- Hey, good morning, everybody,
and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is absolutely incredible
and you guys know that I mean that.
Look at this animal right here.
This is actually a banana enchi leopard clown ball python.
That's crazy.
I mean, it's yellow, orange, just fluorescent colors.
It's crazy that we have ball pythons
that look like this right now.
And to understand how we've gotten to this point,
I really think we have to rewind
and figure out where we started.
And it all started with, obviously, normal ball pythons.
But back in the '70s, '80s,
and really even maybe the early '90s,
the vast majority, if not all of the ball pythons
that were imported into the country
were actually imported as adults.
Now, we all know that ball pythons
can be a little bit finicky from time to time,
even as captive bred.
But I can tell you this much,
as a kid, I got my second snake was a ball python
and it happened to be a wild-caught male that never ate.
For two and a half years,
I did everything I could possibly do, assist feeding it,
taking it to vets, everything,
and unfortunately, it ended up perishing.
The truth is is the vast majority
of those imported wild animals never ate and died,
and they were really considered kind of like garbage snakes
because no one wanted them.
Why would you buy a ball python?
It's not gonna do well, it's not gonna eat,
and it's gonna eventually die for you.
So it was kind of a time when things weren't very good,
but something changed and I'm about to tell you about it.
You see what really changed everything back in those days,
in the '80s, there was a guy named Joe Fauci from Tampa.
He actually went to a university.
Happens, in fact, that his roommate at that university
was a guy named Emmanual Noah.
Now, Emmanual Noah actually came from Accra, Ghana.
Now Accra, Ghana, of course, is the epicenter
for ball pythons.
Ghana, Togo, and Benin is where all the ball pythons
are being exported.
Joe knew that these animals were coming out
and doing horrible and really weren't doing well
in the pet trade because of it.
And Joe had an interest of the pet trade for sure,
so he had an idea
and him and Noah kinda talked about it.
When Noah went back to Accra,
rather than exporting wild ball pythons
that were basically not gonna survive, he thought,
what if we actually have people collect wild females
that are gravid and then they would actually hatch the eggs
and send the baby ball pythons over,
would those babies do better than the wild caught ones?
As it turns out, they did.
Now back then,
they were only doing a couple of hundred a year,
but that's really was the very first start
of how the entire ball python thing started to change,
and they went from being a garbage animal
to being a viable pet in the pet trade.
And that got us one step closer
to that crazy banana enchi leopard clown ball python,
but we still have a long way to go.
And it really, the next step started
with albino ball pythons.
The same two characters, Joe Fauci, Emmanual Noah,
ended up importing the first albino ball pythons.
Now that was the first kind of mutation outside
of the piebald that was imported in the '70s
or early '80s that ended up never reproducing
and most people didn't even think was genetic.
Now at this point, a guy named Bob Clark,
you guys may know the name,
actually had produced albino Burmese pythons
and that really changed the reptile hobby because,
for the first time, there was an investment-quality animal
in an albino Burmese python.
Well, Bob heard about the albino ball python that came in
and he was smart enough to realize,
hey, if I could sell all these albino Burmese,
these giant snakes,
I could certainly sell a snake
that only stayed four or five foot long,
and he knew that the albino would be recessive.
Now, interestingly enough,
it wasn't just the albino ball python that came in.
It actually came in together with an animal
that is called a genetic stripe,
just like this one right here.
And Joe and Noah actually imported both the animals
at the same time.
And they basically told Bob,
hey, if you're gonna buy the albino,
you have to buy the genetic stripe as well.
At the time he thought,
ah, I really don't want that stripe ball python,
but I'm gonna go ahead and buy it.
Weirdly enough, down the road,
genetic stripes ended up costing more
than albino ball pythons,
but that's later on down the road.
So Bob ended up buying the first albino ball python
from Joe Fauci that came from Emmanual Noah.
He ended up proving out and once again,
there was another investment-quality ball python,
which really started to change things.
Now we're still talking about the early to mid-'90s
at this point.
There's still a long way to go.
Enter in a long-haired enthusiast named Brian Barczyk
right around the mid-'90s that loved ball pythons.
I was doing business with Joe Fauci at the time,
buying a bunch of stuff,
and when he imported
those couple hundred ball pythons per year,
I would fly down to Tampa to go through them
and pick out some really cool ball pythons
that Noah had sent him.
And that was kind of how it started
with my enthusiasm with ball pythons
'cause I always loved them going back
to that second snake that I owned.
Even though it did so terrible,
I still loved ball pythons
and I wanted to have more of them,
so I was able to get them from Joe.
They were captive-hatched in Accra, Ghana,
and they did great,
so I would bring them home and I'd raise them up.
And that's how it kinda started there.
And then all kinds of things changed
over the next eight to 10 years,
and that basically was
that there was a guy named Kevin McCurley, Tracy Barker,
and again, me right here,
that were buying up ball pythons that were coming in
and the demand started to increase.
The first pastel, the first spider ball python came in.
S'more mutation started to come into the country.
Piebalds came into the country with VPI
and ultimately Pete Kahl proved them out to be genetic.
All the things started happening,
and then the interest in captive ball pythons
went through the roof.
In Togo, Ghana, and Benin,
instead of producing a couple hundred ball pythons a year,
they started producing tens of thousands
and even 100,000-plus per year.
Now ball pythons were one of my favorite snakes at the time,
and quite frankly still are one of my favorites snakes.
I just have always loved their little cute faces
and stuff like that,
and that's really when I met Emmanual Noah.
I knew that he had been dealing with Joe Fauci.
He was his connection over in Africa
and really the one that started the whole thing over
in Togo, Ghana, and Benin.
So essentially, Accra, Ghana, where Noah was not only there
but also part of the government there by this time,
he was really kinda controlling things over there.
Then in Lome, Togo, there was a guy named Eric Fushaar
and then the big guy in Abomey, Benin,
which had the largest corded ball python,
was a guy named Patrice.
Now my connection in with Noah finally was my first step
into dealing directly with Africa.
Not that I wanted to cut Joe out of the situation.
It's just that I wanted to expand
beyond what he was gonna do.
Again, the demand started to really increase.
There were more mutations starting to be produced,
and it went from three people that were super excited,
again, Kevin, Tracy, and myself,
to all of a sudden hundreds of people
and even thousands of people
that wanted to get into ball pythons,
to the point where people were selling off
all their other snakes just to buy ball pythons.
So I wanted to be ahead of the curve.
So not only was I dealing with Emmanual Noah,
I started to make connections with Jimmy Akwande,
Eric Fushaar, Patrice, Bein Banu,
all these people over in Africa,
and I started buying directly from them.
Again, by this time, we're talking about the late '90s
and things were really fever pitch.
By the late '90s, I literally was sending people over
to West Africa for two or three months of the hatch season
just so that I would get the opportunity
to buy some of the really cool stuff,
and that's really when things changed tremendously
for me personally
when this particular mutation popped up
and it happened to be in Abomey, Benin.
The guy, Patrice, that I mentioned
actually got one of these.
Whether he hatched it or one the trappers brought him,
we don't really know what the deal was,
but I was offered the very first pinstripe ball python.
I ended up buying it for $27,000 sight unseen,
didn't know if it was a male or female,
didn't know anything about it.
Ended up coming in and I was blown away by it.
Of course, a year and a half later,
we ended up proving it out
that it was an incomplete dominant animal.
It turned out to be a male
and we produced a bunch of pinstripes.
By this point, it was crazy.
People were standing in line trying to buy snakes
that were worth $25,000, to the point where, literally,
people would be mad at you if you wouldn't sell them one
because you'd be like, "I'm sorry, I'm sold out,"
and they would literally be upset.
It really changed things to a point that it was crazy.
And it really changed the reptile hobby
because for the first time,
the reptile hobby became a business for so many people.
And that's really what started the next phase
of getting single-gene animals into double genes
and triple genes and so on and so on.
So in the late '90s and very early 2000s,
the ball game really was on.
I feel pretty blessed that I was there
to see the kinda onset of the ball python world.
Now fast forward 20 years later
and we're seeing all these crazy five, six,
eight gene animals that are so absolutely mind-bending.
The truth is we were fortunate enough
to see the first albinos, the first pies,
the first pastels, spiders, pinstripes being produced.
As a matter of fact,
the banana ball python was an interesting story, too.
It was imported by a guy named Mike Van Nostrand
at Strictly Reptiles and he actually brought it in.
And a lotta people thought it might be some sort
of form of caramel albino,
so they weren't that interested in it
and it sat in his shop
for like, I don't know, maybe six months.
Tons of people saw it and were not that interested
'cause he wanted like $15,000
and caramels at the time were about $7,500.
Guy named Will Slough up in Chicago
actually swung for the fences
and bought that banana ball python.
It was a female.
He raised it up, bred it, and to his surprise,
it was an incomplete dominant animal
and that was the first banana ball pythons ever produced.
At the very same time,
Kevin McCurley over at NERD produced something
that was called a coral glow
from an original imported animal
that was called the white smoke actually.
And that was one of the craziest things that ever happened
because both the coral glows and the bananas
started to sell for $63,000 a piece.
Why 63,000?
I don't know. You would have to ask them.
But the fact is they had people standing in line
to pay them $63,000 for banana ball pythons.
So back here to this banana enchi leopard clown ball python.
I mean, gosh, it's amazing how far we've come.
People are producing snakes that blow my mind.
I mean, I look at the animals
that all these guys are producing
and I'm like, "How is it even possible?"
Thinking back to 25, 30 years ago
when I saw the first mutations coming in,
it's pretty special to see how far it is.
And the fact is, is how far will it go?
We don't know.
I mean, every single year
we're gonna have more and more interesting things,
and that's just what's so impressive and so exciting
about the ball python world.
And people ask me all the time,
"Will this ever happen again with another type of snake
"or another type of reptile?"
And the truth is is that I always say the same thing.
Ball pythons have been the king of reptiles
for the last 20-plus years,
and they'll continue to be the king of reptiles
for the next 20 years because they are the perfect animal.
They're big enough to be interesting
but not so big that little kids can't handle them.
They're highly, highly diverse
when it comes to color mutations,
and they're just very easy to take care of animals.
They have everything that you want
when it comes to the perfect animal.
That doesn't mean that other mutations of other reptiles
aren't gonna be super popular,
but still, the royal ball python
will remain the king of reptiles.
And that's right.
That's how we got here with the ball pythons.
I just wanted to give you a little bit of a back history
so that now you know,
when you look at these amazing morphs,
you'll understand where we came from
from the very beginning.
Of course, there's a lot more to talk about with that,
but at least that gives you the overview.
If you do enjoy this video,
here's a playlist of a bunch of really cool snakes
that if you just click one or two videos
helps me a tremendous amount.
Up here's my podcast channel.
I talk about stories like this for hours.
You can check it out over there.
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Have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to somebody
and I promise I'll see you tomorrow.