(upbeat music)
- Hey, good morning everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is amazing.
I'm just hanging out with my girl, Ivy, here, the anaconda.
And really, I'll tell you what,
these guys are definitely the king of amphibious snakes,
or, in this case, the queen of amphibious snakes.
I just find it really interesting
how these guys are actually made for the water, right?
You can see the bubbles on her back that just are there.
I'm not sure exactly what that's for,
but of course their eyes are more to the top of their head,
so that she can, just like she's doing now,
she could have just the tip of her nose
and her eyes actually can be out of the water,
but the majority of her head can be under water.
Of course it's weird when she actually goes in the water,
how she breathes and the bubbles kinda come out.
And every now and then you'll see extra bubbles on her nose.
Not sure if that's something that they use
for extra oxygen if they need to
or how long they can actually stay under water.
I'm not a hundred percent sure,
but it's just fascinating to me that a giant constrictor
could spend the majority of their life in the water.
When you think of reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons,
rock pythons, these are really ground-dwelling animals,
you know, they might climb a little bit,
but to have a giant snake that is literally
like an amphibious animal is crazy to me.
Again, we've seen footage of anacondas swimming
in the Amazon, huge monsters, almost look like giant eels.
So it's really just an amazing thing
and just look at how crazy it is.
Again, totally under water,
she can see me right now, she's looking at me.
You can see the little bubbles on her face right there.
See the bubbles on her nose right there?
And then she just pops barely up out of the water.
I mean, I tell you what, anacondas are fascinating
and I've always thought they were incredible,
but for whatever reason,
I think now that we have the big enclosure,
it's just a different level, right?
We're able to observe her doing her natural things
so much more than we ever have before,
and holy cow, it's crazy.
Even the fact that they'll stick their tongue out
where they're actually smelling under water, it's bizarre.
So, I don't know,
I just wanted to take this first few minutes
of the morning and just spend time with my girl, Ivy.
We have a lot of other things to do today,
but, I tell you what, that animal is ridiculous.
(joyful Christmas music)
Yep, still snowing.
I'm so happy about this.
Of course, this is my Amazon Basin Emerald Tree Boa, and,
of course, this is her habitat.
We've had her for a little over a month now,
and honestly, she loves this habitat, or appears to,
'cause she is crawling all over the place,
but I have not gotten her to eat yet.
So this kinda is an example of how sometimes
you have to pivot a little bit.
And what I mean by that is that
we've tried all kinds of different ways
of feeding her in there.
No response whatsoever,
so we decided to put her in this enclosure overnight.
You know, so we basically just have, again,
a branch for her to be, and a little water,
we sprayed her down and stuff like that.
And we actually did put a live fuzzy rat in there
because we just wanted her to eat.
Again, a month long.
This is a very rare and not easy to get snake.
I didn't want anything to happen to her,
so I finally said, "Let's just go ahead,
"try something different, put her in here."
And I'm so excited to tell you guys
that she ate for the first time last night!
She did!
That's amazing!
Now she's a captive bred animal,
came from my buddy Kevin over at NERD.
And he raised her up, so I know she was eating.
It's not a wild animal or something like that.
But for whatever reason,
she just didn't feel comfortable enough in the cage to eat,
or maybe we couldn't offer her into a position where,
obviously, we couldn't throw live,
because the live would be down here, she's way up there.
It's never gonna work, right?
So we kept offering her frozen, would like heating 'em up,
doing all things, talked to Kevin how he was feeding it.
And he had a similar setup to this, a little bit different,
but similar, and it was crushing food.
So now that she's eaten her first rodent,
there's a good chance
that she may actually start eating in here.
Regardless, now, I know the worst case scenario
is once a week I've got to take her off her branch,
put her in this enclosure and give her food
until she starts to really establish.
So, again, just a little lesson for you guys.
Try different things if your snake isn't eating
because eventually you find the thing that actually works.
But I am so excited that she's finally eating.
(upbeat music)
I've been pretty excited about this.
My friend M.J. actually sent me this
and you guys know all about my good friend Forrest.
Well, these are actually shirts that are memorials to him.
So all the proceeds actually go to Zoo Dreams.
So follow your zoo dreams, Cold Blooded Cafe,
of course, where we get all our rodents.
That is awesome.
And for you supreme fans out there,
this is pretty dope here, check that out.
Zoodreams.
I'll tell you what, I absolutely love this.
And there it is.
Fits amazing, absolutely incredible.
I'll put a link in the description for these guys.
All of the proceeds go to Forrest's family to help them out.
I love this.
I love the other one as well.
So thank you, M.J., for sending this and making these.
Absolutely amazing.
(upbeat music)
- I actually got my boy, Argemis, here.
So I'm actually bringing him out
'cause I need to get him into some water,
get him soaking a little bit.
There's some sheds I want to make sure he gets off
on his own.
But I figured this would be a good moment actually
to talk to you guys.
Why we have Argemis the way we do
and why we do basically everything
sort of different with him than other animals.
He is one of our smaller monitors here
as far as viciousness go.
I'd take a smaller guy over a bigger guy for sure.
Overall, Argemis here is more bark than bite,
as you can see.
He really just wants to get away.
He's not really interested in being part of this right now.
He just wants to be somewhere away from us.
He's not one that we want to hold.
He's one that we wanna, kinda like,
almost like a dolphin show.
You want him coming out, bustin' out the gate
like a raptor almost.
And so he's basically like our version of Blue
from Jurassic Park.
So even though we don't work on behavior necessarily,
we do like to work on his stimuli.
And the stimuli here is definitely like,
it could be anything like throwing a snake shed
just on the floor and having him walk around
and taking a look at it.
You know, those little things
and including actually soaking him.
That's another reason why I soak him is like, you know,
you put him in a new environment
and he asks a lot of questions
and that's what you want them to do.
You don't want them to be like constantly like,
"No, no, no!"
You want them to actually be like,
"What's going on?
"Why am I here?
"What is this place?"
You want the questions to really be asked
and have him sorta figure out on his own.
That's how you get his brain working.
That's how you get that stimulus
really, really charging in him.
- So just giving you guy a little update
on the new tricolor hognose that we got.
I went ahead this week and fed them all
and I was very pleasantly surprised
that they all ate frozen thawed pinkies.
I love that.
Makes my life a lot easier.
So they are loving their new homes,
settling in good, so I'm excited to raise these guys up
and hopefully get some babies in a couple years.
Back in the day, we just had your regular tricolored hognose
which looked more like this girl right here.
So we have some of those,
but then we also got a few that I guess they're calling jag.
So they have a really cool different patterning to them
as you can see.
I think that it's a line bred trait,
so we've got a couple of this jag phase
and then a couple normal.
So it'll be interesting to see what we get out
from the babies.
- Still snowin'.
I wanna actually weigh Salt and Pepper here
just to see how they are.
Pepper's looking huge by the way.
Salt looks big, too, though.
But it's a little bit more challenging now
'cause, of course, we've got our scale here.
They're a little bit too big to put on the scale
and, of course, they're too big to put in a small container
on the scale, so I have to come up
with a little McGyvering here
to figure out how I can actually weigh these guys,
find out what kind of growth they are.
I'm sure they have grown a ton.
I think Salt and Pepper were about five thousand grams
the last time, right in that range.
I can not imagine how big they've gotten now,
so let's go ahead just figure something out,
and get these guys out and see how much they weigh.
Not sure if this is gonna work here but,
I figure if I put a bucket there,
this on top of there,
then we can actually go head zero this out right now,
we can put these in here
and theoretically it should work.
But, you know, I don't know if it's gonna work or not.
I'm gonna get Pepper first
because it's sitting there waiting for me.
Oh, boy, here we go.
Pepper!
Well, that didn't work out so well.
Okay, so, let's see what we got.
Come on, Pepper.
Come on, buddy.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Pepper, it's okay, it's okay.
Calm down.
This is gonna be the hard part.
Whoa!
It wants to bite me so bad.
This is gonna be the hard part.
All right, so I have to actually go
in reverse here with Pepper
because this is the last time
I'll ever try to weigh her like this
because she's so crazy.
So what I did was I put her on here,
I actually zeroed it out here,
now I'll take her off and we'll see how negative it goes
and hopefully we'll get an accurate reading.
If not, this whole thing just doesn't work.
(water splashes)
Okay, I mean, that might be accurate.
About 4300, you know, almost 4400, 4386.
So about 4400.
I can actually live with that.
I think that that's a pretty accurate
'cause again, I think that,
I can't remember the last time when we did this.
I thought they were more like 5000
but maybe they were like 3000.
I'm not sure so, regardless,
Pepper is definitely a pain in the butt
but Salty is much better.
So, she should behave for us a lot better.
(upbeat music)
Of course, Salty is a much different animal.
She's really good.
Hey, calm down.
I need to see if she'll just stay calm for me.
Calm, Salt.
Calm.
And she won't fight me like Pepper, you know.
She's still wound up a little bit,
so we'll just hold her for a few more minutes.
Hey, calm down, girl.
That's a good girl.
I'll tell you what.
What a difference with an animal, right?
I mean, she is just such a sweetheart
compared to Pepper.
You stay calm.
Stay.
Calm.
There we go, girl.
And she's actually 2950 grams.
So pretty interesting.
I'm gonna do the exact same thing just to see.
Says 2950.
I'm gonna zero it out, I'll put her back,
and then I'll take that off
and see if it's the same way.
She is such a sweetheart, I tell you what.
I love Pepper but, oh my God, that animal is insane.
So we have, let's see.
Ah, see, interesting enough, when we tear this out
it was 4000 grams.
So, I'm gonna be totally honest with you guys.
I don't know that this is a real accurate way of measuring.
We're gonna have to come up with a new scale.
I think I'll have to use the bigger scale from now on.
But, apparently, they're both about 4000 grams.
Who knows which one's right.
So this was, not gonna lie, this was a complete fail
so don't even pay attention to anything you saw right now.
It was a waste of our time.
I know a ton of people have been asking about
the fish in Bowser's
and you can see there's a ton of fish still in there.
We put 50 small ones and about a dozen bigger ones.
I can't tell for sure how many are there,
but there's certainly, I think,
the majority if not all of them are still there.
Going around, of course, African cichlids,
doing really well.
And we have thought about putting some fish in with Ivy.
Still not sure how I feel about it,
but there's a chance I might do that.
I'm not a hundred percent sure.
Will it ever stop snowing?
It is the middle of April, isn't it?
Did I, what month is it again?
As you can see, there's a lot more sheds.
What happens is Lori actually will just put the sheds over
so we can see 'em just like this, this,
as far as kinda identify.
That way we go back and actually put in, gosh!
This is an Anery Brooks dream that is loaded up with eggs.
That way we'll actually put lay tags on 'em.
We have red tags that go on here
that say the date that they shed
and the fact that they're seven to 10 days before.
So you can see, shed, shed, sheds, sheds over here.
So, lot of pre-lay sheds meaning there's gonna be
a lot of a colubrid eggs in about seven to 10 days.
Quick update here on the Cayman lizard that lost its tail.
Still doing completely fine, eating and stuff like that,
which is the important thing 'cause oftentimes
when a lizard loses tail,
it can go into kind of a stress situation
where it won't eat.
This guy's jammin' on food.
Still not sure if they grow back, I mean,
I don't see anything that tells me it will.
But in the next week or so,
if we start to see a little sprouting,
that would be a great sign.
I sure hope that they will grow back
but, regardless, I just wanted to let you know.
We're gonna get that enclosure back, sealed up
and working well,
and get these guys back in there pretty soon.
But for now at least, it's doing well.
It seems to be rebounding.
Still really bummed about it,
but at the same time, at least it's doing well.
I've mentioned before about using this time
to kinda do things that you wanted to do.
We're actually about to launch a new business
that I've been working on for a little bit while,
and then I came up with a new idea
that I'll tell you guys pretty soon
that I'm excited about.
Hopefully in the next week or so,
I'll be able to log something else
that I think will be really cool in these times.
So, just continue to use this time
to use your imagination.
Don't just sit around watching TV all day
or something like that.
Use it, you know.
You might be able to do something really cool
or something that you've been thinking about doing
for a long time.
This may be the exact time you wanna get started in it.
Look what we have here!
Couple little cresty geckos.
- [Woman with Geckos] Little babies!
- [Brian] Oh, my gosh, they are so adorable.
Which ones are these?
- [Woman with Geckos] Columbia and Riff-Raff.
- [Brian] Columbia and Riff-Raff.
So you just setting up in here?
- [Woman with Geckos] Yep, so we're gonna go here.
- [Brian] There's your mama leaf.
- [Woman with Geckos] Some people set
the little baby cresties up together.
- [Brian] Oh, okay.
- [Woman With Geckos] I just do 'em separately though
'cause they're gonna separate them anyway eventually.
- [Brian] Yeah, that's good.
Well, they look really cool, I tell you what.
- [Woman With Geckos] One of them already has
a lot of spots on it, so it's gonna be probably
a nice little Dalmatian.
- [Man] Yeah, that looks awesome.
- Yeah, and it's pretty cool just to see the cresties
are always a good starter lizard, you know,
always say like leopard geckos, crested geckos,
bearded dragons kinda the big three for sure.
These guys are super cool.
- They're even a little bit better than the gargoyles
even though the gargoyles are just one step up though.
- [Brian] Exactly.
- [Woman With Geckos] These are a little nicer, though.
- [Man] Look, he's licking his smile for you now.
That's awesome.
- If you guys haven't been sick of me at this point,
do you wanna go ahead and hit this playlist right over here?
It's a bunch of baby snakes.
I know you guys love baby snakes.
You can also, if you want even more of me,
you can check out my podcast "Checking In"
right up over here.
Go ahead, subscribe to that.
We do a couple a week.
It's always a lot of fun.
You can can also subscribe to the clips channel
if you don't mind.
Over here, you can subscribe to this vlog channel.
I just gave you guys way too much to do,
but I appreciate all your support
and I hope you have an absolutely amazing day.
Remember, be kind to someone today and I promise,
I'll see you guys tomorrow.