- Hey good morning everybody and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is incredible.
I'm gonna actually feed my little anaconda Verde
to start my day.
Hey girl, you wanna eat?
You wanna eat girl?
Come on, come on baby, lets go!
Ah there she is, woo doggy!
I'll tell you what, that is a great way to start the day.
And it is interesting that, there is a big big difference
between Verde and Ivy.
And you've got to remember,
Verde is coming up on her second birthday.
So she's literally maybe 30 inches at two years.
Well the thing is, a lot of snakes do the majority of
their growth the first two years of their lives.
(peppy music)
Take for instances my girl Perdita here.
What a beautiful snake as always.
Believe it or not Verde and Perdita were born
the exact same week.
There's a pretty big difference.
Perdita is closing in on 10 foot.
Verde is only 30 inches.
It's really interesting, anacondas they kinda break
the mold of everything, you know?
So the first couple years they really don't grow much.
As a matter of fact, if you remember, Ivy when we got her
she was only about six foot long.
- No, oh Eric, no no no!
- You want me to help you?
Should I help him?
- Yes you should! - No, he's fine!
- No, you should help me!
- [Brian] Eric did you get your work done?
- No Eric help.
- Oh yeah that's right uh--
- No, Eric help me!
- Within a year, Ivy went from six foot
to almost 10 foot in length.
So my point is that, typically anacondas,
until they get about six or seven foot,
they don't really have rapid growth.
Once they hit that size and they actually start eating
those huge meals like they're known for in the wild
that's when they start putting on all of that size
and that weight, right?
Now again, Ivy is nine and a half foot long
and about 60 pounds.
I would suspect in the next year she's probably
gonna go up to 12 maybe even 13 foot.
And she's probably gonna be over 100 maybe even 120 pounds
within the next year.
Now Verde on the other hand in the next two years
might only grow to four or five foot.
So a very different growth rate.
And that's again why anacondas are so unusual
and I'm absolutely so fascinated by 'em.
Guess what time it is guys?
Colubrid egg collection time, that's right.
I feel almost like that Blues Clues guy.
♪ It's a colubrid egg time, it's colubrid egg time! ♪
I do get excited about this
and this is a beautiful animal here.
I love this snake so much.
Last year she gave us some beautiful babies.
I'll show you them in a second here to be honest with you.
But she is a pink eyed leucistic Texas rat.
Don't bite me, don't bite me, don't be silly!
So basically she's a leucistic Texas rat
but she has pink eye so really like an albino
leucistic Texas rat snake.
Now I've told this story before,
I think what's really interesting is the fact that
the pink eyes popped up in the leucistics
years before there were albinos.
So the first albino was just a random pop out of leucistic,
so for years they were breeding leucistics, black eyed
leucistics and out of nowhere pink eyes popped out.
And now of course we're able to reproduce that.
And again a beautiful clutch of eggs.
Looks like we've got one little slugger here.
But other than that it looks amazing.
Oh, two little sluggers here.
Let's just go ahead and pull the rest of these eggs out.
We've got these ones right here looking good.
These two are stuck together so they're looking good.
And we've got these three over here,
got a couple loose ones that I definitely will candle.
And I'll probably candle this whole clutch
to be honest with you.
Rat snakes are kind of notorious for
rolling their eggs around.
So I just wanna candle them to make sure.
But never the less, really good!
Two, four, six, eight, 10, 12 good eggs and two slugs!
That's not bad, that's pretty cool.
And she was actually bred to a snow Texas rat snake.
Same breeding that I had last year,
let me show you those babies.
So this is one of her babies from last year,
it really blew me away to be honest with you.
I knew we were breeding a snow to a pink eyed,
so I thought there was a chance we could prove albinos
that would be het for both anerythristic and leucistic.
But out of nowhere they popped out snow.
Meaning that the leucistics are obviously got the
same genetics for lack of red pigment as well.
Which makes sense in one way
but we've seen that sometimes the alleles don't line up so,
interestingly enough we proved all snows that were
het for leucistic, pretty cool.
So one day we'll just figure this
whole gene thing out with them,
but I think it's pretty cool.
Let's get back to pulling clutches.
Next up is actually this Pueblan milk snake.
It's actually already out of the box over here.
This is actually a really pretty female too.
Not all of them are that good as far of the
lack of tipping is basically what it is,
is where the black actually goes into the red.
But ironically enough this is bred to an Oreo Pueblan
that has a lot more white and a little bit more tipping too.
So basically what you wanna do with a Oreo Pueblan
is much like the Halloween Peublan
you wanna breed the red out.
So it's weird that we have a really pretty
female that's going to a relatively
what we would consider such an ugly animal
that it makes it unique, if that makes any sense.
Not exactly the best clutch here that's for sure.
She only laid three good eggs and it looks like
we've got a couple slugs.
So I'm just gonna take these slugs off right here.
This is one of them right here.
But these three eggs look like they're really good.
So three eggs, two slugs.
Typically Peublans don't lay a ton of eggs but
three eggs isn't exactly great
but that's the way it's gonna go.
We actually have a couple more females that are still laying
so we'll pull them a little later in the day.
Let's just go ahead and jump into some other work.
(energizing music)
Well, no ball python clutches today.
It's kind of a bummer when you don't get clutches
'cause everyday you expect them.
But the truth is about two or three days from now
you start to really start get an influx of females
that are 30 days after shed
which is typically when they lay.
And then they really pretty much will stay consistent
for the best part of two months.
So, expect a lot of ball python clutches
almost every day in the vlog.
I hope you guys don't mind that but as for today,
no clutches.
I'll tell you my girl Ivy is on the hunt, big time.
All morning long she's been in the water, on the water,
coming around, so I definitely need to get her some food.
But I've been trying to find a specific thing that I
wanna try to feed her.
Something to continue to vary up her diet.
Things that she would eat in the wild, right?
So hopefully by tomorrow I can find that food item,
if I can't then I'm just gonna go ahead and
thaw a little pig or a rabbit or something else out.
But what an amazing animal.
And the thing that's so crazy about her again
is that if I come over,
she comes out of the water coming towards me,
almost like she's likes,
"come on I know you need to feed me!"
And you have to remember, it was just, what?
10 or 12 days ago she ate a 15 pound pig.
It's not like she's starving.
(pleasant music)
Take a look at this, this is actually an Abbott's Okeetee
het for scaleless and hoo, she's got a nice clutch of eggs.
And take a look at the male she'd bred to.
This is a scaleless Abbott's Okeetee right here.
That is a ripper, oh my gosh!
And it looks like there is a beautiful clutch of eggs.
Let's go ahead and take this down really quick,
and see what's going on.
Good job mom, oh my gosh!
That is a beautiful clutch of eggs.
She looks absolutely incredible.
And of course we'll always get her cleaned up
and ready to go, get some water in with her
and stuff like that.
Let's just see what she has here.
Wow, look at that clutch right there!
You can see some dimpling and stuff like that.
And what I'll basically do is I'll jut go ahead
and put a little bit of damp moss on the top of this
just to kind of puff this eggs out a little bit.
But wow that's a big clutch!
That's two, four, six, eight,
10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 21 eggs!
21 eggs, again, half of them are gonna be
Abbott's Okeetee scaleless,
the other ones will be Abbott's Okeetees het for scaleless.
Wow, that's awesome.
Let's take a look at my little frillies here.
These guys are getting so big
and the thing that's funny about these things is that
once they're out they never wanna go back in their cage.
A lot of times I'll just put my hand here
and all of them will just run out on my hand.
I'm kind of surprised they're not doing it right now
but look at how big they're getting.
Of course this is the first clutch that Lilith and Nova had.
And this is actually Big Mac here,
the big boy right here that we're raising up.
And these guys are just so social and so habituated.
I can't wait til we produce some more babies
so we can continue to do this because
when we do produce them and start getting them this chill
they're gonna be such good pets
when we can actually start getting them
to other people and not keeping them all
like we did last year.
But definitely amazing animals and doing so well.
Definitely haven't been showing tarantulas that much love
since we've been closed.
I guess it's just the fact that when we're not open
we keep the lights out because tarantulas prefer it
to be a little bit more dark so you don't see them as much.
Not to mention when I'm doing my virtual tours,
which have been fun by the way
if you guys are interested in a virtual tour
link is in the description,
but the fact is for some weird reason
when I get into this area it's really dead
and I always drop the call.
So I stay away from the tarantulas.
But the one thing I want to do when we open up
and I've been talking about this for a long time,
is definitely one of these enclosures I'm gonna switch out
to hissing cockroaches.
I just think it would be cool because again,
we have tarantulas you can hold,
we have scorpions you can hold,
and to be able to hold roaches would be pretty dope.
And hissing cockroaches are some of the cooler animals.
So that's one of the things that
I'm definitely gonna switch out.
Lori's not gonna be happy but I'm gonna do it
because I just think they'd be pretty cool.
Remember a week or so ago we actually got these
little alligator teeth from salt and pepper?
Well you can see there's one or two more in here right now.
There's one right there and there's one right there.
There's some white flecks, those aren't teeth right there.
These are actually bone matter.
And like I mentioned these guys will shed their teeth.
So I'm gonna go in and see if I can't get these guys out
cause again, we're talking about maybe making
some jewelry pieces from their teeth.
Which I think would be pretty cool.
(lively music)
- [Brian] Is this the one, Oscar?
- [Oscar] Yeah I think that's it.
- [Male Voice] I think that's it, I can't tell though.
- [Men At Same Time] Pepper, get out of here!
- [Oscar] And Salt, yeah.
- Now it's Salt, come on get out of here!
(laughter)
We'll I'm soaking wet now, but I did get one little tooth.
Right here on my hand right there.
A nice little tooth right there.
Oh my god, that's a trip.
There's so many little white things in here,
that's the problem.
It's that it's hard to figure out which ones actually tooth
and then Salt and Pepper kept on coming up to me
and bumping into me and stuff like that.
Salt I'm not worried about, but Pepper on the other hand,
holy moly I was expecting to lose a finger
or something like that.
So I think I may have got at least the one,
I'm not sure if there's another one or not,
we'll keep looking.
Interestingly enough we actually have another python clutch.
But this one happens to be a spotted python.
What's weird is that I see momma chilling
here without the egg.
I see a little slugger over there,
so I want to see, oh, here the eggs are right here.
This is unusual.
Number one, not a very good clutch.
Number two, unusual that she would just lay her clutch
and leave them.
Pythons always wrap around them
and childrens and spotteds are typically really good
about being maternal about them
So that is really bizarre.
So we have three good eggs only.
It looks like we've got one, two three and,
it's okay momma, and four slugs.
So not a very good clutch at all and
a very weird type of action for a female spotted python.
Something I don't think I've ever seen that before.
Where they've laid there eggs and
just kinda went away from them.
Good thing that I actually saw them
because a lot of the times I'll just check to see if
a female is wrapped around a clutch of eggs.
I just saw a little bit of white when I looked
and I thought, "oh there's a clutch of eggs!"
But regardless, three good eggs, four slugs.
Not the best but we still have a bunch more spotteds
still to lay for the year.
(peppy music)
- Just slowly trying to wrap my mind around how I'm gonna
fill this cage out for these basilisks as they get older.
Again, it'll probably be six months before I even think
about putting them in here but
I want to start to fill this enclosure out.
Get plants, again, we'll do ABG bioactive soil.
We'll do live plants in here.
So we want to start getting it to grow out so
it'll look really cool so that when we do move them in,
but one of the things is obviously
I need more vines and stuff like that.
I'm just bringing this up here,
this is one of the universal rocks, vines that you can get.
And by the way I've been telling you guys,
if you want universal rocks like backdrops, water falls,
stuff like that you can go to UniversalRocks.com.
Use the promo code REPTARIUM, all caps, you get 10% off.
And these vines are incredible.
So I'm just kinda playing around with the idea of
how would I want to do this?
Do I want to cut, you could cut them down,
you could bend them, you can do all kinds of stuff.
I'm not sure yet what it is,
but I want to have at least one or two nice vines
that go up like this maybe, something, I don't even know.
I might have to cut this down just a little bit more
cause I think this might just be a little bit too long.
But you can bend these things
and they stay wherever you want
and maybe I'll attach it like to here and over here.
Just some more climbing areas and then
I figure I'll have plants here,
I can have plants that are growing down here,
ferns, all kinds of stuff.
So bromeliads, make this just look incredible.
Just the very beginning of the thought process,
how I'm gonna do this and then over the next week or so
we'll actually get this thing planted out
and start the growth for this.
And again, as those basilisks grow they can come in here.
It's gonna be an amazing habitat.
I've got a couple things to unbox
over at the PO box really quickly.
Let's see this is an Amazon Prime box.
You didn't order anything, did you?
- Well, I always order things, I don't think this is
something I ordered.
- Let's see what we have, okay.
Is there a note in here?
Let me see really quick.
No note.
So I don't know who sent this.
First off we have this, what's this?
Oh this is cool, check this out!
- [Lori] Yeah that's for you.
- Oh this is a sloth lanyard.
(Lori laughing)
I'm down, this is what I'm gonna put my keys on
for The Reptarium.
So thank you whoever sent that.
And this one must for you, look at this,
it says fragile do not drop.
- So don't touch it.
- No!
- You break everything.
- I know, let me help you out.
- You don't have to cut.
Oh my gosh.
- Oh look at this.
- [Lori] What does this say?
- [Brian] Oh, buzzed, infoxicated.
- [Lori] Slothed.
I'd let you use that one.
- Oh I like slothed, that one's a good one.
And then --
- [Said In Unison] Skunked!
- These are cool, thank you so much!
- These are really cool.
- Oh my gosh, well whoever sent that,
I'm sorry you didn't send a note
but thank you, that was awesome!
Perfect for me and perfect for you.
I've got a sloth one!
We have something else here.
You know what this reminds me of,
is like an old VHS tape.
- That is exactly what I think of,
the old Blockbuster days. (slicing sound)
- Oh my gosh.
- You just stabbed your stomach.
- I did, oh my god I did.
I did stab my myself.
- Don't send anymore knives.
He clearly can't handle them.
- I just get excited.
I can't help it.
Okay we've got a bunch of this.
- Well that's exciting.
- Oh my god! - Oh shut the hell up!
- What are the chances?
(laughter)
- But this looks like,
I think this looks like, maybe home made.
- "I hope you're having an awesome day.
"Wanted to say thank you for your videos.
"My daughter and I enjoy having father and daughter
"watching your video time, thank you so much.
"My wife says I have too many knives
"so I figured, what better person to appreciate
"a knife than you, thank you so much."
This is from Caleb and Caitlyn.
So thank you so much for the knife.
It's absolutely wonderful, I mean, I think it's super cool.
(Lori sighs)
What do you think?
(Brian laughs)
Verde will certainly grow up just like Ivy
and Ivy will even get bigger because that's the way
things work and as a matter of fact,
if you like the big snake stuff here's a playlist
right over here of just giant snakes that I mess with.
Up here you can actually pay some love to my podcast
called Checking In if you don't mind.
Subscribe over here to this vlog channel,
turn the post notifications on.
Thank you so much for your support.
Have a wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to someone and I promise
I'll see you tomorrow.