
How many eggs we got here?
- [Kelsey] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
- Seven good eggs, not bad, I tell you, I didn't think
there was that many eggs in there, so that's awesome.
And again, it's about 50% on average because you've got an
albino which is the double homozygous animal,
and you're breeding it to a normal looking animal
that's heterozygous, so on average, half of these babies
should be albino.
Let's hope we hit the odds, one more clutch.
What's our next clutch?
- Next clutch is a normal female
bred to a pastel scaleless head.
- [Brian] All right, let's see what she's got.
Oh, she's wrapped around a nice clutch of eggs,
looks like this egg might have rolled on the very top.
You can see how it looks like there's a little bit of paper
where it got stuck and now it's on the very top.
So she might have just rolled that egg around a little bit.
Oh they look nice small eggs, nice, wow that's crazy.
Actually a lot of eggs for that girl.
These are kinda nice eggs, 'cause they're definitely small
and perfect size for, oh my gosh these eggs
are all over the place.
- [Kelsey] Two hand kind of clutch.
- [Brian] Yeah this is a two hander clutch for sure.
All right there we go.
All right good job, and again,
they're a little bit desiccated, which is kind of
unusual, but they'll pop back out once they're in this
incubator box right here.
How many eggs do we have?
- [Kelsey] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
eight, nine.
- Nine eggs, that's a good clutch for this little mama
right here, she did really good.
And again, this is a pastel scaleless head,
which means that these are both co-dominant,
pastel of course for super pastel, and scaleless head
for the completely scaleless animal.
So I should have some pastels, some pastel scaleless heads,
and some scaleless heads out of this clutch.
Good job mama, and good job Kelsey,
way to go. - Thank you.
- And so there it is guys, I was excited to produce
a worlds first again.
The fact that this super Lori leopard is gonna be hatching
in the next couple days.
I cannot wait, I probably won't sleep until it actually
comes out of the egg, so that I can show you guys
how amazing it is.
It's absolutely great when you're going for something
and it actually works out.
And I hope that you have an absolutely amazing day.
Thank you guys for watching, truly.
You guys are wonderful, and I love your beautiful faces.
Be kind to someone today, and I promise,
I'm gonna see you guys tomorrow.
(upbeat music)