- Hey good morning everybody and welcome to the blog.
I hope the start of your day
is as good as it possibly can be.
We have a lot going on today.
I'm actually gonna be working on ball pythons.
Gotta do some ultrasound really quick
kind of wrapping up the breeding season.
Of course check for eggs,
hopefully we'll get some eggs later on.
I might actually even ultrasound Cupcake.
Remember I said that I think there's a chance
she might be gravid.
Regardless it's not going on today
and I just wanna be here to tell you that
we're gonna be okay.
It's gonna be a great day.
Let's push everything aside
and let's just go ahead and jump into it
and enjoy this amazing day together.
Again, things are going good.
My girl, look at how big she is.
Cupcake is absolutely incredible.
And I tell you, oh, Alma Chino look, awesome shape.
Looking really good.
Worked on these guys a little bit yesterday.
We finally have all that hot water going now
where we have a temperature of about 82 degrees.
So now we can do more water changes,
get this bacteria plume gone
and get the filtration working
to where we get some clear water.
Like you guys have noticed that it really worked with Ivy
because she was really cloudy
up until just about four or five days ago.
And now look at how clear her water is,
of course she's over here looking really good.
Hey Ivy.
Regardless, let's just go ahead and jump into things.
Tell you what guys, I am loving that we are cranking
on the production this year already.
I love this time of year.
And of course,
let me just move this over a little bit.
We have another clutch.
This one is a children's python.
You can see, I'll get her all cleaned up afterwards.
One little egg over here
that will candle we'll pull that aside.
And then we'll see what else she has.
She's definitely wrapped around
in a nice little clutch of eggs.
Doesn't look like a tonne of eggs,
but looks like a beautiful clutch.
Good job mom, you did so good.
Tell you what, what a beautiful animal.
And it's so cool to have like a dwarf python like this,
that that's as big as they get.
So, I always say,
if you're ever thinking about getting a python
but you want something smaller
children's spotted stimson's are great.
And these are actually a lot more eggs than I anticipated
to be honest with you.
It's not a bad clutch.
That's 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 eggs.
That is a good clutch for such a small female.
So 12 eggs, children's pythons.
Now the interesting thing is our candle lays one egg
but these guys incubate pretty quick.
Most pythons like ball pythons and stuff like that
they hatch in about 60 days.
These hatch in about 50 days believe it or not.
So we'll incubate 'em at 88 to 89 degrees.
And again about 50 days from now
we're gonna have a bunch of little baby children's pythons.
Its been a while since I've talked about Pinocchio,
the course the rhino ratsnake from Vietnam.
We have actually some adult breeders next door
that we're breeding.
Hopefully we can produce some more babies.
They're absolutely incredible.
And just like green tree pythons and Emerald tree boas,
they go through what they call an ontogenic change.
So as a baby, they're actually a grey color.
But then of course, as they get older,
they get this absolutely beautiful green color.
And of course that nose,
and the reason we call him Pinocchio,
is not 'coz he's a liar,
but because of course they'll use that as a lure
to kind of lure in birds when they're up in the tree.
It kind of looks like a grab worm, right?
And then of course,
when that bird flies up to try to get the grab worm,
Pinocchio gets a free meal of a bird.
I don't talk enough about cribos.
They are an amazing colubrid snake.
I mean, this of course is Rico, the black tail cribo.
Just an absolute beast.
I mean he is always on the move,
but a really placid animal.
Super good.
And we're trying to breed them well this year.
Last year, the female actually was gravid,
and then she got egg bound and none of the eggs were good.
We got all the eggs out of her.
But this year we've been breeding Rico again.
Again, there's a few different types of cribos.
These are the black tail cribos.
And I love them to death.
Super intelligent snakes.
As you can see,
really inquisitive and just a fun snake.
So with any luck,
hopefully, we'll get these guys bred this year.
And this is actually my girl Maya.
She's also a beautiful snake.
Certainly not as big as Rico,
but she's the one that did produce for us last year.
Again, got egg bound.
Was able to get those eggs out without any problem.
She definitely looks like she's got
a little bit of follicle growth this year.
We've seen some copulation.
So with any luck we'll get some black tail cribos
because that would be a dream come true.
We also work with the yellowtail cribos.
Take a look at the color on that.
It's almost like reverse right?
The black tail cribo is almost,
are this color and then turn black by the tail,
whereas the yellow tails are almost reverse
but just absolutely stunning.
And this is one of our girls.
We didn't try to breed her yet this year
because she's just not quite big enough,
but I think next year
we're definitely gonna be able to give a go at these guys.
And then this is my big male yellowtail cribo.
Of course, these guys are huge, monster, big animals.
These guys can literally
sometimes get up to nine foot in length.
So, with any luck next year,
he'll be waiting for that female
that is just getting up to size because they are incredible.
Again, all the dry mark on
which are indigo snakes, cribo snakes,
I mean, they're just so cool.
I mean, they're just such a neat animal.
And you can see this guy is just starting to shed.
So I'm gonna go ahead and put him back
'coz I don't wanna rip his shed off but,
you can see these guys are wonderful.
You guys remember yesterday
when we actually had to clutch the ball pythons,
we had one little slug egg.
Well, I'm gonna go ahead and see if Elvis is interested.
And by the way, if you didn't
see yesterday's video with the first ball python clutch,
you can check out the card right here.
Go ahead and check that out.
In the meantime,
I'm just gonna let Elvis come out.
And I think he's gonna be pretty excited about this egg.
Here you go, buddy.
And I'm gonna just let him come out
and see if he can smell it
and see what happens from there.
Again, mental enrichment I've been talking it about a lot.
Letting him come out, really checking things out
and just see if he wants to do it.
I wanna keep this guy's brain console working.
We wanna keep all our animals that way too.
What's this?
What's that?
There it goes, there it goes.
He's smelling it.
He's like, what is that?
What is that?
It smells yummy.
So he doesn't know what to do yet.
Oh, there he goes.
There he goes.
Yep, there it is.
Is he gonna squeeze it?
Or is he just gonna swallow it?
Oooh, it popped.
Oh my gosh.
That is so funny.
He definitely loved that.
I made a little bit of a mess though.
Unfortunately, Bruce is over here working.
So, he had the cord out
and now there's goop all over the cord.
But I think Elvis loved that little bit.
He is such a cheeky monkey.
Again, just in a cool way.
I love doing weird things with this guy
and just keeping him happy.
That's the face of a happy lizard right there.
What is he doing?
A silly monkey.
There he goes.
Oh my God.
That is awesome.
Elvis you're the best.
He's all done.
You're a messy eater Elvis.
It turns out that I did convince Lori
and everyone else involved
that we are going to do those personalized shout outs.
They're gonna be cheap.
Go to thereptarium.com.
And again, you can have us, the crew, the animals,
whatever, a personalized message.
Whether you need a pick me up,
Whether someone else needs a pick me up.
Whether it's your birthday, a special event,
something like that, we're happy to do it.
I'm probably only gonna do it
during this time where we're all shut in.
We'll probably discontinue this when this is all over.
Now we just wanna do something that's inexpensive
that you guys can do to just cheer you up for the day.
So again, go to reptarium.com and check that out.
Continuing to do a bunch of ultrasounding
and kind of just getting a gauge
of where we're at with the breeding season with everything.
This girl was actually at 21 millimeters
about a week and a half ago.
You can see, definitely grown.
I would say it's definitely upper 20s
maybe even 30 millimetres right now.
So, this is actually a chocolate pinstripe.
Yeah, 28 millimetres.
So, she's growing really well.
Again, the chocolate pinstripe.
A really beautiful one at that.
I actually bred two,
of course the banana chocolate spinner,
hopefully the bany ball,
we'll see what happens.
But I'm just gonna scan a handful of animals today,
kind of continue to see.
The vast majority of females are already ovulating,
which is great, but we still have probably,
you know, maybe 40 females
that are in that 20 plus millimeter
that we're still breeding.
And a few even at 15.
Hopefully, they'll continue to grow,
so we can continue to kind of just get a gauge
of what the breeding season is like down here.
And as much as you know,
big follicles like 25 plus millimetres are important,
there's a handful of girls like this one here,
that's actually was 13 millimeters.
Now if she grows past 13,
that's a really good sign that we're gonna,
oh, yeah, there we are.
Look at that.
They went from 13,
all the way up to that probably a good 17, 18
something like that.
So, just gonna get my cursor here,
go over to the other side.
Yeah, 17 millimetres.
So that's a big jump.
That's a great sign.
This is a female,
that when I was doing kind of the calculations
of how many clutches,
I didn't think she'd go off.
At 13, it's pretty light.
But now that she's at 17,
probably by next week, she'll be in the mid 20s.
So it looks like we'll have one more female going.
Hopefully we'll see that same pattern
with the other animals that were at 13 and 14 millimetres.
- I've gotta work with a lot of lizards today.
And one of those of course,
is this beautiful, beautiful Louis eyed hybrid right here.
Oh my God, look at her.
She is just like, you know what,
and to be honest with you,
one of my favorite things about the species here,
is truly truly those eyes.
What I'm actually gonna be doing here is,
remember like how we did with the rhino iguanas.
You know how when we first started working with them,
it was sort of like this food association.
So what I want is, I want her to look at my hand
and think I'm gonna feed her every time.
So I'm gonna try to put this here.
I'm gonna try and see if I can get her to eat it.
I wanna actually touch her chest.
Just like that.
So now that she's eating,
I touched a little bit.
I'll grab one.
Give another one.
And while she's distracted,
eating and I'm touching her.
So like, she's getting a sort of positive reinforcement
about the foods.
The food's not only
something she's getting this affirmation,
but she's also getting the touch.
Okay.
(mumbles)
You have every right to be anxious, I know.
That was actually pretty, pretty awesome.
And it really is awesome
that you guys were able to actually see us do this
because like this is a way I can show you guys
how we sort of address sort of problem and problem issues
and also read the body language of our lizards.
Every lizard here has some different little thing about them
some way that they want to be sort of like,
you know, manipulated one way or the other.
And we always try to like
push towards the positive of it all.
- And just so you guys get an understanding
is what we're looking at is,
we wanna get females up to about 35 millimetres
and then getting bred.
You wanna breed every maybe every three weeks with a male.
This girl was at 20 millimetres before.
It doesn't look like she grew a lot.
Yeah, it looks like 20 millimeters.
So she didn't grow at all.
That's not what you want.
You don't want stalling.
So, a lot of times when an animal stalls,
you can get a copulation.
So a male in and that'll kind of get that
follicle growth up again.
So she's gonna get a male in with her probably tomorrow.
Hopefully if he breeds and then in a week or so
we'll see that 20 go to maybe 25 or something like that.
Again, we wanna get up to about 33 to 35 millimetres.
One last breeding ovulated about 40, 45 millimetres.
So, most of these animals will go from 20 to 45 within
two to three weeks or something like that.
So, this girl didn't grow in the last week,
but hopefully with the breeding,
she'll actually explode
and we'll see the same thing with the other animals.
Alright, last female I'm gonna be doing down here,
she was actually at 13 millimeters.
So I'm not sure again if she's gonna grow very much.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like very much growth at all.
It's a, really at about 13,
which unfortunate because it's definitely
it's a py female.
But almost every other,
I think this might be the only female
that I ultrasounded today
that didn't have some growth in it.
So that's pretty good.
And guess what,
I think I'm gonna actually bring the ultrasound
over here in a little bit
and see if we can actually ultrasound Cupcake the big ball
just to see if she potentially gravid.
That would be dope.
So, I'll do that in a little bit.
All right, so we got the ultrasound over.
We gonna check out Cupcake.
We'll see how she got a little bit harder.
She's a big snake right?
So, I'm just gonna slowly get her out here.
Come on, girl.
It's okay.
Come on big girl.
She definitely looks fat.
And I'm not sure if she's gravid or not,
but that would be pretty amazing.
So what I'm gonna do is
I'm just gonna set her on the ground right here real gently.
What a big snake.
I tell you what, that's a monster boa.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and lube this up.
Right in here,
is where I should be able to scan
and see if there's anything going on right now.
And you know, I don't see.
You know it's funny.
I see masses right now.
I don't know.
I think that yeah, they are.
There is actually big masses right here.
I can't tell if there's a snake in them
but there absolutely is masses all the way down.
So she's definitely carrying.
Whether they're live babies or slugs,
I don't know yet.
But there's absolutely zero doubt in my mind
when you go down an over doc,
that you see big masses.
Gosh, I wish I could see little snakes.
It'd make me feel so much better.
So yes, she is 100%.
She's gravid for sure.
Now we're gonna have to wait to see if she has live babies.
Holy cow, that is awesome.
I mean, it's a little bit disconcerting,
the fact that I can't see
like kind of spines and stuff like that oftentimes.
But she's also a very big snake.
And this only penetrates so far, right?
So there's different megahertz,
but absolutely no doubt that there's masses in there.
So that is really cool.
So now we just have to wait and see.
There's also a chance although it'll be off season,
she could be gearing up for an ovulation.
So, I might go ahead
and throw that male boa back in with her
just for the heck of it.
Again off season,
because they typically would be having babies
in the next say month or so.
So doubtful that she hasn't ovulated
but then again, you never know.
So there you go.
We'll see what happens with Cupcake in the coming month.
I know I always say it,
but I appreciate you guys so much for always supporting me.
It means the world to me,
allowing me to live my dream.
And I'm so lucky to be able to do the things I love
and be surrounded by these animals.
And I truly hope that
you follow your passion in these times.
It's the time to kind of make the changes
and to go after things and spend some time now
doing things that maybe you didn't have time to.
And again, we will get through this.
I really do appreciate you guys.
If you want you can check out a playlist
of a bunch of feeding reptiles
because I know you guys really like that.
You can also spend some time if you want
listening to our podcast right up here.
You can subscribe to it.
It's called Checking In,
at least once a week, twice a week,
sometimes even three times a week.
You can subscribe to the vlog channel over here,
turn the post notifications on.
Again, have the best day you possibly can.
You guys mean the world to me.
Be kind to someone.
And I promise I'll see you guys tomorrow.