- Hey, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is absolutely incredible.
Actually, my camera guys aren't here today,
so we're going a little old school.
Everyone needs a day off, right?
So we decided to just take the day
to where I'm going to be talking to you guys like I used
to talk to you guys back when I started the vlog.
And by the way, I'm starting to go
through colubras because we're going to be getting males
and females together as early as this week,
which is amazing.
And this is a scaleless Texas rat snake, and hoo doggy!
I tell you what, that thing is an absolute ripper.
And we have some really cool scaleless Texas rat snakes
that are out this year that I'm super excited...
Oh gosh! This sucker bit me!
Come on, you little...Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! That hurt!
Whew. What is wrong with you?
Look at this dude. What is wrong with him?
He's an absolutely beautiful animal, but oh my gosh.
That's not the way I want to start the day.
So nevertheless, a couple of beautiful,
kind of orangy-reddish animals that are really cool.
But check this one out right here.
It looks like this one wants to bite me too,
but it's nice and yellow. Whoa! Sheesh oh Pete!
Texas rat snakes can be a little bit cantankerous,
I'm not going to lie to you, but I'm pretty excited
about the polymorphism that we have this year.
Oh doggy! I tell you what, I've started the day
with a handful of bites, and that's just the way things go.
But to be honest with you, I'm really excited
about our group of leucistic Texas rat snakes too.
We do have some scaleless leucistic Texas rats as well,
which will be really cool if we produce those guys.
But these Texas rat snakes as a whole are awesome.
For whatever reason, the leucistics
don't seem to be as hyper.
Some of the scaleless stuff is just like,
I mean, you saw it.
I mean, gosh, I've already been leaking a little bit
this early in the morning, but the leucistics are really
where I really fell in love with Texas rat snakes.
Just this pure white animal. Absolutely incredible.
When I was young, they were 300 dollars.
I mean, when I was like 17 years old.
And I remember saving up to buy a pair
of them for 600 dollars.
And it was such a thrill when I finally
produced them a couple years later.
And all these years later, still producing them.
And this year we have a whole new group
of them up to size, which is pretty exciting.
Then another rat snake that is super cool that
I'm excited to be producing,
that we used to produce a long time ago,
these were called licorice rat snakes, right?
Sometimes they now are called white sided,
but they started out being called licorice.
And look at this guy, he's just like the Texas rat snakes;
he's coming right for my face like, hey,
what are you gonna, why don't you put your nose
a little closer, and I'll get you.
But these were actually found in Maryland
and produced by a guy out there.
I think he was like a farmer or something like that.
He found them in his yard, and he ended up breeding them.
And they were recessive.
When we first bought the first ones back
at the Mid-Atlantic show, they were pretty big money.
I think they were like a thousand bucks apiece
or something like that.
And we bought them, and then we produced albinos
and all kinds of different stuff.
And then after the last, you know,
maybe six, seven, eight years, we haven't had them.
This is the first pair that we have
up to size to breed again.
So hopefully we'll have some licorice rat snakes
here later this year.
Again, awesome time.
I'm just going to go through and check out
all the animals here, down in the colubrid room
because I have to start thinking about what males
and females we have to put together
over the next week or so.
And then the breeding season begins.
(synth music playing)
Boy, I'll tell you what,
things are looking great down here.
It is going to be an amazing year,
as long as we can get things bred up.
I mean, a lot of new animals
up to size that were incredible.
I forgot that we had so many amazing snakes,
and that's the thing that's cool about hibernation,
or brumation, is that when you bring them up,
it's like I said, it's like I inherited
an entire new collection cause yo,
after they're gone for a few months, so wow!
There's some beautiful animals down here.
I'm super excited.
It looks like my guy Drogo is out for a little bit of a run.
Hi baby. How are you doing today? Hi baby.
(laughter) It's so cool. I love him so much.
And it's really cool because we've been slowly
kind of habituating him, socializing to people coming in
and getting a chance to pet him now.
And we've even had him to actually taken out
and holding him a little bit around people.
So it's really kind of starting to open up
what we can do with him.
We actually are getting a really cool
like kind of bird branch, where we can bring him out,
put him on it, and roll him around and stuff like that.
So slowly being able to let people get closer
and habituated. And again, we took it slow
cause we wanted Drogo to be super, super happy.
We didn't want anything to happen to him,
but nevertheless, he's doing amazing.
Look at the dexterity in that animal.
It is ridiculous how these guys crawl around.
What are you doing? You got a little scratch, buddy.
You got a little scratch? Oh my gosh.
Is that the cutest thing in the world?
Hi, Lori.
- Hi.
- [Brian] I just want to say you look nice today.
- Okay. (laughter)
- [Brian] That's all. I just wanted tell you that.
- That's all?
- [Brian] That's all. I hope you're having a nice day.
- Alright. (laughter)
- [Brian] Bye.
- Bye.
- You know, there's always a ton
of work to do here at the Reptarium.
I mean, we just finished up a long weekend here a couple
of days ago, and it's a lot of kind of cleaning up
and getting things going.
You know, we always want to give the animals
a four day break, right?
We want them to kind of chill out because for three days,
of course, we have a lot of events.
We have tours, birthday parties,
and then open to the public.
So we spend this time kind of doing the kind
of maintenance work, there's also some training
and stuff like that.
And although I miss Jay, because it's always good
to have someone behind the camera,
and we kind of can go back and forth,
it's kind of cool to go back to old school, self-vlogging.
So again, Mike has got a ton of work today here
at the Reptarium, so we'll let him get his work.
We're going to head over and mess with some ball pythons.
(soft synth music playing)
- [Brian] Noah.
- Oh my God.
- [Brian] I just got back and apparently was supposed to
be working this way away. What happened?
- So I come into work, and as you can tell,
I'm a little dirty now. I come into work.
I get set up down here. I get set up and go upstairs
and go take a little leak real quick.
And then I do a little walkthrough just to get comfortable
with the setting, see how the day is going,
what's going on around the shop.
And I notice that there's only one cage open
without an animal - Argemus Prime.
- [Brian] Oh my gosh. Not Argemus. And of course,
Noah's been taking care of Argemus here
for the last couple of weeks, just getting into shape.
And so what happened to Argemus?
- So I go around asking is Argemus in a bath,
is somebody take her out for a zoo to you, dude?
What is going on?
Mike is like, no, she's in her cage.
So we had to go get, we had to go rally the troops.
- [Brian] So you to find her first.
So when I was gone, you guys found her,
but she was underneath the cage, totally down there.
So I walk in and literally like, everyone's like,
Mike's on his hands and knees.
You guys, I don't even know where you are.
You're behind the cage. I can hear you talk like,
what in the heck is going on?
So we ended up getting Argemus back.
Thankfully she was okay, everything worked out.
And this was Mike's first time he let an animal out.
I think he learned a valuable lesson.
What do you think?
- I hope he learned a lesson.
I don't know how even, how it even happened.
- [Brian] He just said he accidentally
forgot to shut the cage.
- Forgot to shut a cage and lock it?
- [Brian] I know, well Mike's been with us
for a few months now, and he hasn't done it,
but this is the first time.
But like I said, I think he learned his lesson.
I think it's going to be fine now.
But yeah, Argemus was out for a little walkabout.
Thankfully it all worked out.
As you can see, Jay and Noah are behind the enclosures,
and they have to use their phone in order to see.
And sure enough Argemus was actually wedged
underneath one of the enclosures right there.
And Noah even brought some chicken back there
to try to lure Argemus out with the chicken.
But Argemus didn't want to have anything to do with it.
Argemus was happy just to be kind of hiding down there.
So it was definitely a little bit of a chore to get it out,
but thankfully it all worked out.
You know, my girl, Bella, she loves her bananas.
Do you want a banana, girl?
Hi, girl.
There you go, there you go. I love my Bella.
She is absolutely a banana monster, for sure,
as I always say. And as you can see,
I've got my yellow Bella bananas shirt on right now.
So again, just for another week or so,
we're going to have these guys available.
You can go in the link in the description.
You can get yourself a shirt, you can get yourself a hoodie.
You can get a mug, whatever you happen to want.
Definitely, you got to get some merch.
I mean, look at how absolutely gorgeous my girl is.
Hi Bella, baby. What are you doing, sweetheart?
And she's such a dainty girl. In usually three bites,
and she's done with her bananas,
but she certainly does love them.
There's no doubt about it.
So go ahead down in the description,
get yourself some Bella merch.
One more bite. Ah, there you go, girl.
There it is, I love Bella.
And kind of my love of this whole place started
with Bella, to be totally honest with you.
So she's definitely a special animal.
(soft synth music playing)
Down here in the dungeon and actually the rainbow boas
are still breeding really well.
I kinda messed up, cause remember how I told you
that when you mark your animals,
and then they shed, you lose the actual mark.
And well, this is the male here,
I happen to know he's a giant male, but he actually shed.
So that was not a good situation
because we had two females in here and a male.
I was like, Oh no, whatever, and then I remembered.
And the truth is is that actually
with Colombian rainbow boas, their tails are super long
with the male, so it's pretty easy to find out.
So I'm going to go ahead and just mark him up a little bit,
get him back into the different group.
And all the rainbow boas have been breeding.
We've seen a bunch of copulation so far,
so hopefully with any luck,
we'll have a really good successful year with baby boas.
So let me just go get the paint marker.
I'll be right back, and we'll mark male on this
and get him into a group.
Again, it's like I said, this paint marker
doesn't hurt him at all.
I'm just going to put a male mark
on him in a couple of different spots.
He just shed out, so now we should be good for another,
you know, maybe through six or eight weeks
before he does it again.
Put him back in a group with two other females
that he's already been in.
And what I do is I'll kind of actually circulate these
through about every two days.
So I'll spend two days in this group,
two days in the next group, so on like that.
And I switch all my rainbow boas that way too.
So these are just the normal Colombians.
We have the leucistics. We have hypos, all the other.
Brazilian rainbow boas and stuff like that.
So we have to do all those swaps every couple days.
And like I mentioned, going through some ball pythons,
and I noticed right off the rip here,
this pied female here, this girl right here, who is gravid.
Guess what? Well, she shed out right here,
and I can actually see the shed right here.
Now, basically what that means is that it's about 30 days
from the shed to actual laying.
When they actually ovulate, it's about 20 to 21 days
before they'll shed out, and then 30 days from there.
So about 50 days from ovulation is actual shed.
So what I want to do is whenever I find a shed in a female
that's gravid is I want to mark her, because now I know
in the next, you know, 25, 26 days, I'm going to be
kind of keeping an eye on her.
Because sometimes females will lay a little early.
Sometimes they'll lay a little bit late.
You know, she could go 23, 24 days.
She could go up to 40 days to be totally honest with you.
The point is is that you want to keep
an eye on them and stuff like that.
Now I can mark the date on that female when she shed,
and then I can look 30 days from there and know
that they're going to get some eggs.
About that time, you know.
So I go through this every single day.
This is getting exciting, guys.
This girl here, who's actually a pinstripe het pied.
She shed about 10 days ago,
meaning that we're talking like maybe 14, 15 days,
we might start getting our first clutch of ball pythons,
which is pretty cool.
But I think I had one other female that was actually
even before that. Let me check really quick.
And I was thinking it was this G-stripe because last year,
this G-stripe that was bred to a banana pastel G-stripe
actually was our first clutch.
But the truth is, she's actually in shed right now.
So the pinhead pied bred to a pastel pied
will be our first clutch.
That pied that I just showed you that was bred
to the same male will be our second clutch.
And then this one will be our third clutch.
And then we have a whole bunch of females going into shed.
So again, egg time is coming, guys.
It's going to happen pretty quick.
And part of my daily routine everyday during this time
of the year is kind of spot ultrasounding.
Sometimes we'll do an entire ultrasound where,
ultrasound and everything; but to be honest with you,
when we get to the end of the season,
it's more about spot ultrasounding.
I want to take females and see where their advancement is
so I can decide as far as breeding.
Later on today, we've got males back in with females.
So I kind of got to get an idea.
So I'm just going to scan a couple of females to see
if we have some growth and stuff like that.
This is actually a super enchi orange dream
and an absolutely beautiful animal at this.
And it was actually bred to a stinger bee orange dream,
so we could produce some really crazy stuff.
And she was only at 13 millimeters before.
Going to scan her right now, and yup, bigger follicles.
Definitely on the right road here.
Yep. We're at 19 millimeters right now.
That is exactly what I was hoping for.
This girl is actually just a head albino that's bred
to an albino just to produce more albino ball pythons.
But what I noticed, she was at 13 millimeters,
much like that last girl was,
but she's been bred a couple of times.
She's fed pretty well.
So I'm hoping that those 13 go again to 19 or 20 millimeters
and see if we see some growth.
That's telling you that
we're heading in the right direction.
So definitely having some growth here
but not quite as big as the last one, to be honest with you.
We'll go ahead and measure these up real quick.
She was at 13, she's now at 15, so not a lot of growth,
but still heading in the right direction.
And again, that's part of my daily routine.
Definitely moving in the right direction.
Seems like every female that I ultrasounded today
actually had an advanced follicle thing, when they went
to 13 to 15 to 18, whether it was 18, now they're 25.
So we're definitely really starting to ramp things up.
It's looking like it's going to be another one
of those banger years.
I think I'm finally starting to figure out
how to breed these snakes, if you know what I mean.
Only took me 30 something years to figure it out.
So there it is, guys.
We made it through the old school day without camera guys,
and I kind of liked it.
I'm going to get rid of Jay now. No, I'm just kidding you.
I do miss Jay because it's not just about filming;
it's also about the attitude
and kind of having someone to kind of go back
and forth with things.
But I hope that you guys enjoy it.
Let me know in the comments what you think.
Like I said, it's fun every now and then,
and hey, everyone needs a day off, right?
Including myself. So that being said, have a wonderful day.
If you did like this video,
here's a playlist of the first year that we daily vlogged.
If you want to start, you can watch all that whole year.
It was pretty fun.
You can also subscribe to my podcast channel up here,
called Checking In.
On this side, we are 30,000 away from 3 million.
Hit that subscription button.
Turn your post notifications on.
Have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to someone, and I promise
I'll see you tomorrow.