- Hey guys, what's going on?
Welcome to The Reptarium, how are you?
My name is Brian. What's your name?
- [Alejandro] Alejandro.
- What's going on Alejandro?
I tell you what, I figured today we're gonna give you guys
an opportunity to see what you can do
if you ever come to The Reptarium.
You guys see all the videos here,
but what can you do with it experience-wise?
So I'm gonna take Alejandro
and we're gonna go on a little tour
and show all the cool things that we can actually do here.
So let's get started.
Well, of course, the first thing we always do is,
is we hold a lot of animals here.
There are so many animals here at the reptile zoo
that can actually be held.
Have you ever held a snake before?
- I've never held a snake before.
- This is your first one?
Don't be shaky. You're completely fine.
- Oh okay.
- So obviously all our animal ambassadors here
are super socialized and habituated to being held.
This of course is Hellen the no eyed albino ball python.
And oftentimes when people come
and are a little bit afraid of snakes
this is the snakes that we introduce them to,
But listen, there are dozens and dozens
of giant snakes you can hold, alligators you can hold.
All kinds of different experiences.
So we wanna give a ton of cool experiences to people.
The handling part is a very special part
and a very important part of The Reptarium experience.
And again, like I said, there's not just snakes
there's all kinds of things.
Take for instance, Flaming Hot Cheeto,
our beautiful bearded dragon.
Now he's absolutely wonderful.
And again, not a really large lizard,
so it's a great way to start.
And he's so chill. Just put your hands out.
He sits in your hands like that, and there you go.
- Look at the beard.
- That's right, and these are the experiences
that we start at The Reptarium,
but the thing that's like when we're open to the public
for if you want to come in for general admission,
there are seven animal educators that are walking around
that are pulling animals out,
like Flaming Hot Cheeto here
so that you can get experiences.
So if you see an animal and you're like,
"Wow, I'd really like to check that out,"
chances are pretty good that one of our animal educators,
including myself,
will actually pull it out and you can get that experience.
And if you're feeling courageous,
which I have a feeling most of you are-
- [Man] Whoo!
- You can actually hold big snakes like my girl
(indistinct) the Cow Reticulated Python.
And she's actually not the largest snake
that we have here that you can hold, believe it or not.
She's definitely a bigger snake.
Again, she's about a four year old Reticulated Python,
Cow Reticulated, absolutely amazing.
But we have snakes that are three,
four times her size that you can actually pull out
and interact with too.
So lots of different, cool experiences here
when it comes to holding snakes and other reptiles.
Another great experience
beyond just holding all the animals,
of course is doing the extra stuff
like the sloth exhibit with Drogo.
Of course, we've got Jay here.
He is our animal educator and also our sloth trainer.
So what do you say we go in and meet Drogo?
- I've never met him before?
- (laughs) Let's go. (men laughing)
- Oh, this is him?
- [Man] This is Drogo.
- Oh my goodness. Can I touch him?
- So let's feed them first.
- Oh, okay. - Here you go.
- Okay.
- You're gonna put it right in front of his nose.
- Here you go Drogo. Is that his name?
- Yeah.
- O Drogo. Oh.
- There you go, now you can pet him
right on the back of the head.
- Here you go. Good boy.
- Have you ever met a sloth before?
- I had never even knew they existed,
It's like a monkey and a human.
- So we actually operate
a couple of different types of sloth experiences.
You can come in just like...
What's your name?
- [Alejandro] Alejandro.
- You can actually come in just like Alejandro has done here
and actually get a chance to feed and touch Drogo.
You can also have an experiences when we're not open
where Drogo actually comes out
and you get some really up and close thing.
Alejandro, do you want one more piece?
- It's Alejandro.
- [Man] Alejandro (laughing).
- Alejandro. Can I feed it with my mouth?
- [Man] No.
- Okay
(water splashing)
- Well, there's certainly not any places that I'm aware of
that you can go ahead and just handle an albino alligator.
I mean, there might be, but the fact is The Reptarium
is pretty unique in the sense that you can actually
hold an albino alligator like Salt here.
And she's actually trained
with a little nose tap here to stay still.
That way you can actually take pictures of her.
And she's a lot heavier than you think isn't she?
- she's like 75 pounds.
- Not quite 75 pounds, but she's definitely getting heavy.
And again, she's only gonna get bigger
and we're gonna be able to continue to do
some sort of interactions with her her entire life.
Of course, right now you can come and hold her.
Eventually we're gonna get her to a point
where she just sits on the ground
and you can come and pet her and actually interact with her.
Again, it's just a really cool experience with The Reptarium
that you can't do very many places.
There are places you can hold alligators,
but albino alligators, that's a rare experience.
Alejandro, have you ever met an armadillo?
- No. They don't have those where I'm from.
- Well, I tell you what, this guy is amazing.
Of course, this is Brill the Armadillo.
What we're gonna is we're gonna give you
this little pouch here and we actually offer experiences
with Brillo where we just kind of take him out.
Come on buddy. Up here you go.
Ah, there you go, buddy.
And you can actually feed him.
He'll come right on over and he'll eat like this.
- Oh.
- You're making quite a mess there, Alejandro.
- Oops sorry. He's just super excited.
- Isn't this awesome.
Again, fast becoming one of the most popular animals here
at The Reptarium is of course, Brillo.
He's just amazing.
Look at how he stands up like that.
And he just tripods. It's absolutely incredible.
And he is super cool, but you are making a mess.
(Alejandro laughing) Be careful.
- I'm sorry. It's so much fun.
- Out of all the guests that we've had at The Reptarium
and experiences with Brillo, Alejandro may be the worst.
- Wow, this is crazy. I'm not gonna lie.
He really wants a lot of this carrot juice.
Look at all this juice, he's like, "Gimme more."
He likes it when I squeeze and pump a lot in there.
Make sure to come get your Brillo experience today.
- And it's always fun to have a bunch of school events
that actually come to The Reptarium as well.
That's another thing that I love about The Reptarium,
it's when complete classes come in
and we can do some education,
they get a chance to hold animals
that they've never held before.
It's definitely one of my favorite things
about The Reptarium.
(Upbeat music)
Here we have our next visitor and where are you from?
- Missouri.
- Missouri. What part of Missouri?
- I don't remember (laughs).
- Okay. No problem.
Well, you can get some amazing experiences here as well.
Things that, again, you could hardly see anywhere else.
Like of course my two headed snake, Ben and Jerry.
- [Man] Wow.
- I mean, again, there's not a lot of places that you can go
and actually handle such an interesting animal.
What do you think about that?
- I've never seen a two-headed snake. Ever.
- [Man] Oh my God, what do you think Ben and Jerry eats?
- Ben and Jerry's ice cream?
- Actually, It's mice cream.
And then of course there's feeding opportunities.
Take that right there. Make sure your hands on that side.
You don't wanna get too close to the chicken, right?
Because the alligators may not realize
that his hands aren't chicken.
And these alligators literally will eat
whatever we want.
Come on over guys. Let's go, come on.
You can see him. And of course you can feed the alligators.
It's absolutely an awesome time to feed these guys.
We have smaller ones for littler kids
that might be a little bit afraid.
This guy is ready for some food.
So go ahead and serve before we get some more off.
There you go. All right, rookie.
You know what I mean? But that's okay.
Really fun feeding the alligators.
And of course we always have an animal educator here
protecting everyone from getting bitten
by these alligators because as you can see,
they are definitely ready to eat.
So we're always making sure we keep everyone safe.
You know, you need to be at a safe distance.
Watch out for the guy down below
because it's never the guy up top that gets you,
it's always the guy down below.
And one of my favorite experiences here at The Reptarium,
of course is feeding my dinosaur Elvis.
We're gonna take a piece of chicken.
He's gonna follow this blue ball.
Come on Elvis, let's go.
- [Man] Whoa, whoa, whoa!
- Up you go buddy, up you go.
There you go.
And it's just super cool. - Wow.
I mean, he comes charging out there,
but we have him so trained
that we can always get him to stop wherever we want, right.
Come on Elvis. Come.
(making race car sounds)
(indistinct) Up here Elvis, ah, there you go.
Up here, Elvis up here, up here, there you go.
So it's just really cool.
So if you're brave, you can actually feed basically
a miniature dinosaur because he is absolutely wonderful.
Up here bud, up here, up here.
There you go, buddy.
Good job. That's pretty cool? - Wow that's nice.
- Yeah.
- Can't do this in Missouri can you?
- No.
- Up here bud.
If Elvis has just a little bit too much high energy,
we always have smaller monitor lizards.
Like my guy Toothless that you can see up so over here.
and I'm gonna just go ahead right over here.
And here here comes, up here bud.
Oh, he is definitely on fire.
Gotta keep him fed. Up here up here, up here, up here.
Oh, whoa.
Okay. Back in the cage buddy.
- He's a lot. Up here.
Ooh. He is on fire.
That's as up and close and personal as you can get.
That's interactive zoo action right there,
but hey, listen, it may be the monitor lizards
are just a little bit too much high energy,
we got you covered.
So again, if maybe a bearded dragon's more your style
Heady White is absolutely the perfect
shy little thing for you.
Go ahead, one more.
I tell you what, it's a pretty cool experience.
So you could see whatever level
you want to feed animals here,
you could do and have a great time.
Oftentimes during open hours,
we actually tried to feed a couple of big snakes,
including Lucy.
So it's just a cool experience that you can get to see
a giant 20 foot snake eat.
Let's see if our girl's gonna eat for us today.
Come on girl. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Whoo, O my goodness gracious. Did you see that?
That was crazy.
And of course The Reptarium is also
about facing your fears,
Mr. Missouri, how do you feel about tarantulas?
- I'm not a fan.
- Not a fan?
Well, we're gonna turn Mr. Missouri into a fan.
Of course we've got Black Beauty,
our Brazilian black tarantula,
who's absolutely wonderful.
And you're gonna be fine.
Just put both your hands out.
Now just remember that it's very gentle.
Nothing is gonna happen.
It's just gonna sit right in your hand
like that and hang out.
It's all about this.
Some people come in, are fearful of snakes.
Some people are fearful of tarantulas.
(man laughs) (indistinct)
It's okay. We got her.
See, you did good, Mr. Missouri. See that.
So we really pride ourself in getting people
over their fears of all kinds of things.
And you did a good job.
My vision of The Reptarium from the start
was to give you the opportunity to have whatever level
experience you possibly want.
We have hundreds of different animals
that can come out and you can interact with.
If you feel brazenly, you want to do the most extreme stuff,
we have that opportunity to hold an 18 foot snake
or a big alligator or something amazing like that.
Or if you want to come in and just take a look around
and really not touch anything,
we don't force anything on anybody.
Or if you just are starting off
and you're a little bit fearful,
you can actually hold a few small snakes
or a few small lizards and get your feet wet
until you get to the point
where you can actually hold something bigger.
It's all about experiences here
and whatever experience you want
we wanna be able to deliver.
One of the experiences that I personally love to death
but a lot of my crew doesn't love so much
of course, is a fish spa.
You can't get a fish spa in a lot of places
so you gotta take advantage of it
when you're here at The Reptarium.
Are you excited?
- Sure. Let's do it.
- All right. Let's go, get those shoes off.
Now you guys don't be looking weird at his feet or anything
like that, but it's just cool.
These are what they call Garra Rufa,
which are just a doctor fish, right?
And they basically just nibble on your skin.
They don't have teeth.
It's like almost like a bubbly feeling.
And you basically up on this fish spa like this,
you just stick your feet right in there, like that.
Look at that. Oh yeah.
- (giggles) I don't like when they go in between my toes.
It's so (laughs) it tickles.
No I don't wanna open them (laughing).
- I can tell you the Fish Spa isn't for everyone,
but it is an experience that everyone
needs to have at least once.
- (giggles) Definitely once. Oh my feet.
- It's definitely a unique experience
that everyone has to do when they come to The Reptarium.
I hope you enjoyed the kind of experiences
that you could potentially do at The Reptarium.
It's a great time here.
And I hope you come visit us sometime
'cause we definitely would love it.
If not just keep watching the videos.
I mean, that's what we do, right?
If you did like this video,
do me a favor and hit this playlist right over here,
you can do me another favor,
hit the subscription button on this side,
have an absolutely wonderful day Reptile Army.
Remember be kind to someone and I promise,
I'll see you in the next one.