Morelia Python Radio

Silver Peppered Inland carpet python with Darren Whittaker

Episode #236 In this episode we will be joined by Darren Whittaker to talk about on of the collest carpet python morphs in the world, The silver peppered inland. This past season Darren proved this morph to be recessive. We will talk about the back story of this morph and what will be the future of this morph. We will also be hitting on some of the other projects that Darren is working on.

Duration:: 2h 59m
Broadcast on:: 02 Mar 2016
Audio Format:: other

Hey, Chad Brown here. You may remember me as a linebacker in NFL or as a reptile breeder in the owner of Projak I've been hurtful since I was a boy and I've dedicated my life to advance in the industry and Educating the community about the importance of reptile. I also love to encourage the joy of breathing and keeping reptiles as a hobbyist Which is why my partner Robin and Marklin and I created the reptile report. The reptile report is our online news aggregation site Bringing the most up-to-date discussions from the reptile world Visit the reptile report.com every day to stay on top of latest reptile news and information We encourage you to visit the site and submit your exciting reptile news photos and links so we can feature Outstanding breeders and hobbyists just like you the reptile report offers powerful branding and marketing exposure for your business And the best part is it's free your buyer or breeder You got to check out the reptile report marketplace the market place is the reptile world's most complete buying and selling Information full of features to help put you in touch with a perfect deal find exactly what you're looking for with our advanced search system Search by sex wait more or other keywords and use our buyer now options to buy that animal right now Go to market place dot the reptile report calm and register your account for free Be sure to link your marketplace account to your ship your reptiles account to earn free tokens With each shipping label you book use the marketplace to sell your animals and supplies and maximize your exposure with a platinum Add also gets fed to the reptile report and our powerful marketplace Facebook page Byron and selling you ship your reptiles.com Take advantage of our discounted priority overnight shipping rate ship your reptiles.com can also supply you with the materials needed to safely ship your Animal successfully use ship your reptiles.com to take advantage of our discounted priority overnight shipping rates the materials need to ship the reptile Successfully live customer support in our live on time arrival insurance program. We got you covered Visit the reptile report comm to learn or share about the animals click on the link to the marketplace find that perfect pet or breeder Then visit ship reptiles.com the ship that animal anywhere in the United States. We are your one-stop shop for everything reptile related to the world. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Marrelia Python radio tonight show that I've been waiting for since 2012 I think. I don't know I know the last time I heard when did we go to Tinley Park 2013 maybe it was 2014 first time because we went because this was the second time right. Yeah, then we went before that. So do you remember that? So yeah, okay. So 2014 the silver peppered inland carpet python is a is one of the coolest morphs I think that I've ever seen in carpet python. What the hell are you doing over there man? Nothing. No. Well, Darren's in the shoes is a ruppy so I'm not paying attention to you. But the silver peppered is like it's definitely up there on one of the top of Marrelia morphs and it's weird because it's so new but it looks so different and so cool like it jumped up that ladder of the coolest morphs in Marrelia so quickly it was ridiculous. So yeah, it's definitely my favorite. Of course it's the one I can't have. That's how it always is. It's like this one is amazing. I would love to have a pair of these. Oh, it's in Australia. Dammit. So we have to just kind of watch from afar. So but it is one if you guys if you're listening and you haven't seen pictures of these animals go now to Google type it in or go to the Marrelia python radio Facebook page and look it up. Even go to Marrelia python radio.com because I don't we have a picture of it there? Yep. Yes. Okay. Cool. I was going to open. We did it for after I said it. So if not, you'd be working furiously right now. So definitely go there. Check it out. It's really cool. The best way to describe it, it's almost like a really reduced zebra granity kind of looking animal with the base colors of an inland that make it just gorgeous and it's definitely one of my favorites. I would kill for one. Yeah. So now he's got a picture. So. Yeah. Now you're talking my language. Our good friend Darren Whitaker, he is down there in Australia and he produced these really cool looking silver pepper and all of them are called. I think the first time I saw it was the complete carpet python book and I was just floored by it. To me being a morph guy, you know, just so awesome. But what's cool about it is inland carpets which here in the States really haven't you know, I guess they haven't really taken on. You know, like to die hard carpet people sort of have them mainstream. It's not really, it's not a big thing yet, but they will be because they are definitely the hardest and coolest carpet. Probably one of my favorites. I think they would be one of my favorites. It took a while for bread lie to catch on and what really kind of kicked bread lie into the stratosphere was having the stripes and the hypo's and now the stone wash. And it's like. You still get the basis of the appreciation for bread lie, but it takes some time. It's almost like you need to have a few more to have a few people who own one or two because then they'll show them to other Morelia heads. And then they'll go get one. It kind of just how it goes. And England is definitely like starting to go the same path as bread lie where some people have them. And then the way they kind of show them off to other Morelia heads, it started to progress like I saw your inlands and now I have to get a pair of inlands. So, you know, that's just how that happens. So, yeah, silver peppers were here. I imagine everyone would have inlands. Oh, man. Yeah, there was a question that came up the other day in one of the Facebook groups and it basically said that if Australia decided to open up exporting. And you could, well, they had to choose. You could choose one animal or one type of snake. What would it be? Well, one type of reptile. What would it be? A block. Wait, so one type. How many can I get at that fight? It wasn't really clear, but those rules sort of went out the window really quick. But you can't pick just one. You know what I mean? You can't pick as possible. So, of course, my pick was the silver pepper inland and a pair of inbracada locality in bracada. Then I thought about it and I came back and I said, you know what? I think I would go there with a GPS and I would find, you know, each of the subspecies, and get some true locality with the GPS coordinates that I would say. But, dude, you would never hear somebody ever again say, that's not pure. You know what I mean? I would email to you every day just to annoy you. It's not pure. I'm not sure you'll read your GPS right. So, you know, you were in jungle territory. Yeah, that's where were you again? I'm looking at the topographical map in front of me and I don't believe you. So, you know, there's always going to be somebody. But I would just have a case. The problem is I would make a poor decision and I would get a case of rough scales. And when they arrived, I'd be like, oh, yeah, you said a case. I did. I said, I don't see the problem here. Yeah, exactly, stop it. So, what is funny is you'd be like, oh, and why didn't you just get like 20 rough scales? I wanted 20 rough scales. What if you could have gotten other animals? Oh, shit, you're right. Oh, well, I mean, like, it's just like I would just ruin it because of the blinders for the roughies. That's why I'm like, well, I can get silver peppers when Eric makes them. So, yeah, we would have to be strategic in how we brought things in. Man, you would have it. Oh, my God. Well, even if it's only you're allowed to import from breeders, like even if we're not allowed to import from anybody else but licensed breeders, we could call them. Oh, you know what? I think Scott, Scott Eeper said something on that thread. I should do much time that was. Well, I probably would be poor and you probably would have a new house. Yeah, yeah, it would be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody's getting extension put on their house because Owen and Eric are bankrupt. So, yeah. Here's some already placed on radio wing. Yeah. Just added this extension on, you know, a few weeks ago. Perfect. But of course, like true morality placed on radio fashion, the show that I'm most excited about, I feel like crack. So, you know, I'm going to push through this one, no doubt, because, you know, like I said, this is going to be awesome. We're going to hear the history of the morph. Obviously, we're going to be teased because it's something that we don't have. But like, if you don't know, Darren, he keeps a wide range of morality. Yeah, he keeps roughing. He keeps working. Like we said, we're really in Burkata. I know he's more than I. You know, he does antiresia. So, he has a lot of reptiles, so it's cool. When he gets on here, we can talk to him. One, I guess of the more exciting things in our news is that we were voted the radio show of the year. By the reptile report. Yeah. The reader's voice. So, it wasn't readers voting from readers and listeners, which we obviously want to thank all of you who went and voted for us, because it's awesome. So, thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely. Also, we want to send a shout out to all the readers and keepers that have come on here and shared their info with everyone and gave their time. I think that's pretty awesome. The reptile report for running the contest. I'd imagine that's a lot of work. I don't know. It's just good to recognize positive stuff rather than negative stuff, which, well, plenty of that to talk about next week. It's just good to see positive people in industry recognized for their achievements. I guess I would have said that congratulations out to Herb Nation Radio, our good friend Nick Mutton, who has to show over on there. What do you call it? Sorry, I asked all of them to pop up in the post. Our good friend Nick has a show over there. Nick Mutton's show. Those guys were checked as editor's choice, which is pretty awesome. Sure, if you guys haven't heard of Herb Nation Radio, you should definitely go check it out. Then Russo's on there. Now they've got the Venom Interviews, which I find quite fascinating and I can't wait until that DVD comes out. That should be pretty cool. Just a Josh Pady wealth. I don't know. I can't think of anybody else at the moment. But yeah, it's a cool, cool thing. I don't know. There's a busy person over on the group page. Yeah, he forgot to call in and do the show. So apparently he's having far too much fun doing that. But we're going to have to post all the pictures that he threw up on to the chat, on to the Merle Python radio Facebook page, just so everybody can see. Because he has pretty much of the progression of these guys from like hatchlings all the way up to adults of how they look and they look phenomenal. So I think someone compared them to mini Owen Pelley Python's, which is cool. And I can kind of see that. But I want both just to compare in front of me living in my house for several years so that I can compare which one looks like the other. So yeah, I'll have to get the Owen Pelley and the silver pepper over here to make that. Even still, I think I'd rather have silver pepper. I just want the Owen Pelley because it's cool. See, it's like, I imagine it's like the next rough scale for me. Oh, I can't have it, but they're really. Yeah, they're coming on in. What is? No, no, no. What were you saying? You kind of cut out there for a little bit. Oh, I was kind of you were saying about the Owen Pelleys. I was saying that Owen Pelleys are kind of, they're large, like a large children Python, I guess. They're kind of like, no. Yeah, they're kind of the mix between, I don't know, I've heard that there are mix between children's and, you know, like, more alien, that kind of thing. I don't know. I wish you could see one. Like, in front of us. So, to Gavin Bedford, and he is, we still have to get together at date, but he gave the go ahead for to come on the show in April. So, well, we're all about that. You know, and how much I love hearing those trips and the outback and how the project started and the history. You know, the thing that I'm like most about, like, doing podcasts and stuff about reptiles is the history. You know, GTP Keeper radio. I got down quick now, man. We're not stumbling anymore. Yeah, they did a show a couple weeks ago, and they talked all about that history of chondros and all that stuff. I don't know. Once it's there, it's archived now. And as long as the podcast is there, the information is there for people to go back and reference. You never know what's going to happen. The stories might get lost. People get out of the industry and, you know, they don't write stuff down. And, you know, maybe even years from now, certain people may die and all that kind of stuff and, you know, stories get lost that way. So, it's really cool to hear people share books like that. Why would we wait for him to come on? How was Hamburg? Hamburg was good. It was fun. They moved me again. I wasn't back in my normal spot near Matt. And, you know, it was one of those I come in and I go straight back to where my table normally is. And somebody else has already set up on it. And I'm like, "Uh-oh, that's not right." And Matt said he came in and turned around and there were a bunch of ball pythons of Boas set up behind him. He goes, "Let's not owe his table. That makes no sense." So, they actually had me set up next to Jason Bailin and Howard Ruttings. So, I was down. It was like a mini carpet row. You had me, Jay Howard, and then Jason, and then me. And then Eric Kohler was down on the other side about an aisle away. But, yeah, it was kind of like- He bends their pretty regularly now, right? Kohler, it's on and off. He lives more towards Pittsburgh. So, it's a little bit of an aisle for him. So, if he's doing anything else, he won't bend the show. But if he's got a free weekend and he feels like he'll come down and bend the show. So, it is, you know, you're kind of right where you can almost bet on him being there. But, don't be surprised if he's not there, is what I'm kind of saying. I mean, if Jason were to miss a show or I miss a show, it's kind of like everybody kind of wonders where the hell we went. But it was a good show. It was packed. So packed. I didn't even get to walk around the show because there was no room to walk around the show. It was just that full. Apparently, there were all of Python's at the show, and I missed them. There were enough heel monsters to choke a horse and various other animals to see. So, yeah. So, I'm kind of glad I didn't get to walk around because I really shouldn't be spending the money I have on heel monsters, even though I kind of want to. So, it's one of those things. But I heard it was a great show. It was a lot of stuff going on. I sold a few things. I know everybody else sold a few things. So, it's just kind of one of those shows. It was a good show. The issue that comes is that the next show is April 30th. So, which is the same date as the southern carpet. You're going to have to educate the folks for a minute. I'm going to have to help Darren here. Oh, you help Darren. I'm going to tell them about the Northeast carpet fest that we'll announce the date at the end of the show. So, you go ahead and do that. Anyway, Eric and I did have this big grand meeting Friday night when he came to drop off some snakes for me to take the hamburger. And we discussed a few things, one of which was setting the date for the Northeast carpet fest. Because we decided it was going to be held once again here in Birdsboro at my house for this year. I know you're talking about sending it to Eric's house, but Eric didn't move like he was supposed to, like he promised me. So, now we're going to help the deer again in Birdsboro and we'll announce the date at the end of the show. But we're going to give you guys enough time to do all that and also keep your eyes peeled because we're going to have the t-shirts up for sale again. And we're also going to be asking for donations for the auction as well, basically the same stuff as last time. If you have any questions about hotel bookings or if you need a place to stay or something like that, if you want to come up for carpet fest, contact me through Facebook. If you're my friend, if not, you can email me through my website, which is roger-reptiles.com, just put in the header carpet fest. You can also send any emails or questions to info@marelypipe.com. We're going to try to be as accommodating as possible to everybody who wants to come out for carpet fest. The only thing we ask for you guys to do is you bring one dish food or drinks, something that, and bring enough to share for everybody else. If you want to just bring your favorite six pack of beer and your favorite dessert, awesome. Some people kind of go a little bit above and beyond. The important thing to remember is that you are responsible for getting whatever food you bring edible. So if you bring a bunch of raw hamburger, you can't leave it on the countertop and call it good. You've got to go cook those hamburgers. So if you don't want to be sticking in front of a grill, don't bring hamburger. That's pretty much how it is. Also, we're definitely going to set up who brings what. If you're coming to carpet fest and you want to know what to bring, just send an email to me. I'll tell you what you're thinking about bringing. I'll tell you if it's good or not. This way we don't have 20 people bringing brownies. As much fun as that would be, we can't all have 20 different types of brownie for carpet fest. So definitely avoid that, but just so everyone knows, like I said, we're going to announce the day at the end of the show, but we're looking more towards the end of May. So mark the calendars, get everything set there, and it'll be a really cool time. It was fun here last year. We didn't get too crazy. I did still way more alcoholic beverages on my own carpet than I ever thought possible. So just so everybody knows, so it'll be a fun time. I always enjoy carpet fest, and we are kind of choosing May, because it's a little bit warmer up here. It's nice weather to be outside. We've been pretty good about getting good weather when it comes to carpet fest. I think we had one year where it rained, but of course we'll hold the auction and it'll be really cool. We can hope everybody can come out and make it. If you can't make it, just support us by buying a carpet fest t-shirt. It's almost like people are collecting them now. It's like they get one even though they can't make it a carpet fest. We usually have to send a few t-shirts, a few carpet fest t-shirts in the mail to Australia, because there's various people down there who ended up wanting a few of them and kind of hanging up, wearing them, do whatever, and so it'll be cool. So we'll definitely get on that one. So are we ready or no? Are you still leaving me all by myself? All by myself. Okay. So in that case, what I'll say is I need to say this. Damn it. I'm back. Damn it. I was about to call free drinks at Tinley. Oh. Sure. We can do that. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. We just had some technical difficulties. No worries. We'll get it going and we'll be set in no time flat. So falling back in or something like that. Yeah. We have a problem Skype, but no worries. We are changing from Australia. In the season? Yeah. Holy crap, dude. The past week, I've seen more locks of carpet pythons than I have all year. And I already have one clutch of eggs on the ground and one that's imminent. So it's like the season ain't freaking over at all. I picked up a loan, I picked up a mail on loan from Jason at Hamburg. It's a red tiger mail that he and I did a loan previously in about 2013. I don't know if you remember I brought the baby tiger with me to ICAST and we split the clutch. So we did that. I do remember that. We did that again because he has that tiger's kid or one of its kids or relatives that's a very brighter red tiger and that one's been breeding everything. So this boy didn't have anything to do. And so he sent him over here and I threw him to the same team mail that we bred in 2013 together. So I put them in and I'm like, all right, well, we'll see what happens. An hour later they were locked up and I'm like, God damn it. This is happening quickly. So it was like Monday I came downstairs and those two were locked up. My red tiger and my high con tiger were locked up. The red tiger and the high con normal were locked up. The granite and the high con jag were kind of cuddling. So was the caramel jag and the caramel tiger. It's like all of a sudden we're nowhere and you're done. The brettles are still are cuddling up and the white lips are cuddling up. It's like you have expected now that we're in March. I've heard a lot of people were like, Oh, I shut them together and now we're hitting like April, May. I'm pulling them apart. I'm like, no, I'm not going to stop till like July because apparently things are breeding like crazy still. Like it's almost like if we start getting eggs, I'm not going to get eggs until June, May-ish. It's like do not count your animals out right now. If you've been pairing them since like I told Jason, like I had been getting locks and I had eggs and he started yelling at me about like, when do you pair your animals December? I'm like, well, if you prepared to December because when did you cool down July? I'm like, no. So it's, you know, apparently some will go a different time. So I would say if you're going out there and you're breeding, definitely winter your pairs together because you never know who's going to breed then. But then also, you know, don't be afraid to start introducing males now. So if you have one male and you want to breed it to two females, let them winter with one. And then around February, introduce them to the other because you might get him because right now the caramel jag already bred my caramel female and now he's breeding the caramel tiger. And it's like those clutches are going to be a little staggered. They're going to be off by a couple months. But which I kind of like too because then I'm not feeding 200 hatchlings all at the same time. I kind of got these. I can get these guys established while these guys are hatching. So. 200 hatchlings. Good God. I'm not going to have 200 hatchlings. I'm not going to have 200 hatchlings. If I have 200 hatchlings, I'm going to panic. Oh my God. It's like I got five eggs out of the red tiger clutch. And then Matt sends me pictures of my blood python over at his place. It's the size of a house. And he goes, I'm pretty sure your girl's a done deal. I'm like, crap, what do you do with baiting blood pythons? You know what, you leave them with Matt. You don't touch the mowing. Don't bring them here. You won't even with Matt. You're like, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not even going to try. So, but that's another pair. Plus Jason told me Saturday that he has my granite. And she's been curling up with his granite mail. So it's like, holy crap, maybe I did go a little too far with the presumed eggs for the year. So we'll see. How's your season? I got another issue. No, crap. See if you did all this stuff, then I could talk, but you're going to have to talk. Well, I don't do all this. I still haven't had my computer for shit, so. Hang tight for a second. All right, we'll hang tight for a little bit. And now I'll just say, because we're not even going to wait. Car professing the North East is May 21st. That's what we've decided. So, mark your calendars. Ask off from work. Call in sick. May 21st. It'll be in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. Come on up. Check it out. If you haven't been to a car professed and you live in the Northeast, it doesn't necessarily have to be a carpet python person. If you're just in DiMerelia in general or even pythons in general, it's a good time. I'm out. Hang out. It's always enjoyable. I think this is our fifth year in a row. I don't remember when we started this. Oh, it would probably be fifth. This is when we started the show. Anyway, so if you're in the Northeast, you haven't made it out to one of these. Please come. It's a good time. We definitely want to see everybody here. If you are not in Northeast, you can still definitely come. Just let us know and we'll try to get you all set up or try to find the car professes closest to you. Right now, I'm pretty sure we have four or five of them right now with the Northeast, the southern, the southeast or whatever that they're calling down in Florida. And then we have, of course, the western car professes. So if you're close to any one of those, contact those people. We usually have the links, as well as the contact information for all the different car professes on Maralea Python radio.com. And if you can make it out to any one of those, go check it out. It's a blast and you're going to want to come back every year. And you definitely should. If you do want to offer something for the auction, just go ahead and contact myself or Eric at info@maralea@timeradio.com and tell us what you want to donate. Normally, a lot of people do vouchers or merchandise like cages or panels or stacks or something like that. We ask that nobody put up live animals. You can put up animals as the auction, but don't bring them to car professed. We kind of had it a few times for people to bring animals to car professed. And it kind of seemed one of those things of a little sideways. You don't want everybody worrying about what's going on with their animals. So definitely, if you can put something up, don't bring it. We found the best way to get people a little bit more interested is to do a voucher because they can decide for themselves what they want to get out of your breeding season or your collection. As opposed to just offering up a paragraph or a zebra or something like that. So it's definitely very cool. We want to try to raise as much money as we can. And of course, we'll be donating the money to the entire proceeds to US, or if we do every year, which is very important to defend our right to keep the animals that we love keeping. Especially now, since I don't know if anybody's told the news, but apparently they found a carpet python in the Everglades National Park. So hopefully, this is not the beginning of some very bad times for the Morellia community. And this is kind of like just a one and done and we're not going to have any issues like that. Since Eric is gone, I will say that if you are going to March Tinley, he will open up a tab for you all to drink and be merry. You just have to get his credit card information from him. And if you just call him and ask, he'll just forward that right to you. I mean, he's very open out his credit card numbers as well as the Social Security number to anybody who wants to just drink for free at a Tinley park or anything like that. You just go ahead and call him or you can email him at info@placehundredheout.com and he'll give you all that information. And you guys can have a grand old time at Tinley. Apparently, we're supposed to do something for the reptile report when it comes to Tinley. So if you guys see Eric and me on these big screens or something at Tinley Park, don't get too shocked and don't get too surprised. And hopefully, we look good. I don't know. But hopefully, we have the stuff with Eric's big store. We have the Darren stuff fixed. It always seems like every time we want to have somebody on that's really cool. Sorry, but your call cannot be completed. Interesting. All right, well, I don't know what the hell that was all about, but I don't know if anybody heard that but me. But it seems like every time we have or want to have somebody on that's really cool or really important to us. We have an issue with Skype or Blog Talk or something like that, which kind of just seems like the luck of the draw. So hopefully, we can get this rolling in the right direction and get it started. And of course, if you have any questions for myself, Eric or Darren, go on to Facebook. And if you are not a member of the Marelia Python radio chat group, you can send a message to myself or Eric will add you to it. It's how you can live during the episode. You can also ask questions as well as see pictures from the breeders as well as myself and Eric about the topics of the show. You can see it before and if you are a podcast listener, you want to see the pictures that we're talking about. Just go on to Marelia Python radio's Facebook page. You can check out all the stuff that we're talking about there. We try to add that stuff on there usually after the episode for you podcasters. If it is not there, definitely drop a line to myself or Eric and we will add everything on as quickly as possible. Even then, if you're still looking for pictures, you can find a bunch at the galleries@mareliapythonradio.com as well as the Marelia Pig of the Week. If you haven't joined the Marelia Pig of the Week, go ahead and do that. And it's a cool place you can show off your Python's. Well, a lot of people from around the world show off all their Marelia's as well as a few other really cool Python species. The only rule is we ask rules. I'll say no for sale ads and don't be a dick. If you can follow those two rules, you're going to be fine. If not, you'll be banned. We can only give one or two warnings and then we kick you out. So hopefully we got this rolling in the right direction. Eric? Nope. All right. So we're just going to keep hanging on here. Oh, gosh, I love these episodes that happen like this. So that is what we're going to do. And if you guys have any ideas for episodes, email us at info@mareliapythonradio.com. You can also reach myself or Eric with any kind of questions or corrections. But right now, you would like to correct the fact that it's just me talking to you. Nobody really wants to hear Owen talk. But here we are. It's not so easy, isn't it? It's not so easy. You do it by yourself, huh? Oh, yeah. Figure it out or what? No, we're still trying to get this together. I guess we should have did a test run. Every single person that we've had from Australia did a test run with. And then, man, I think, yeah, it's something to do with. Can I try to connect with Blog Dog? Yeah. I'm going to call this back. Yeah, I'm going to attempt to do -- that was you any second, okay. Yeah, so hopefully -- I keep looking over there. I don't see him. He might have to do it. I should be getting eggs any day now. Really? That should be -- yeah, my coastal girls do -- Hold on. [ Laughter ] The suspense is killing me. I assume Eric meant his M Pen Coastal, where -- I don't know if everybody has seen that. Go check out Eric's page at eBemorrelia or eBemorrelia on Facebook.com. And if you're somebody like me who is totally into Coastal's, you've been like drooling over those animals since Eric bought them. And you're very, very happy to see that he's going to get eggs because now you're going to be parted from several hundred dollars of your money. And you're going to get some really cool Coastal's if he decides to let them go. From what I've heard, if you want something from Eric, you pretty much have to go to his house and be him with a stack of money until he finally gives up the animal. That you want, especially if it's an IJ. Apparently, if you wanted a poison -- yeah, if you wanted a poison ivy IJ, that's just -- you'd have to back up a truck with a hundred dollar bills. That's not happening. It's weird. Speaking of poison ivy, I'm going to talk about this bill. He says he's going to be on in a second, so he's figuring something out. So Paul has come and all of a sudden I have to drop out again with me and I thought that. So, yeah, poison ivy. So what's happening with the babies with that clutch is, I don't know, dude, every time they shed something different happens. What I am noticing is that -- and I have noticed that her first pairing was to a jack and that was Kurt Finnegan, who owned poison ivy before I did. She was bred with a bullwinkle, lineage, jag, and if you look at some of the offspring that she produced, they kept this black kicking that comes in on the scale. It almost looks like what if you had a jungle, you would consider muddy. Another interesting thing about them is that the head pattern is crazy. And it's completely black, but we'll talk about that another time. [ Laughter ] That's normal when, especially when trying to contact us, that's a normal feeling. But that's awesome that we grabbed you because I was tired of talking. Nobody wants to hear me. I don't want to hear you, I'm sure. [ Laughter ] They really don't. [ Laughter ] Welcome to this show, Darren, and let's just jump right into it. What got you into reptiles? Well, excuse me. It was kind of a couple of things. I've always had a passion for reptiles all my life since I was a little kid. I always wanted to take the blue tongues around the yard and wish to do a bit of shooting when I was going up. I was 6'11" and stuff. My first close encounter, believe it or not, was Red Billy. It was one of my father actually shot, believe it or not. And it was an opportunity for me to see and get up close. And my fascination just grew. And it wasn't until my parents had the old, you know, a good snake, a dead snake kind of attitude going up. But it wasn't until later I was probably 11 or 12 and kept testing my parents about, you know, wanting a pet snake or a pet lizard or something like that. And back then, it wasn't quite the voyage around. There was so certainly wasn't the social media we have nowadays. And so Dad was talking because he's a little bit of shooting. Dad was talking with a friend that owned a sports store near Petrol Station, a service station where he used to own. And the guy said, "Oh, I've got a couple of snakes, you know, seen him up and he can have a look." So I was like, through the roof I was like, "Oh, it's so exciting, you know, can't wait, let me go and check the snakes here." So I go up and he goes, "You lived up above the sports store and set up, up you go." And he goes, "Oh, I'm just coming to my bedroom." He said, "Okay, what's going on here?" And said, "You ain't going to his bedroom." He said, "All these tanks, set up, blast tanks all around the place and all that sort of stuff." And I'm been asked to me, you know, just pulled out this red belly, it was probably about 20 foot long at the time. To me it was enormous, but it was probably only a couple of feet, two or three foot long. And he goes, "Oh, here you go." And I can't look at him. I said, "Ah, are they venomous?" He goes, "Yeah, that's all right. Don't worry about it. You'll be fine." "Oh, okay." So here I am sitting on his bed, freehandling this red belly, black snake, you know? "Oh, I was teaching." I know, to me I was like, young, naive, didn't really know the risks or, you know, the potentials of what could go wrong if it did. But yeah, it was very exciting to me, it was like this snake. And I was up there for probably three or four hours just talking about reptiles and things like that. And he goes, "Oh, he can have it if you want it." And I was like, "Oh, he's serious." And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, he said no worries. He said he can have it." So anyway, that came, picked me up and on the way back in a car, I was telling how excited it was. And he goes, "Oh, he's kind of giving me this snake." And Dad's like, "Well, what sort of thing was it?" I said, "It was a red belly, black snake. Far out. That's the last time ever I do this." That was going to kill him, I think. He's just like, "You what? You what?" 'Cause, you know, I'm telling him how he's red. But I didn't say I just said, "Oh, he's handling me snake and crawling all over my arms and all this sort of stuff." And I'm in there, you know, it was unreal. And he goes, "What was it?" Yeah, so that was kind of the end of keeping any rectals when I was younger. And it wasn't until I actually bought my house back in '97, I think it was. And I made some offers. And I've always loved rectals, always had a passion for rectals and the ocean and sharks and things like that. And I said, "I really want to do snakes." He said, "Oh, see, it's making me pretty cool." I was very excited I had my first mate. And within 12 months, I had like 30 rectals or something, and it's just gone nuts from there on, you know, just a passion that never ends. That sounds about right, where you get one and they're like potato chips. You can never just have one. What type of collection are you working with now? I mean, like, how big your collection and what do you got in it? It's certainly growing compared to what it was. I did a key out the other week, actually, and topped just over 460 pythons at the moment. I used to keep a lot of lizards and things like that, but just the maintenance and upkeep on them was just too much for me trying to do everything. So pretty much, really, is probably the main focus of what I work with at the moment. I do have some here, it's easier, and there'll be some faces, but it's, you know, there's a very garter. It's the first below the Macarphone, McDowalloy, Chainoy in Ricarda, you know, so on and so forth. Breadly, scubbies, you know, possibly keep the three types of interregia. I don't keep the percensus from WA from pygmies. I've kind of looked at keeping those guys, but I don't know. I find that a little bit too much work with the hatchet and things like that, they are pretty cool. They're certainly something I'll keep down the track in the future. Just for the sake of wanting to breed them to have a go and work with new animals. I try to work with pythons and snakes that I haven't worked or bred with in the park. On the list, maybe, I'm not ready for them yet, same with chondros. I've gone with my hat or kept chondros. It's usually been in cases that haven't been able to afford to buy any. They're on the track one day, same sort of deal. I keep all these water pythons. I've just got myself or getting an adult pair of examples of blackheads. Plus, it's the owners. So, it's a pretty big collection. It really took off with the pepper project when it first started. I kind of realized the potential and everything there. So, I just started adding more and more snakes reluctant to sell anything of a bit of a hoarder. I feel you're paying. You and Eric. Yeah, you and Eric are both, they never sell. Yeah. Well, sorry, John. I was going to say, you're still holding on to all the silver peppers, right? Yeah, yeah. It was a slight project to start off. So, it's kind of a really, really come to fruition. I guess last season, or season just passed off over here. Yeah. Wow. I mean, this is the 19th. So, we'll move. Out of all the stuff that you work with, what's your favorite? Is it silver peppers? I could really say no, could I? Yeah, well, you could. Well, you could. Yeah. You could. In terms of what I enjoy working with, yeah, I really enjoy the silver peppers, not knowing what potential lies within a new mutation as such. But there's other things in my collection I enjoy as well, which probably sounds weird, but the scrubbies, I lost scrubbies. I had a made of myself bought a pair off of a male and mutual friend, at least 12 years ago, I think it was. I went over to that weird place on the western side of Australia on a fishing trip. And then while I was way one of my thermostats crapped itself, and we got a phone from my wife saying, "Oh, there's something stinks in the reptile room." I went on a bed for two weeks. Long story short, the thermostat had jammed on. The enclosures were 43 degrees. One scrubby was dead and the other one was basically stuffed from a heat stroke, a heat stress, and she died six months later. So my friend that bought the pair that I have now, Justin, he said them for 10 years. He said he's bred them twice. And although I said to him, "If you ever breed them, let me know." I really loved, really, really missed scrubbies. I actually quite a pleasant animal to work with. Big day know it. It's kind of got a little bit of attitude, but the female, I could do it ever wanted to. She was one of the most docile snakes that I had. You could put your hand in, pull her out, no problems whatsoever. She was about two years old when I died. She was about eight foot. The male was a bit big. He was about 10. And he was the same. Once he came out, he was fine. You could bring him and do whatever you want and were quite pleasant. So because of that nature that the scrubby's had, I really wanted that particular lineage in hope that they were the same. So when just a friend could know along the bathroom due to work, and things already offered them to me to care for them. I was like, "Yes, yes." "Of course." So they're a bit big in the other females. They're not the big scrubbies. They're probably not the biggest. But the female, she's around 16 odd kilos and the male's about 13, something like that. They've got 14, something for, I guess. So they're a nice size. No, I don't know. Over here in the States and even over in Europe, like, scrubs are one of the more difficult species to breed. Is that the same in Australia? Or are they sort of like, you know... Yeah, I agree, I think they are. It's a hard one to pick. There's not a lot of scrubbies over here in captivity. They're around, like, people do have them. Right. Actually, at the breb, it's quite hard to find. You find them around, or you occasionally find someone in cans that happens to have a clutch of the scrubbies, and you always scratch anything. "Did you breed those guys?" They do. I had a bit of crack at mine last year, played around. The first year I had them, I didn't really get them time to settle. I've got them for cooling, so I think they're in good healthy condition that I think the female needed a little bit more weight on them. So I put an extra few kilos on her coming into last season. Okay. I had some friends, I'll just say I'm the female. They go, "No, I know." She's great. You can see the shape of the follicles was different. It's developing eggs. I'm like, "Oh, okay." But I think what we actually saw, they actually saw this. I have no idea what I was looking at. I'm looking at this screen on an ultrasound machine going here, whatever. I actually think it was what we actually saw was possible follicle development, because it was a distinct swelling in her. I'd had the mailing with her as well, and then we kind of, when Pete and Cole came down and we played around with her, the swelling was there, and that's what I think we saw. I actually think we saw the follicle stage. So I'd taken the mail out when really I should have been chucked in the mail in. So I think I've missed it for that reason, but there's certainly something I'd love to breed, and there's not a lot of people out here that breed them. No, they do turn up occasionally, but I know I had a lot of people messaging me looking for scubbies, like catneybred scubbies. So to me, it's not something you want to breed every year. To me, it's just like I mentioned before, it's just ticking our other species off that list of, "I've not bred them. I want to breed them. I want to understand how they work and get me temperatures and enclosures right and get me set up and produce a clutch once I've kind of produced that clutch." You know, I know what I'm doing, and it's just another thing to learn within the hobby to keep the enjoyment going the more you can learn. I mean, I've been doing it for a while, and I still learn from people every day. So they're just one of those things I want to pick off the bucket list, I suppose. Yeah, I know the feeling. Yeah, do you do anything? I'm just curious. I know this is kind of off topic, but not many people we talk to have experience with King Wornai. Do you, is there anything special you have to do for them as opposed to, say, like a carpets as far as temperature or anything like that? Do you keep them cooler? No, I treat them the same as anything from that top end of Australia. So Darwin's, you know, jungles, all that sort of stuff from up there, and obviously a more suitable size enclosure for them, naturally. But I'd call them the same as what I do with everything else. Of course, it was my first time, and I'm a big believer. You can read a hundred different ways to breed the same animals because it depends on where you live in, if you live up north, whether you live down south, if you're in a glass enclosure, a timber enclosure, if your house is warm, you're cold. So there's all these variants that come into play, so whenever I go to breed something, I'll do whatever research I need to find out what temperatures people cool. And there's not a lot out here of information on that. There's a few articles around, but some of it's quite old. So anyway, I tend to do one particular set routine for the first year. So I'll cool it to a certain temperature. I'll cool it at a certain point in time. I'll let the temperatures get down so far. And then after a few months, I'll start to warm them back and I'll do trial introductions through that period and even into the warmer months to see. This year, I actually saw the first time what I appeared to be the male spurring the female. The tails were quite twisted and quite close together. I couldn't see a visual lock up as such. So to me, I've obviously done something right. I've had successes. I've had the female develop follicles. I've had the male interested in the female. Maybe I just took them apart too soon. So next season, coming into it, I'll carry on and do the same things at the same temperatures and follow the same routine. But this time, I'll look at where I cut them short and I'll extend that out. And introduce them a little bit later than what I did before. I can try for men. Yeah. So. And fingers crossed. Yeah. Cool. All right. So let's talk about the silver peppers. I guess maybe give us a back story on these guys. What was the parents? Does any information on how you stumbled upon these beautiful snakes? Yep. Well, this is supposed to be the time. So I can go to the long version, I guess, in essence. So it kind of started back in 2006. I bred some diamonds at you. And a friend of mine had a pair of wild-type marries. And she wanted a diamond python to put out in their ovary. She said, "Don't you think she only had the two snakes?" She didn't want them anymore. She just wanted something. She put an ovary outside and something that can live in, obviously, it's an actual habitat. And she could just feed it and they can live a happy life out there. So I did a swap for these two marries for a diamond python. I thought, "I've got a great deal of 18 months old or a bit over 18 months old at the time. A little bit small, but that's all right. They were quite nice animals." So I picked them up, got them fed the life out of them over the next few months. And I was actually going away on a motorbike ride with some friends. We do a trip down into the snowy region every year for a fundraiser for cancer. So I got up in the morning and this Murray Darling's laying eggs in a drawer. So I caught a madeover. I caught a madeover and said, "When you get home, can you grab these eggs?" I was not thinking. I just Murray Darling's. It wasn't any special in the clutch. And so, who was that? I'll tell you the date, actually. It was night for the 10th. She laid 14 eggs. So it was interesting. She heard it was quite a large clutch weight to body ratio as well. It was 44%. So the clutch weight was 468 grams. And she weighed, yeah, she was 1,069 grams after laying. So, as you can tell by the way, she wasn't a big girl at all 1.5 kilos. So 55 days after, they started to dip. And I went through and cut the eggs as I do and opened one up. And he was this funny looking pattern. I thought, "Am I seeing things?" or "What's going on in the egg?" And yeah, waited till they all hatched it up. And sure enough, there was three of these. I actually referred to them as "granates" at first. I was a granite looking pattern. And this was back in 2007. So understanding genetics and everything back then to me was completely new. It was something I didn't really understand. I mean, Albino Dalins hadn't been out for long. I was still coming to grips on understanding a simple recessive trait, let alone anything else. But I knew there was something different. I was going back to a couple of years before that. There was a guy who produced what he called a ghost Darwin. And it was a really funky looking Darwin. And it boiled down, nothing ever produced from it, boiled down to an incubation thing. So my first thoughts when this hatched out was probably just an incubation. Didn't really think any of it other than it was cool. I knew it could potentially be a new mutation as such. And I put it up on Aussie Python's one of the websites out here. Going back when they hatched out, there's a UMD morph and took some photos and put it up. But it didn't really sink in for probably another two years before I actually realized what the potential was of what it hatched. And then I started looking at the ratios and everything else. Because out of the 13 hatched, and I hatched three peppers, a such and all the rest of the wild type, out of the three that hatched, one had a defect with epiglottis and couldn't sleep at all, no matter what you did, it worked. So I actually force fed that animal over probably eight or nine months in a hope that something else may trigger it or it may get to a point that it can sense food without actually using its tongue as such. But it just never went. And the reality of, do you want to, will it breed if it gets to size? Do you want to force something for its entire life? Is it really a healthy way to live? Or are you going to add, if it does breed, are you going to add wicked genetics into the strain? And it was kind of a hard decision, but I think I did what I thought was best for the animal. So I had it euthanized as it was. I think that was the best thing to do for a defective animal, I guess, in essence. So I lost that one. Then out of the other two, I went to an expo in a couple of years after. I didn't want to be in the year after. Anyway, they were probably yeeling sailing on to old animals on the showers. And that was in May, which is the beginning of our winter out here, basically. When I came back from the show, I was in the midst of battling depression at these days, and it wasn't exactly mentally in the right place. And I came back and put animals back away, and obviously I didn't put one. I'm not sure if I didn't put it away correctly in the drawer or whether it had gotten out or what, but I came home one day and the drawer was open and one of the peppers was gone. And I was, I was being in the bad place that I was in the very dark hole. It was part of me was like, "Oh, well, you know, stiff shit." And the other part was quite gutted. So it turned up about three months later. So it had survived the whole of winter, basically in Sydney. And when I found out it had a massive retained shed, a serious eye infection. It was a mess. So I actually took it to her friend, Michelle. She's a hurt fit. And we gave it some injections, gave it fluids, did whatever, but it was that bad. She actually kept it in the veterinary surgery to treat it every day, but eventually it lost its battle and died. So that kind of left me with one, and it was a female. So whatever you want to experience, it always went like a male. So you can outcross it over five females or something or other. But yeah, so I was left with one which wouldn't eat. It was so weird. Here we go. So it just, it would eat, but it might eat one. It would eat, I suppose if you fed something a larger rat, if it was eating a larger rat, it would eat a small rat in comparison to size instead of a larger rat. So if you offered it anything that it should be able to eat, it wouldn't eat it. You had to offer it something small. And then if it ate, it would only eat maybe once a month, once every six weeks. You could offer it every week, and it would just turn its nose up. Didn't want to know about it. I did contemplate force feeding it every now and then, but the thing was it ate. I didn't know if actually force feeding it or something would possibly create more of a problem. So I just persisted with it over the years. And yeah, it was like five years of age. It weighed like 300 grams. It was time. It was really, really annoying. Yeah, so that was when she finally came out of cooling in 2012 or something rather. It was 2011. She came out and started to feed. So that was after winter. So probably maybe August, September, she decided to feed. And by the time the next cooling breeding season came around, she went from 300 grams to 1.8 kilos. It's like you want to eat. You want to eat, but you can eat all make up for your lifetime. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah, as much fruit as you want. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. But just going back to the original pairing with the two wild, wild-type marries, the following season, I thought you did. I've got this weird thing earlier after the first season. I thought next year I'll have another guy reproducing from the same pairing again. Because everyone says, "What happened? Why didn't you break it up again?" And that year that I produced, I'm actually putting them in a show at Castle Hill, one of our local shows, and had the mum and the dad on display and a couple of the papers on display just to show people. I thought it was a bit different. It was a show that ran over for three days. And the show was in May, I think, which is basically the start of our winter. So it's quite cool. When I took them home and cooled them and fed them up and everything else, they made it six or seven times. So everything was going around, but she never produced eggs. Oh, I was scratching my head. So I was cursing myself and kicking myself in the bum thinking, "I've put them in the show." And it's obviously upset her. He was fine. He's a male, man. Let's face it. He's a male. He's not worried. He's happy. He's going to be fine no matter what. Yeah, that's right. So I put the female in the show. I went to the home. I thought, "Oh, I've obviously upset her. She's been out in display. She hasn't been happy. She's been in the bag to and from. She doesn't want to breathe. I didn't really think anything of it." And then the following season, coming into it, I was going through doing all my checking, and she was feeding, doing everything spot on and coming through into the breeding season, making sure they got an off-weight condition and all that sort of stuff on them. And I noticed a little bit of puffiness in the throat. I walked down and said, "Oh, he's going to shoot me." Not an ROI. I missed out last week. Not going to miss out this year again. So I took her out and I was having a look. There was no fluid built up in the mouth, excess fluid in the mouth, which you would expect with an ROI. And when I started handling her, I noticed a series of blisters, probably 8 or 10 blisters randomly on her body down the side. And I thought, "That's not good. I've not seen this before." So once again, I rang up that friend of mine and she came around and had a look and we danced one open and all this red fluid came out. Not blood, but like watered down blood, I suppose you'd call it. Came out and she looked at her and said, "Oh, that doesn't look good." And I said, "Why is that?" She said, "I'll take some tests and I'll let you know." She went away, turned off the tests, come back and she said, "I've got cancer." What? You're going to be joking. Oh, my God. And it's in the blood. So she took it. There's nothing you can do. And you could see, once we knew that, you could start to see when you actually, say, felt down the body, you could feel lumps in her. And anyway, she took her and euthanized her, cut her open. She had 13 tumors inside her. But the interesting thing was she said the biggest tumor was on the overdose. And she reckons that that might have been the one that started the whole lot and the reason why she couldn't breed the previous year, or obviously this coming one. So basically, you've produced one animal. And luckily, I've got that clutch in essence. If you go back in hindsight, it was like one clutch. And then the female was, obviously, possibly you even had to tumor it. That first original timer wasn't well at that particular time. But yeah, she had the one clutch and then was complete null and void after that. And potentially, the mutation might never have reed it's hitting up. If it wasn't for that one clutch. Wow. It's like, oh, wow. Exactly. Against you. Like, everything you just told us is like, oh, yeah. And that could have been the end of the silver peppered. So like, any moment they never could have occurred. Wow. Yeah, that's exactly what it says. It's been, that's what people go, oh, you must have played. I'm like, no, no, you have no one. No idea what I've gone through to get to here. It's like, people say, it's not fun. You know, you should have about 500 now, shouldn't you? I'm like, no, I've got a handful. Like, it's really, it's one of those projects. But like they say, they reckon the hardest projects to work with are normally the most rewarding. So it's, yeah, I haven't any rewards from it at all yet. But hopefully that'll come. So. I was going to say when you cut open that egg or when the egg picked out or whatever. I mean, I know you said like, oh, what's that one? But when it came out, we were just, I mean, what was your reaction? We should just like blown away. Like, I mean, if I'm talking about when you proved it out, when you proved, well, like, when you bred it again, and then you finally got that clutch. And then you saw that it worked with Luke. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. When I finally, that was 2012. So from Hatchney in 2007, it was 2012 before I finally got to a point that I could pair them up and reproduce the trade. So once I reproduce that trade, it was like, and the worst part was, I think I, I think she laid 13 eggs and I hatched, I'm hatched eight. So, yeah, it was like, you know, it's trying to, you think if you look in the incubator three times a day, you'll look at the eggs three times a day. And I hatched five. I'm just like, I've hatched it and I hatched it. Now it's another 30 days it does. So it was, you know, maybe I'll pump the temperatures up and cook them faster. That'll get them ready sooner. Yeah. So it was, it was a very trying time. Plus I had a lot of other things going on in my life at that time. It was a kind of getting out of the whole suicidal depression thing and trying to get my life back on track. All that, I started the business and was trying to do a mean things at once. And it was like going from the bells of health mentally to the top of the world, you know, when I picked that egg and I saw that first pepper in that egg. I was like, I was sure I was doing a little hop skip and a dance around the room. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember how many eggs you had to go through? So you saw the pepper was the first one you got. It was the first egg. There was a hammer hook in there. And I saw, the first thing I saw was black eyes. I went, I was quick. Where's the autopsy key? Got it out and got the tweezers and the scissors and cut the egg. And then I cut the rest of the clutch open and had six peppers and two heads in it. So I was like, yeah, ran around on a big high for the rest of the day. You know, set them up in their little tubs. And I think I looked at them 486 times each that day. Just going back up. It's real. It's real. I'm not dreaming. It's real. They're in the container. So yeah, it was very exciting and something I won't forget. And if anybody has that opportunity to luck on their side, I suppose, for that sort of thing. They'll know exactly what I mean. It was a very exciting day for me to know that they approved it. And the other side was secured the line, I guess. So going away from the original father and the daughter. And that was the line each. So to have that extra baby's there, it was a very happy day indeed to see that. I was going to say like, so I mean, we know how the more thing works here in the U.S. I mean, how does it work down there in Australia? Do you have to like sort of keep that under wraps? Or is it like something you've run out and tell everybody? Do people get, you know, I guess jealous for lack of a better word? Well, it's an interesting topic actually, isn't it really? I mean, it's not so simple when you look at it. I know some people have some projects that they keep very, very quiet. When going back to when I originally hatched this, like I said, genetics and that was fairly new to me. I really didn't understand. I mean, all I had to start somewhere. And when I first produced that first pepper out of the egg was when I kind of started to realize that I need to understand what's going on here. But money has nothing to do with it, it was the ability that was given an opportunity to work with something new. So when I hatched it out, I thought it was bloody saying, yeah? What was the question? I was thinking about how like when you proved out a morph, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, having that out, I didn't know. So therefore, I went on to, like I said, APS, which was the website back in the day and put something up. Not realizing quite what I had, whereas in hindsight, maybe I would have waited longer and waited to secure the project. I suppose a little bit more and had some definite groundwork, like maybe waited until I produced the second clutch and actually produced some animals. There is quite a theft for animals over it. It's pretty bad. You know, I was a recipient of those low-lying scumbags and broken and stole a whole heap of my animals, including one of my peppers, built after it hatched. So, you know, I kind of hindsight and think, should I have just kept my mouth shut and not said anything, and now I would have been any of the wise until I was ready to release it. But then, you know, I do what I do because it's the passion. I love it. I love to share. I love to talk to people and, you know, ask anyone that knows me. It's getting me to shut up this after problem. You know, I love to talk about reptiles. So, you know, when I've got something to share, I like to talk to people and, you know, I'll do something, daily, something. It's all about caring, sharing, you know. But when you, I guess, show a lot of people these things, there's the scumbags, you know, the gutless wonders that think what you've got their own. And, you know, so after having this high of producing these animals, you know, not even a year after, you know, someone broke in and went through and knocked off 19 animals. You know, including a pepper and hats and the striped black and whites, which you'll just touch on later and a whole lot of other stuff. And, you know, I've been around for a while and you're a lot of people and they just kept poking their heads up. You know, and I was on the hunt for these animals constantly and it was kept pretty quiet. Originally, it was in October, not last year, year before. We're in there, so 2013. So, and they took quite some valuable animals. It was definitely a shopping list and, you know, probably one of the smugglers out here. And there was too many coincidences. I don't really want to go through it all, but there were so many coincidences, fingers pointed at people and all sorts of stuff. But, you know, it's quite anybody that's been broken into, whether it's reptiles or just your house. It's just living in violation and having gone through, you know, two or three years of depression, I still battled depression now. But, you know, I was still sighted. I was, you know, basically went to a cliff to jump off and they didn't stop me from walking off the edge with my kids. You know, I started thinking about them and I turned around and decided to change my life. And, you know, so it's hard to deal when you quite get back on your feet, everything's going right. You prove out these peppers and then some arseholes, you know, or arseholes decide to take what you've worked so long. And after five years of stressing that, will these females eat, you know, and finally. And, yeah, so it was pretty gut-wrenching and it told me back to a place I didn't want to be to the point that I was ready to just pack it all in again. You know, I was I was done, I was dusted and it was actually more white. Sorry, just to be emotional, but it was actually more white that saved my life, you know. Right, yeah. Sorry. So, yeah, you know, you can kind of get back over it and go forward. No. Yeah, that sucks. That's horrible, dude. Yeah, anyway, you know, let's go forward. Yeah, so, you know, she kind of said, like, finally the preacher, you know, pick up your bat and ball and go back and play, you know, prove it worth it. Yeah, well, I know what I wanted to do with the bat and I know what I wanted to do with these balls, but anyway, I should get this course. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I got a question for you. So, now that you have, like, adult animals, like, what, what is the, do they have different looks? I mean, because, like, really, in ones are pretty, well, at least they're in states. They're pretty consistent. I mean, except some will be a little bit redder and some will be, you know, have that more. You know, have that more gray blue. Have you noticed any, have you done any breeding to, you know, bring that red out? Are you, is that a direction that you're going to go? What do they look like as a pulse, as a, you know, how do they progress? There is, I'm just going to, I'll put up a. So, sorry, I'm going to dump a photo, I'll put on the NPR chat there. The interesting thing, the original, the original dad, which I just put up in the NPR chat, actually has quite a bit of the reads in it. Yeah. He's actually very, very similar, and I had this discussion with that one. Oh, wow. Very similar to the, um, Geman Rangers carpets, which is kind of borderline South Australia region. And some of those, some of those reds actually come through into some of the silver peppers. There is quite a distinction between the peppers. There's some, you saw ones I posted before, they get this, I guess, ghosting phase. And it's very hard to capture and very hard to show people. One of the, one of the few people that saw on first hand was, um, a mate, Peter Birch. He, he came down, we're looking at some stuff, and I went, like, we're drawing, and said, "Oh, look at this." And I went, "Oh, this is a ghosting phase." Check this out. And you kind of touch the snake, and it's like the melanin that sits along the, the dorsal on the back of the snake. It's like you touch it and it just pops a little bubble, and all that melanin just starts to roll down the, the sides of the snakes and darkens up in the sides. You can have the same snake, and they can look totally different at different times. It's very, very cool. I guess it's a bit like ruffies, they can, you know, they kind of get on a, at night time, they can go into a pastel pail, kind of, kind of, coloration, and, like, that photo I put up before. So you do, so I've got some that have very minimal melanin. I mean, you can call them hyphen or nispy, they, they lack heaps. But then I have others, and I'll see if I can find a photo, um, that have a lot more. So the patterning, all things to be the same in essence. They all have this dorsal stripe on the back, um, third of the body. But some, some contain more melanin than others. So not that it's a lot, the slides are generally, actually, here's the, I think that was. [inaudible] So it all has the same, the same pattern, the same dorsal stripe, you never know. Just, some has more melanin. You see how much black of that one is in comparison to some of the actual product, which is different. Yeah. So it's quite a lot more contrast. You can get the other. You know, you know what's wild is like those orange, red scales that are just like, like, just like peppered throughout it. For lack of a better word, I guess. But, uh, like, especially around the neck and on that, and the head there, wow, that's wild. That's really cool. Yeah. It's like an animal. [laughter] Some, some try the, it's quite funny that the, it's almost individual scales of red. You know, you just get these random little specklings of red here and there. Yeah, I never noticed that before. Like, I saw, yeah, I saw it like in the tail before I've seen that, but I've never looked, I guess I've never looked close enough to where you actually see, like, right on that blue gray, you see these, these, like, little orange scales. Right there. Wow. Yeah. Awesome. So it's, it's, it's cool about, like, the potential, you know, just, you know. Yeah. You think they totally play with it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, generally for us out here you go, oh, Zebra. You know, what can we do with the Zebra? It's like, oh, let's go US. And, and I, I chat to, to top die quite a bit on Facebook. It's a good bloke. And we have a good old, the, the bogan from, from a, bogan brother from over the US. And, um, we'll have, we'll have a bit of a chat and I'll say, have you done this with the Zebra? Have you done this with the Zebra? Have you done that with the Zebra? Or what have you done with this? A little bit of a jag and so most of that stuff generally has been done before. So if you want to know, what, what does a, for example, a Zebra look like with a jag? What's a Zebra look like? You can, you can see what it looks like when you take something that, well, doesn't exist anyway. No one else has got it. What happens when you add a Zebra jag or a zebra jag or a jag jig or an exotic jig or anything else? What happens? And that's kind of the fun part and the excitement of it. It's not knowing, you know, what will happen when you start introducing a multitude of other genes into the pattern and obviously the, the coloration. So it's, um, an exciting road at the moment. Yeah. The next step is to add jag to the silver peppered because you're going to break my heart right now if you say yes. It's shattering. It's shattering right now. Hold on. No. You're, you're a lot like me. Like you have your, you have your projects that are pure and then you have your projects that you just befriend can find the hell out of them. You know? Right? Well, it's, it's funny, you know, because over here, not so much now. People are coming, starting to come a little bit more terms with it, but it's still your haters, you know? When, when, when jag first hit the market, there was a massive split of people that, oh, yeah, can you bring jags and neurological retards and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you had your, the other people taking photos going, oh, but look how beautiful this is. And look how amazing that is. And I think that kind of split came together, but you had this association that if you're a person in breed jags, oh, that means all your snakes are retarded. Right? You can't breed pure line animals because you have a jag in your collection. It's like an airborne plague that infects everything. And you can no longer breed pure line animals. You know, it's like, what the hell is wrong with these people? Like, in two boats, you know, I can breed a pure clutch of red light and I can also breed bredly jags. What's the difference? You know? It's like... Right. But the, the, I think the stigma for that here comes back from the days when we, we kind of went through this, um, pure locality, um, period of time going back a number of years. I must upon the time we'd have jungles and it'd be Palmerston jungles or acid and table lands and that was pretty much it. And then suddenly people went, oh, local specific animals. That's the shit. That's everybody's going to have local animals. And suddenly you could go to cans and within a 20K radius of cans, there was 300 locales of jungles. Every second kilometer was a, this is a street jungle and that's a George street jungle. And this is a talking beach jungle. It's like, well, you know, two years ago there was a Palmerston or an acidans. And now there's like these myriad of, all these local specific jungles. So we went through this period that people only wanted local specific stuff. And back in the time I was actually had my own business distributing for a company in, um, South Australia selling reptile products. I was traveling all around New South Wales selling, selling reptile products. And so I was kind of following the long list, not that I was the massive fan of having, you know, 13 different Stimson's pythons that all had to be from a different locale, you know, which is what people got to. And you'd go in and I'd have a shop owner say, oh, I've got a guy that's looking for a, um, you know, a Simpson python, oh, do you want a Georgetown steaming? You want this steamy, that steamy, that steamy. God, God just wants a steamy mate, like spec off. And was that real? Is that realisation back then that the general public, the average punter? They didn't, they didn't care. They wanted a saint. They just wanted something that looked pretty. And I could see back then that the whole, I mean, it was, they gave me wrong. It's nice to have locale type stuff. But at the end of the day, to say you've got a jungle from here and a jungle from there, at the end of the day, if it's a nice looking jungle, people, you know, people that are kind of getting into the hobby of the first time will buy it because it's a nice black and gold jungle. I mean, it's very cool, they gave me wrong to say there's millimilla jungles and certain beach, local jungles and all this sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, the people knew coming into the hobby. They just want a jungle. You start going to too much specification as to location. You just confuse them half the time. But as time goes on, that kind of locale, it's still there. But it's not as, I don't think it's as prevalent as what it used to be now that mutations have really started to take off, particularly in Morelia rather than some of your other folks. But that's all coming, we've got the answer, Asia, we've got marbles and teaplast and teaplastimis. So you've got to get quite a myriad and it'll change the same because people will start going, "Oh, I've got an albino mac if you're lucky enough to have one survive." And, you know, they're going to start to go on and put an albino mac with marble children's because they want albino marbles and then they're going to put it with granites. So the same thing, you'll start to see this transgression. And don't get me wrong, like I said, there's nothing wrong with having like our stuff in pure-line animals. I keep and breed both. I can still keep and breed pepper and pepper and produce peppers and still outcross it. So going back to what you said, that one. Now that you've dodged the question, you're all around. Yeah. Yeah. So it was kind of one of those things. You have a new mutation, which no one else has, and you want to work with it and see what it produces. And I'm a big believer in my theory anyways, that when you have a mutation, the purer side of things falls off. So, for example, meaning if I had just nice normal wild-type marries and I had some nice normal wild-type jungles, I couldn't do the point of pairing them together. They would serve no purpose whatsoever. I'd rather produce pure marries and rather produce pure jungles. However, when you take a mutation that reduces melanin and changes color and pattern and all this other stuff, to me, it's about exploring outside your standard boundaries, I guess, in essence. It's like albinos. They've been crossing to anything and everything, and there's some really, really cool-looking stuff starting to pop out. So I think when you've got mutations, it's a bit of an open gamble, and I think as long as you've got a long-term mindset or a long-term goal at what you want to produce at the end, they go for it. At the end of the day, they're not going to be released back in the world. As long as when you set them, you're straight up with what it is you sell. I don't lie. There's no point to it. If I say you're getting an XYZ, you're getting an XYZ, and you can expect to buy it in the arse, and you see those people come and go all the time. They come in and they start to bullshit people, try to screw people over, and it doesn't take long. Facebook catches up. I would personally think that that would look pretty awesome as an albino. All of them, the combinations will be interesting, so we'll check on that one. What was your approach to breeding the inlands? Can you kind of take it through how you got them ready to roll, and when you did the introductions and all that fun stuff? Yeah, well, I had a really, really kind of funny season to what I normally do. I think the summer, or I suppose, really the pier where we're normally cooling down, I really struggled to get my wrinkle. So I had to, I mean, answer each or answer each. I mean, it doesn't matter. It's almost like they go, first June, put me together, or first of May, put me together, I'm ready to go. You can walk in your room, offer food, and if the male answer each day and eat, they got one thing on their mind. We kind of don't need to do anything. So I had a few of them, maybe in kind of June, but some of them, I really had a couple early, more earlier, may things at that point in time, but I kind of had nothing happen until March. And when I kind of hit July, I kind of started thinking, nothing's happening. I'm still a female, some females are still feeding, males are still feeding. I'm like, something's going on, it's not right, I don't need to get this wrinkle. My room was still 23 degrees, which is too warm. So I went out and bought myself, because I have nighttime, I've been able to drop the temperatures at nighttime, but the room, the afternoon sun comes through in the room, and just warms it up right before it cools down, and it just can't get the heat out of the room. So I went out and bought some time, and put it on all my adult enclosures, and basically shut the temperatures off at nighttime. And that allowed me to drop my ambient root temperature during the day, down to 18 degrees. I was obviously getting cold on that at nighttime. And it was almost, I had the timers on effort for two weeks, and as soon as that kind of cooling period came through, you could tell the whole atmosphere and the room changed, you could walk in, and the males were all active, but none of them were interested in food. So everything started to go in the right direction, so I put all the time, and all the time I put everything back, and then I started introducing some males. So because it was this late period, I finally got everything triggered, but I'm probably getting the animal selfie. You know, Jenna, you're doing good. Yeah, I mean, my season really starts probably January. Come January, I'll check all my females out and check conditions. So I just got through what I want to breed, work out pairings, you know, do I want to put this for that or that with this and everything. So I kind of saw that outcome, come January, I maintain food, and generally March, I guess, is when I'll actually pump the females a little bit harder than what I normally do, just to try and give them that little bit more body fat for producing the eggs, and also giving that notion that this is a great season and cycle them into the breeding season. I mean, it might not be much, I don't know if you guys do it over there whether you just smash them hard all year round, but I kind of after that, I normally put a bit of food into them to get them up to a condition that I like. And maintenance feed them through December, January, sort of thing. In February, they can match just prior to what I'm going to consider starting to kill things down. I'll just really increase their food intake on the females, particularly ones I really want to breed. And then I'll kill them down. That's something that I just recently started doing, and it seems to be working really good. Actually, I think it was when we talked to Troy that he kind of put the idea in my head about, you know, cycle feeding type of thing. Now, I got a question as far as that goes. Are you feeding bigger meals or are you feeding the normal sized meal that you would give that female when you're going into that cycle? Well, as far as feeding, my generally feed them as big as I can feed them anyway, so I can't really jump. Okay, so we're talking about extra large rats, rabbits. What are we talking? Well, I breed rats in mice commercially, so to try to keep up with them anyway. And so, yeah, I've seen everything in my place rats in mice. So, you know, like the pepper shield, she'll take a jumbo rat or an extra large jumbo, which I'll ask her here. For me, that's a jumbo rat, 250 grams, sort of thing. So, surely, if I've got extra large jumbo, there's the ex-males, which are 350 gram plus sort of animals, they have reach 0.450. If I've got those, you'll get those, and I'll feed her those. So, I normally take the bigger rodents and feed that to my priority females. If they make sense. So, rather than, like I'd rather myself a pepper girl breed, rather than a striped coastal, if that makes sense. So, if I walk into your rats and 200 grams or 400 grams, 400 grams, 400 grams, one's going to go under the pepper, the 200 gram, one's going to go under the striped coastal. So, that's kind of how I work it. But in terms of what I actually feed them, I'll just feed them the same thing, but where I might have been maintenance feeding them, we're feeding them once every two weeks, or give or take whatever sort of thing, coming into that season, I'll increase and feed them every week. So, they've suddenly got us probably a month to six weeks, where they'll get a feed every week, and they'll, you'll see, and they'll get all bigger fat and full of crap and stuff. But, yeah, and then they'll, I try to work it, so I'll finish right on the period where I'm aiming to start to cool them in essence, or that season is about to start where the natural climate starts to drop and temperatures change and things like that, and they're starting to feel that season's coming in. So, they, they, they sense a bit parametric pressure and all that sort of stuff. So, I try, that's what I try and do. That's the theory behind it anyway. Reality is generally a completely different thing, but, yeah, that's, that's what I try and aim to do, so that, you know, when it comes in. And, and that's what I did this season go on, but, like I said, I, I just couldn't get the, the temperature's cool in, in my room, and everything, everything delayed, and it was pretty much a month out. The fun, the fun thing was, this is where I'd have stuff mating in, with some of them earlier, through, through winter breeders, through June July, and most they didn't start till August, but the, the funny thing is, most of that stuff that mated later, the females almost ovulated, almost straight away. So, from the, from the form of copulation deposition was like a month, whereas sometimes it might be six weeks or two months, depending, you, you've got to get the mateies, and then the females wait for a certain time, and obviously they trigger and, they'd ovulate, but there was, I don't know where there was a timing thing, but just, I found dropping that, smashing that room temperature down for those couple of weeks, just brought everything into play, and then sorting out the few mistakes, animals that I had trying to, trying to sort out. So, I had, you know, females going with other females, and scratching head, going, well, there's nothing happening there, that's not right, I almost got over this one. It's like, it's like, it's better. If it's, well, anything I sell, I, I, I pop as a hatchet, so normally the hatchet, I pop them, you know, you pop any beans or you don't, so, but stuff I keep back, I, I normally don't worry. I just, I keep them in any way, I wait until it gets old enough, and I worry about it then. So, I'm not selling it, so, you know, if I sell stuff, I, I try to make sure, you know, 99% accurate, that if I sell a pair, I, I sell a pair. So, you know, when, when I, when I patch most, I feel I'll just pop it and I can mark it straight around the tub or a male, you know, it's got any beans, it's obvious. So, doesn't, it's, it's a female. So, coming into breeding seasonals, playing around with some of the peppers, I had those lovely ones that when you probe them, they probe like seven scales. Like, you see that Nurgos, and so I thought, oh, they're probably males, or they're probably females. I had one that probes six, I thought was a female, so, you know, putting them in a male or nothing was happening, and, sorry, no, no, no, no, no, no. I probed seven scales, I thought was a male, and it was a female, so I was putting the, the female in with other females and having no success. So, he didn't take long, didn't take long with the, the peppers and shuffle things around, put, started discerning. My albino male was on absolutely fire this season, so, I took all, all, anything I wasn't sure about, I'm putting with him, and if there was a male in there, you'd need straight away, it was a boy. And if it was a girl, he's like, hello darling, how you doing? Hello, can we? So, it was a good way of sorting through everything. So, I took all the adult stuff and just started, started to throw it back in, adult. Yeah, one of the time guards, can you give me a sex test on this, please, just to make sure. Yeah. Sure enough. Not that I was overly incorrect, I think with the peppers on it, I worked out, I thought I had one male and five females or something or other, and turned out two males. So, it was just, just the one that had that funny probing, but, you know, it was very confusing when you're putting stuff in with other stuff and not getting the, you know, desired results, you know, so, that was a bit of fun. Wow. And you're exactly correct, man, proven males are the best way to tell if it's a boy or a girl, because if he's locking with her, it's clearly a girl. So, awesome. That's it. Yeah, all the, I had a guarding the up-down eye, he's got a male listener, female, that, and he's nice. What'd he have? No, he had, sorry, he had, hang on, I think what it was, hang on. I think you said he had, he thought he had a pair or something, and, yes, put it together, he said, "But nothing's happening." And I said, "Well, you don't have a pair." I said, "Because if it's a pair, you know, the, the male should be all over the female if it's, you've got two males, or, you know, if you've got two males, you're going to start combating and carrying on fighting plastic." Yeah. And if they, they curled up happily in the corner, not doing anything, I said, "You've probably got two girls." No, no, no, it's definitely a female, definitely a male, I'm like, there's not doing anything, anyway, so I did him a fiery, I went down private and sure enough, it was a female, it was a, it was a male, so just be late. Even if it's, you've got two boys, you'll know you've got two boys, I'll fight with you. So. Yeah. That is true. Yeah. So, it's way, well, all the males are live with a female, like a rash on the other. Providing you. I don't know what you're on, sorry. You're exactly correct. So, we talked, we talked about the Inland's, uh, getting down the set and ready role. Um, when you're doing crosses, uh, like crossing a winter breeder, like the, inland with a spring breeder, like, you know, you were talking about, you know, or, I'm sorry, the winter like, uh, in albino, and you're talking about crossing it with the spring breeder, which is like the Inland, uh, what's your approach to that? You kind of take it differently when you're kind of doing the crosses, you try to make sure the animals are ready to breathe and they're with each other at the same time. Yeah. Well, uh, I was kind of, kind of fluted, but it's, it's probably not the, the right terminology, really, because it's about being aware of your animals and, and like I said this season, obviously I, I put a, a pure albino dial and over a, uh, breeder life female this year, only because I, I've seen some of the albino forms like in, in albino, like 50, 50 albino marries and if you can get that Murray patent to come through in an albino, wow, they're just a stunning looking snake. And so I was lucky enough to, because my season went late and this is, I think I've chatted to this before, um, because my season went late and I, I kind of had to smash the temperatures down over a two week period. It, it, it was like flicking a switch. You know, one week everything, two weeks later, everything's like, oh it's breeding season like everything just changed in a rather short period of time. And I think by dropping those temperatures and then removing those, those timers and having the thermostats take back over, so therefore naturally increasing the, the nighttime temperatures from, from being killed. I think what happened with the, the female breeder, it was, it was a male, male Darwin, and like I said, he was on fire this year, he just put him in anything and then he, he was up for it. So coming towards the end of all these breedings, I thought, I was looking at the female, um, bread line, she looked like she was ready. You know, I suppose they're going into too much. And so I thought, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll chuck the male albino in there and let's see what happens. So he'd already done, you know, good five weeks of, five or six weeks of mating with, um, head albino's and other stuff. And I thought I'll put him in there and see if there was that compatibility. And I'll put him in there, or do they come in the next morning and here they were locked up solid. And it was literally one week from the, from the day I put him in there. I saw three lockups over the course of a week. And at the end of that week, I went to, went to pulling me out and he just about took my hand off. Wow. So it was, it was, it was just that right time. And I think the fact that it was season went late. I dropped the temperatures and warmed them back up. It cycled with the bread line. I think I brought her into fruition and the male had just gone long enough and I got that one week crossover because I literally took him out and, and he ate the same day. So he was like, I'm done. My season's over. No more from me, pal. I'm ready. I'm waiting for next year. So it was kind of a, kind of a lucky thing, I suppose, but I was aware of what was going on by starting late. And when I saw the opportunity, it was our thought, I'll give it a crack. You know, I felt it's one of the harder pairings to make. And I think it was the fact that my room went, took so long to cool down that allowed me to bridge that gap, I guess. Whereas if it had been that, you know, four to six weeks sooner, whether my albino might have actually dragged you up that extra couple of weeks at the other end. If that makes sense to get it on with the bread lie female. So I spent a lot of people, there's a couple of people, a lot of people have had a turn at it and there's not too many to be successful. I know I'm Joe Ball up in Queens and he did it this year, but he had a mixed blood albino male that he used. So whether the fact that that's already got coastal in it and other stuff may already allow the fact that it's already been paired with a later breeder. So therefore, it's season of mating might be stretched a little bit. I don't know, it's just a theory. But yeah, it's certainly, I spent a lot of people, a lot of people tried it and had no success, not that I'm trying to, I shouldn't have known asked, but I think it was just more attractive. Maybe I shouldn't, no, I think it was just... Why not? Yeah, it's because I'm awesome, man. No, just being observant and paying attention to your animals. You know, my whole season revolves around what man will tell me. You know, I watch the way they act, whether it's an enclosure, what they're doing, if they're sitting in the hay, if they're sitting in the cool. You know, all that sort of stuff. And I mean, it's just an experience, I guess, over using, you've been doing it for a long time. Like, you guys, you tend to know your animals when you start to cool, or when you start to put your males together and who's compatible with who and all that. Last year, I tried to put my, I sacrificed my pepper female last year and refused to put the original male back with her and only put my albino male in there to try and get double heads and built no interest from the eyedrofen. It was almost like it was a race or something like that. I don't know, but it's just... No, it's not my type. Forget it, pal. No interest in them whatsoever. Yeah. Not for me. I'm able to see it, maybe see a couple. No, I'm going to go with that yellow thing. No, you don't do it. It was almost time. Don't know. So, yeah, clutch last year, but, you know, it was what I wanted to make sure that I had that specific pairing because I was trying to prove out, you know, I was hoping to try and prove out that mutation last year. But, yeah, all season before, didn't go. So, but this year, like I said, he was on fire and I put him in and he did the job with the Pepper Girl this year and gave me a nice clutch. And so, there's now double head pepper albino's feeding away and going up in my hatchet racks. So, it'll be another exciting little thing to see what they look like. Yeah. And then a couple of years, so. Yes. Very exciting. Yeah. Very exciting. Very exciting. There, yeah, there you go. So, that's kind of my rendition on how I managed to get two opposite seasons or like a winter versus spring breeder to get together. So, it was just like, I suppose like the essence, I guess, that everything went late. But I saw what went on and put the opportunity to try and do something different. Well, I think a student of the serpent as Eric, I beat him to saying it. So. Yeah. So, what I'm going to say is that what do you think is that when you're breeding the spring breeders, is temperature for you guys, really the most important thing, like, you know, up here, if we're doing diamonds and even some inlands, people haven't really had success with some of them and breeding them. Do you think it's the cooldown or do you have any thoughts on what the problem might be? I don't know, because I, well, I find Murray's actually quite easy to breed, to be honest. I knew he was going to do that. Yeah, I know. I've had a similar conversation, so I've died. He's like, oh, yeah, we're struggling to get a Murray's to be like, really? Like, really? No, look, I suppose it depends. I mean, it maybe depends on what your temperatures are getting to. Look, I aim for my room, my ambient room temperature, so if I walk into my room during the day, you know, I like to see it getting down to at least 18 degrees. So at night time, that's going to be cooler and temperature drop to 15, and the enclosures, because I have thermostats on the enclosures that maintain the warmth, I drop that down around 20, but that's going to be during the night in the warm end. So 2022 degrees, I'm not sure what that means in your funny Fahrenheit language over there, but 22 degrees will be just enough. Sorry, what was that? 71 degrees. 71 degrees. Is 20 degrees. Okay. 71 degrees, little Fahrenheit. But that's going to be warming. So the cool end of the enclosure is going to be whatever the ambient room temperature is theoretically. So if it's 14, 15 degrees, that's what it's going to get. And I'm not sure, but like Mary said, quite a broad region from basically Queensland, down through New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia. So they're quite a broad spectrum. It's not like you need the southern-only type state where you may need to get that extra few degrees colder. I mean, they're breeding Queensland. So they naturally, even the cooler temperatures in winter are still going to be warmer than what they would be saying in Victoria through winter. So they should be... Right. It shouldn't need to like freeze their balls, so to speak. [LAUGHTER] To talk about the breeding. So... Yeah, but I'm sorry. I was going to say, if you're taking it down to 14 Celsius, that would be 57 degrees Fahrenheit. Holy crap. That's a lot colder than what people are doing in the state as far as ambient, you know? That will change that way. For some reason, there are a lot of people that would be extremely tall. Right. But people are afraid to take their carpets below 70 degrees to freak out, you know? Yeah. I don't think there's so much of a problem dropping their temperatures at night time. I think where people make the mistake is during the day and not giving them enough heat to be able to warm their body up if they want to during the day. So during the day, my animals will still get 30 degrees. So... Right. But it might be over a six-hour period or seven-hour period where that warmth will come back up. So they're getting a nice cool at night time allowed. And if they want to... I mean, they don't have to go into the cold end of enclosure, which is sitting at 16 degrees. If they want to, they can stay up where it's still sitting at 20 plus degrees. So they have that option of deciding whether they want to go to cool down. Right. So I think that over 20s are in brackets a safe zone. So... Right. You know, as long as you've got warmth during the day, you're not going to risk any sort of respiratory infections of getting too cold. And I think that's the other side of the coin. If they do want to get cold, you need to provide that heat for them during the day. So if they want to, they've got... It's a bit chilly the night, the heat comes up. You don't want to get under that nice warm heater there and sit down and bask and warm up to a happy body temperature. And I know I've seen it with a lot of people out here. They get told, "Oh, you need to drop your snakes to minus 57 degrees." Or else they won't breathe. And, you know, it's a load of garbage. You just... You need to cool them enough. And you need to provide the heat during the day. So you take away that risk of respiratory infections. Because once you've got a respiratory infection, forget trying to cool them again. As soon as you start to cool them again, that respiratory will just start to take back off again. They'll just... Well, once they've got it, so... You've got to have that balance. Like I said, I like my room to get to 18. If I walk in my room in the mornings, just... My room's not at home. I have a workplace. And I'll walk in there and I'll go... And I'll just have a simple analog gauge. Nothing flash that just sits in the room. I can't go 20 degrees. I'm happy. Because I know, at that point in time, the thermostats have warmed up. The enclosures have warmed up. The room's going to be warmer than what it would have been at two or three o'clock in the morning when it's coldest. So I know that it's getting colder than that at nighttime. And you can go in there. I've been there at nighttime when I've been working till stupid hours. I wanted to look off in the morning. You can go in there and just feel the rooms cold. You can touch the snakes. They're cold. They're freezing cold, but they're cooler to the touch. I should say, since they're cold, they're cooler to the touch. And, yeah. I don't know. What do you guys normally... See, you guys normally don't chop under 70 degrees. You say we'll set 20 degrees or something on it? Yeah. Yeah. Normally, I have the room heated to around 80 degrees. But I'm not... it's not perfect. So if I would not be surprised if during the night my room and being temp drops below 80, give or take a day or two. But the cages themselves, they all have hotspots of about 85, 86. So then the snakes pretty much, you know, do what they want. If they want to get warm, they'll go over here. They want to get older down and go over there. So that's pretty much what I do is let them pick and choose. But there have been days, exactly like what you said, if I'm in my room at a stupid hour doing something and I touch a snake, they'll feel cooler. But then there are also other nights where I go to grab this one snake and I know they were just up against the heat because they're warm to the touch. So it's kind of getting big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I normally go to anyway. And that's pretty much across the board with all my animals. And it's a regi... I don't even touch them, literally. They're in a... one lot's in a 22 tub vision rack. It was a V-35, whatever it is. And I don't even touch the thermostat. I don't even touch the thermostat in it. So eight or nine years since I bought the rack. Like I said, I put a thermostat in it. The first year I put them all in, they all bred and went, "Oh, that's pretty cool." I didn't even drop their temperatures. So, you know, where it's... I find you can't... I find that the Morellia are a little bit more... I suppose difficult to breed in a sense where you need to pay them their homage. You need to spend the time with them to make sure you're getting some variation in the temperatures and dropping them down. I mean, it's finding the point that works for you. I mean, if you're having little success over there, anyone out here that I talked to a breeding is the first thing I say is, make sure your female has enough condition. My pepper female, she bred at 1.8 kilos and it was 2.3. I think she was the following season. This year she was just on four kilos because she didn't breed. I thought, "Oh, well, I'm just going to stuff you for the rats." And that's what I did. I'd just fed her up and got good size and good weight and good conditioner on her. And I see a lot of people that struggle to breed because they've been told by the breeder. They've bought their pair of albino darons off the bloke at a show for a thousand bucks. And the guys get, "Oh, you know, just getting their freedom once every couple of weeks." And, you know, five years later they've got these things that are still feeding once every couple of weeks. They're four foot long and way kilo. You know, and they wonder why they can't breed them. And I say, "You've got to feed animals or tell people you like females." As soon as they hatch out of their eggs, you can just feed them really hard. Give them a good couple of years of feeding up until they get to their adult size. And once they get there, you can maintenance feed them then. You don't have to make them fat in their beets. But often females that I've seen with, you know, a few guys of learning and coming into the hobby and wondering why they can't breed. And they send photos or go to the house and have a look. And often the cases I'd go, "You need to feed your females mate. Like, what do you feed it?" I feed it a medium rat once a week. Well, it should be eating extra large, you know, every week. So I have a medium rat once every fortnight. So, you know, there's that size as well. Because you guys are big on keeping your males small too over there. I mean, that seems to be a... Yeah, right. It's almost like bragging runs. So I read them a mile at 100 grams. [laughter] Miles isn't a daily adult. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's one of those things where if a male breeds for me, he gets put on like maintenance feed for the rest of his life. And that's just like, well, you now prove to me that you can do the job that I need you for. So, forget you. And they still get fed once a week. And they do bulk up during the summertime. But I'm never letting my boys, like, I have some large males. And, you know, I have some smaller females. And those large males are useless. Because the girls don't want anything to do with them. So, it's kind of one of those things where it's like the males on the smaller side. And I'm not talking like my male can live in a five-court pin for his entire life. They need to be bigger. But, you know, a four or five-foot male is fine for me. So... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously, that's not a high school. [laughter] No, no, no, no, no, no. Well, those are Eric's coast. Those are Eric's coastals. So... [laughter] Yeah, my... I treat my snakes on the smaller side, for sure. No doubt. Yeah, but... I was gonna say, but, you know, they breathe. I don't get huge clutches, but I don't want huge clutches. So, you know what I mean? Whereas, Owen will get 30 eggs. I'll get 15, you know? And I'm fine with shifting, because I'd rather have... I'd rather have, like, a bunch of smaller clutches than one big clutch. Yeah, Owen wants as many big clutches as he can get until he loses his mind. So... Yeah, that's what you just lost my mind this year. What have you done here, Sophie? It is. [laughter] You sit there in the room and it's like, "Who's fault is this?" Oh, that's right, it's mine. Wait a minute. Yeah. How would they stop you? Please, I was a little excited. [laughter] Yes, I'm gonna breathe. Yes, I'm gonna breathe that. And then when it all happens, it's like, "What the f*** did you do?" Shit. [laughter] Yeah, you never think that you're gonna be successful. [laughter] Yeah, you never think that all the breathe. I don't think that all these are gonna go, and then somehow they do, and you're like, "What are they all doing here?" Yeah. [laughter] Oh, boy. That's why it's just playing at the start. Oh, yeah, it was the best of intentions. But, Staren, can you talk about your black and white striped jungles for a quick second, because Eric was showing me pictures of them, and they're awfully pretty. [laughter] Yeah, well, that would be a nice thing to know. [laughter] That's some black and white jungles. I bought a couple of black and white jungles in here and there over the years, and paired them up, and this is another one. This is a null on those stories, like the peppers, I suppose. So, I kind of bred them over a couple of years, and so I did to keep back a couple of patches and a whole back, and just, well, even a few years ago, I'd had a couple other projects. One was in the furris, Aimee Ice, I was in trailing rough mob tower geckos, and I produced them, and a mate and I were actually doing it. I bought the animals, had them, bred them for a year, and then a mate was interested. So, we looked after them, we'll split the profits, so to speak, and help pay for stuff, and that way he got to play with all he wanted to, and since I was running out of time. So, anyway, I saw them to a couple of people, and when I was gone through my depression, I just got rid of all my lizards and did that at a time. You know, they were going to die, because my head was at the time, and it was... So, I decided to apply to them, and I sold a trio that I happened to have kept back, which I was going to keep for myself from the first pairing I had. So, I got out of animals and had bred them, and sold them to the mate, and they produced a pink Amyoy, like a little pink jelly bean. And I was like... And I'm like... He goes, "You're a producer, and you pink babies?" And I went, "Pink." No, like, you know, "Pail orange." He called you, like, "No, no, no, no, no, no." Like, "Pink, pink." Like, "Shame your picture." Actually, I'll see you in a picture. And so, I sent this... He sent me this photo of this pink Amyoy, and I thought, "That'll be right." You know, you finally have... ...a project. You kind of hold back some animals, and then you sell them to someone else who keeps it. Another friend that also had bought some animals from us produced the same thing. So, I'm not sure where the project is at the moment. I know they were trying to work out loads of photos, so I'll just put that on there. Obviously, they're sitting there in the babies. And so, that was kind of the icing on the cake for me. I just...I refuse to now breed anything and not hold back some babies. So, I'll always, always back everything and pair them back and try and see what comes with it. So, with these black and whites, I thought, "No, I'm not going to sell the babies. Keep back a couple." And finally got to a point that I had one of the original F1 males, F1 generation males. I thought, "You know, I'll put them back to these mummies. I'll try to produce patent black and white animal." And we'll see who comes of it. Just hoping to reproduce actually her patent more than anything else, because she had a nice thin banded patenting. So, paired them up, same thing. And this was the same year. This was the same year as I produced the peppers. And they're actually due to...due to pit and due to hatch. And I thought, "Oh, I haven't hatched yet. Look at the dates. I thought, "Oh, I should be due to hatch today." I thought, "Oh, you know, I'll just leave them overnight," which, you know, "I shouldn't have done." So, anyway. Next morning, I come in, and sure enough, there's two heads poking out. "Oh, sweet, they're hatching." So, I've pulled out the container. Cut the air. You know what? Oh, check this out. This is pretty cool. So, give me a little happy dance around the room again. Sorry. I wasn't expecting something to stop like this. But this is where...I'll chop some. This is where it gets interesting. And I remember I listened to your show with Travis Ringram. Is it? Well, Adam. Travis, the genetics dude. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Cheers. The only butcher again. Hello. Hello. Anyone there? Gee. Yes. Give me the break. So, I kind of tried to message him without, you know, trying to be true. I thought, "Do you want to ask a question? I don't want to drag into this massive essay." And, um, I'll just put up some photos. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. What? The difference between them all. They're all the same. Like, other than one difference. I just put up a photo. There was half alive and half of dead. It's dead in the egg completely formed. I just put up a photo in the NPR chat. That's all the, um, ones that were dead. See? They're all... Well. I think I put up a photo before the living ones. I'll just, I'll chuck up. I can explain that to me. What's happened here? Because in terms of your standard, you know, dominant, incomplete dominant, or excessive traits, neither pair, any trait whatsoever. The female had never produced anything like that extreme in the past. The sun looked like typical normal black and white jungle. Other than the mother's reduced pattern, but this entire clutch hatched out with these super strikes black and white jungles. And I spoke to a lot of people over here to try and understand, you know, like, tell me what's going on here. You know, Travis, when I spoke to Travis, he said that it could be through pathinogenesis. But in saying that, normally if they're pathinogenesis, according to what I understand, and this is getting a little bit bigger than my knowledge of genetics, but they should all be the one sex. And these, both males and females. So, it's like, I don't know, you don't have, have I won the polygenic lottery ticket and, you know, hatched or the, you know, just simple polygenic pattern snakes out that all just happen to the same is, so I have absolutely no idea. And going back to, you know, the mention of the theft, I had seven of these, which all fed. Actually, Kerry King was one of the first to see it, he actually, last time he came out on a tour, he was up to meet Kerry through the silver peppers. And, you know, when he comes out, we try and catch up and he came down and he was in love with these striped things. And I had the seven there and, you know, when the people broke in, they decided they'd knock off five of them, so I had two left. So, you know, it was like, oh, you know, amongst other things. But over time and through nine people and through some very, very good friends, I've managed to get most of them back. There's one left up, Central Coast, which I know where it is, but I managed to get those back. I was really sure we'd get back, you know, a number of the animals that were stolen, believe it or not, just through people and people doing the right thing and stuff. Yeah, that's good. So, this year, they went and I basically got most of those back over last year. So, I've got a couple up to size, I've got a female, I'm working on the mountain, there's no enough condition on it yet. So, I'm hoping to pair the two together. So, but one of the interesting things, when I went into season last year, one of the males, this was another case of mistaken identity. I've probed one, I thought it was a female, turned out it was a male. So, because it was once again, it was one that probed. And unusual, I mean, probed like six scales or seven scales, I thought I might be female, but not turned out it was a ball, it was rather shallow for a male. But anyway, I actually paired him up with another sibling this year and got a clutch out of her. And the patterning on all those babies is different, I guess in essence of a word compared to the original snakes. They have a different patterning, I can't really explain it. You know, when you see a hundred of these animals and then you see this clutch, it's like they're different to those ones. So, whether that's something underlying or not, I don't know, but it was just going to be another clutch to hold back. Yeah, sure, I've got plenty of them, no worries. So, I'll then back, but I'm hoping this year if I can get enough size onto this female, if I get enough size, I'll have a crack at strike to strike this year. And, I don't know, I've done anything in there, I don't know if it's just purely polygenic or if it's actually a new mutation or not. Yeah, I don't know, I'm happy to, I've got open ears. So, anybody that wants to throw in a suggestion as to why you would get, I mean fair enough, it's mother to son pairing, but to explain a complete clutch of stripes. So, I could understand if there was three or four or a couple that would try to make a little bit more sense, but in a tight clutch. Could it be, could it be recessive? I mean, like, you know, bread line recessive strike, you know? Well, I don't know, because this is where the pairings, if you're, let's assume the mum and dad were heterozygous for the stripes, you wouldn't expect the entire clutch. You'd expect a quarter of a clutch. Yeah, that's true. True, but you could possibly hit the odds and get the entire clutch. I would think that if it was recessive, the hit the odds would be a lot easier than if it was polygenic, the hit the odds. Well, you know, but that would bring us on into play when, what was, there was, I think it was like 16 animals and 17 animals and something. Is it a hatch or in the clutch? But that's where, I guess, Travis is trying to hit the entire clutches like that. Maybe that's where part of the genesis comes into it because, I mean, I like to get that many animals. And when you have a look at them, there's very little difference between all the animals. Other than a slight variation in head pattern, which is, I mean, they're all different anyway. You know, the pattern being the fingerprint. But you're not going to, overall, they've all got the perfect striping at the back. They're all kind of dispersed down towards the rear end. The head patterns are all very similar. There's not a huge variation within the clutch. You know, like, I just, it's the outer clutch of striped coastal, striped, so, striped coastal, striped coastal. Some in there are like pristine, perfect stripes, stunning babies. And then you've got some that have some striping, but also some blotching where the pattern changes. So you don't have it, which is your natural polygenic variation within a clutch. But you just, I just, I don't see it in those striped ones, if that makes sense here. Like, there's just not enough variation between 17 animals from one clutch from two completely unstriped animals to natural sense. Yeah, that's, that's why I think, you know, it reminds me of it. It reminds me of the tristrac ball python. And that is recessive. So, I don't know. What I feel is just, I think, recessive. But I'm not a genetic wizard, either. I'm not a genetic wizard. I hope you're right, because it's one thing we like anyway. I know there's a guy working on what he thinks might be some generic striped marries. But not to this extreme. To have something that extreme in a inheritable genetic trait. I mean, it just opens the doors. I mean, just to see that in like, in those sort of stripes in an albino form or a really crisp examples or something like that would just be stunning. You know, just be a gorgeous looking animal. But I just have to- What's that face? Yeah. And if it was recessive, and if it was recessive consistently. You know, like when you have polygenic stuff, it's like you get a range of looks, you know. Whereas if you have something that's possessive or incomplete dominant or something like that, you get, you know, consistent. They all look the same. For the most part, you know. But, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. It's the polygenic variance. Yeah. So, yeah. So, it's a cool project. Not sure what's going to come of it. So, it's, you know, unfortunately not having those animals to work with means, you know, I couldn't get the food into them that I would normally have fed. They eventually came back, you know, the size they were when they left. Like they've hardly been fed at all for the short daily months. They've been out roaming around the world. And, naturally, with sunshine virus over here being quite predominant and, you know, running a muck through collections all over the place. I had the quarantine as well. So, they had to come home. They spent eight months at home. They had some sort of virus testing to make sure they were clear and before learning about the work. So, unfortunately, we stuff a quarantine at home. They don't quite get fed as easily as, you know, a work off a feed fresh kill. They go out and guess a whole bunch of rats and throw something in the freezer to sell and take something down to feed some animals. So, when I'm at home, I've got to defrost them. You know, sometimes after you've preached work to a lot of hours, you know, in a lovely, sweaty, stinky rat room. Or, say you're in the last thing I want to do is go on defrost more rats and feed some snakes. But, I mean, I still have a fed back in here on. But, yeah, now that they're down at work, I'm trying to get as much food. If I could keep my food supplies up, I'd be a happy man. Too many customers, I think. It's time. Yeah. So, at home, you know, if there's something straight would be very, very cool, I think. And have another mutation like this, like the fourth one I've produced. So, I don't know what to do with all these weird things keep happening to me. So, that's all for now. Yeah. So, I think I'm out because it's too much to work on. [ Laughter ] It checks in the mail. No worries. Yeah. Well, one of those rubber chicks. Dwayne bounces it really. Yeah, right. So, I figured before we -- I can't just go ahead of some time. But, before we run out of time, I wanted to make sure that, you know, one that's near and dear to my heart before Owen talks about one that's near and dear to his heart. You work with Setha Imbracada. Tell us about that. I mean, I know you said they're like coastal, right? [ Laughter ] The Western coast versus eastern or northern coast. Yeah. Look, there's something new to me. I wanted Imbracada first. Oh, geez. I don't know in years when they first allowed you to collect them in WA or you were able to get them from WA. The biggest problem was having to know someone that I could trust because to send snakes in WA over. I knew I had gotten content and found a couple of people over there. But when I spoke to people on the eastern side, over at Sydney, the supposed pairs that I was getting turned out to be on males and it was all wrong. And so I kind of got disheartened. I was organizing here 2.3, brought over many years ago. It was just, like I said, early on. It's just one of those species and other species I want to breed and tick off the breeder box. I had an interest in them for a long time and didn't really know anyone. And then when I was actually over in Tinley Park, you might remember Paul Pomey guy that was with us as well. Matt Harris over in WA here, Matt. He breeds him over there. So he's from Western Australia. He breeds the Inbracadar over there. We were chatting and I said, "Oh, you breed Inbracadar? I've always wanted some of those." And he goes, "Oh, sing some. No worries." So I paid the transfer fees and all that sort of stuff and some money. He sent me over 2.7 of Inbracadar. So I'm like, "Do they grant them?" Yeah, I did say I was a hoarder. Sorry, sorry, sorry, 2.5. So I have 7, sorry, 2.5. 2 miles, 5 females. Yeah, which is one of the photos I've sent up before. Matt's a great guy, a lovely bloke for Pomey. And he's sent him over and gave me some tips and sent me some photos where he's set up and all that sort of stuff. They're not a big snake, they're quite a small snake. They're only 5 foot long. So I'm very excited to work with those. Hopefully this year if I can get a bit more food into a column, they're getting some decent size on them now. They were fussy kind of moist feeders to start off with. I've still got a male that's really, really picky. He does eat, but he's quite fussy. But I've got 3 females and a male that are just smashing the unrest at the moment. So I'm trying to get those up to size and have it go up breeding them. So there'll be a new venture and more hoarding. That's awesome. I can't get on here and tell you all these things about breeding them. I haven't really done it in the first 10. So I won't be making up stuff until you rise. But they're a very cool looking animal. They do have a similarity or coastal, but they are just different. They're just different in appearance and markings. And there are some quite nice ones over in WA. One of the interesting things that Matt actually said to me, he goes, "It's the males that are the problem." He said, "If you can find a good solid breeding male, he said you're laughing." He reckons that some of the really nice good looking males can't get on the breed. He said, "Doesn't matter what he tried, just can't get on the breed." But he said he's got a couple of males there that are quite good at doing what they do best. But he said he reckons that males are the problems. So you have girls and he said, "Oh, God, no worries." But he reckons finding a virile male is more to the problem. Now whether there's anything to do with being wild caught over there and a lack of captive generations I guess to work with has anything to do with it. I'm sure. So I'm just hoping that the two males I've got, like I said, the one who's absolutely paring along. I'm just hoping that feeding attitude will go through to his sex draw. Come back up. It'll continue, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's the one thing that he mentioned to me. So I thought it was interesting. I don't know many people that have bred them. I know there's a few people around, but he's one of the few that I know has bred them successfully. He doesn't breed them every year. Every couple of years just for the fact he doesn't need to breed them all that often. So I'll just give you more photos of those and I'll take some more. I know you like them there. That's right, torture him. Yeah, certainly mating photos. Exactly. It'll have to come up there. Yeah, well, if that happens, like, you know, we don't want to. If we come and visit you, then you're going to know the guys who robbed you again, because it will be us doing it in front of you. Like, you know, we're shoving Silver Pepperdyn was in a bag and you guys, you're just going to have to stop us every time. So put those back. All right. Check in the mail. Yeah, check in the mail. Get in the place, get in the other place a little bit different nowadays. The security is going to be lifted dramatically. Yeah. So I'll just go to the airport and pick them up after you idiots get arrested. So yeah, I mean, that'll just be how that goes. Right. So Eric, Eric has to talk about his. Now we're going to talk about mine because I think you've been torturing me about rough scales since you and I met at Tinley Park. Yeah, you were like, I sold the rough scale from like 300 hours. You had a little tinker tail. Like you, you have any advantage of paying for rough scales? You jerk. So it's like, you know, it's one of those things. So, like, I'm speeding paid to a good friend of mine for 400 bucks lost reason. See, what the hell? I do that every time. I don't know, 15 in my hat, you're right? Yeah, exactly. How do you feel about the roughies and what's it like working with them in your opinion? I love the roughies. A lot of people on the, obviously when John White first started working with the roughies, he was working with a wild population, a collection of wild animals. So, you know, everyone probably seen the photos of, you know, with their mouth open and that real aggressive looking defensive stance they have, you know, with open the mouth and look at you like, yeah, I'm coming here, I'm going to rip your face off. And obviously with Brian Barchek, Barchek, one of you, one of you shows, he had a roughie that was chewing his arm up left, right and center. That was over here. Well, I'm going to show you this. So they kind of got this little bit of a stigma about being, you know, an aggressive snake and having a huge teeth for their size. You know, whether they drive that, they say, oh, maybe because it's eight birds or whatever and they get a bit of grip. I don't know. They've got decent size set of chompers for the size snake there. But they're extremely placid. Like, I just hand in the enclosure at any time and just pull them out. They just, they, just the really docile animals. They're really, really, really nice animals. They've bought them not for any dollar value or anything like that. I bought them purely because they were different. When I, when I used to go, when John first started work, well, then I got, got the chance to handle one up at the reptile park, he goss it and play with one. And as soon as I touched that animal and felt the scallation on it, I was like, oh, I mean, well, I've got to have some of these just because they're so cool. They don't feel like any other, any other more earlier. And so when, when I could, because that was huge dollars when they first came out. So when I was able, when the price came down enough that I was able to afford to buy some, I bought myself a couple and they're really easy to keep. They're really hardy. They breed easy. Like, this is a third year in a row that mine's, you know, I think the first year she dropped 14 eggs last year, she got 15, this year she dropped 15. I don't smash them with a lot of food. I'll feed them. I'll probably actually give them a rest. It's coming in just, just because I've had my fun. I've enjoyed a bread a few. I've got, like I said, there's 15 and a hatchet right there at the moment. I'm all starting to feed and do the right things. I'll probably keep back a pair or two or something like that. And I'll sell the rest on. They're really easy. They're in like a three by two by two sort of enclosure, ceramic heat emitter at one end. The branch, they can hop on and cruise around if they want to. Really simple setup. I don't have big flash elaborate setups. You know, the branch is over the top on most of them. Yeah, and pretty much trade them on any other of my morellia. They're almost like interresing the bread. Like seriously, I reckon you're almost trying to kill them, I reckon. I don't know whether it's just me or the setup or whatever it is. But like I said, my room gets too much. I dropped their nighttime temps down a bit, you know, 20 odd degrees. But you put enough condition on your female and she drops a good healthy clutch every year. The one thing I do find interesting though, I don't know whether it's just mine, other is maybe different. But my male can be a really picky feeder for a certain time of the year. And I want to get this, I guess it's almost a two month window of where he's like ravishing. So, you're kind of offering my females like nah, don't want anything, don't want anything. And the next week you're going and all of a sudden you'll just smash rat week after week after week till he gets to himself to a certain, I guess to a certain condition. And then he's back on the feeding and doesn't want to know about it. And it's frustrating, of course, after obviously breeding and she lays her eggs and you know, you want to get some condition on the both of them, she'll eat no problems. And you're trying to get in the feed and he's like, nah, I'm not interested. I'm like, dude, you're done for the season, you're finished, he's already had eggs. It's snow zoned to a next year. Yeah, it's over. And he's just like, nah, nah, nah. And then come sort of January, you'll go, oh, it's time to eat. And then you'll eat for January, February, maybe March. And that's it, you'll eat, probably rat every couple of weeks. And he's done, he's ready for season number four. Like I said, I'll probably rest on this sheet. But yeah, so, but they're very cool snake. They tend to change the color a little bit at night time. I don't know if you, do you have roughies on? I do. Yeah, roughies. And what you're saying about the picky thing, I had a boy that's like eight and eight and eight and eight and eight to the point where like he eclipsed his brother by so much that he was just so much bigger than his brother was ridiculous. And then right when he got through a certain size, he just stopped eating. And it was like, I'd offer and he'd be like, no. And then maybe every couple of weeks, he'd be like, no, all right, and you eat. But, and then that was the one that I sent to Nick to breathe with Nick's stuff. But it was the exact same way, which is like, no. And then he'd made me lose a little bit of weight. And then he'd start eating again until he got to a certain weight again. And then he'd be like, yeah, I'm good now. So it was like he was regulating himself weight wise. It was awesome. I didn't have to worry about him. But yeah, yeah, I have two roughies. And definitely the girl is the one that looks more different at night time. Like she looks a whole lot darker. It's kind of cool. I like it. Yeah, they kind of color change style. Not all of them. I find that they do it all the time. But some nice thing going in, there's a big difference. And other times they go in there and they just look normal. So, but I had a, a main one actually produced one that had, it died unfortunately, but actually had some striping on it. So it was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Holy crap. That was a little fun over there floating around somewhere else. It was awesome. Yeah, of course it was a striped one. Yeah. Well, it's only a matter of time. Isn't it really? Yeah. Yeah. It was kind of this partial, partial. No, I'll just do. Yeah. I, I, I still want more. I have two, but I want more. So, you know, Eric, Eric and sit there and pine over the, and brakata, and I can still pine over the ruffies because I just want more. So. Yeah. Oh, wow. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I want it. Yes, Don. I want it. Even though it's got weird bug eyes. Yeah. I didn't want it. It didn't make it now. Yeah, of course it didn't survive, but it, you know, it's like anything. The more you are, the more you inbreed, I guess the, the common stuff falls off the allow in essence and the chance of something cool and unusual is the more opportunity the rear it's head. So. And that's one thing I haven't done. I said before, you know, for now I'll always brief something, hold it back and, so I'll produce F1s and then, then produce F2 generations to see if, you know, there's any might be there. And it's the one that you haven't done with the ruffies. It's just kind of bred them and sold them, just enjoying their pair. And it's just kind of been one of those old things on the side. But this year I've, I've got a couple of the smashing down race at the moment. So they're going to go in there. Hold it and grow it and breed it in a couple of years time. Time been and just out of curiosity when you look at something like that. It's like, wow, I hope that pulls out for something different. So you never know what might hatch. That's so cool. So now that is that, again, I just want more. So that's my problem. Yeah. What is, what is, what is in a show hall? You think someone's going to knock on your door one day and come and say, "Sorry mate, you've got to stop holding all these snakes. We're here to collect them." That might be the way to get Eric to part with certain things. Like, you know, I'm waiting for him to let go of the Tigers at Albino. And he's, he's got them in like a vice grip. He won't let me even see them. So. Nope. They don't exist, do they mate? It's sort of a figment of Alan's imagination. You're right. Yeah. They don't exist, yeah, I don't like that. It's the hard to know. There's so many cool things to get. I keep a lot of, I keep some of my stuff a little bit quieter nowadays. You know, because I know when I, when I produced the first pepper, I had an accusation of, "Oh, I had enough. They're pure Murray's." I'm like, "Look at the pics of the adults." Like, you know, you'd have to be a rocket scientist to know they're pure Murray's. And what I found out was that he crossed Murray's into jags. He's in the very early stages of jags out here in, in the, when they first got smuggled in. And yeah, he was like, "Of course he produced these Murray jags." You know, and I suddenly popped up with this. It was like, "Oh no, someone else has got a Murray Dalen mutation." And basically tried to debunk it, you know, like did it. Wasn't, and once I kind of realized what he was doing. Because I had all, I've got all the stats, like, you know, incubation time. Um, the whole lot. And there's, there's nothing irregular. It's perfectly normal. What it was in the photos, the whole lot. And he was trying to make it out there. Oh, maybe it was a jag pairing. And yeah, I'm sorry. I just shut him down in flames. And then said, "You know, awfully a lot like gamens as well, you know?" So, that kind of didn't go down well. (LAUGHTER) Well, we'll leave that one there. It's just one of those things that makes me laugh. You know, someone's lucky enough to get something different. There's always people that want to try and, you know, find, "Oh, it's crossed with this, it's crossed with that." And it's really, really hard. Yeah, it's really hard now. If you produce something, you're indifferent. And it doesn't matter, you know, your reputation. Since you go, "Oh, I've got a, you know, an albino diamond python," for example, "wouldn't matter if you'd found it in your backyard." Everyone would be like, "Oh, it's probably your diamond cross with the diamond." Or it's just that yellow, you know. It's just instant. It's very hard to prove anything else. Right. People just shoot the um, you know? That's got to be super frustrating because if you really do find, you know, well, didn't that happen with the albino coastal? I mean, yeah. I think that was a Darwin mix. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's still going on. I mean, they're gorgeous looking. The one that Kurt's got up there. You know, they see photos on Facebook all the time. And, you know, we used to see what these, obviously, you've got a few projects he's working up on this. I mean, we used to see what he comes out with all that stuff he's got out there with those crystals. He's got some nice crystals. Right. That's what I want because then I can do albino things with my crystals and still be a purist at the same time. So. Yeah. Well, what's the fun of that? Jeez. Get out. Leave a little. No. Yeah. Yeah. Jeez. They're pure. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. It says, it says Merely importance, right? It doesn't say Merely a purist right here. That's only because he wouldn't let me put it on the marquee. But. That was a debate. But, um, I'm interested to see how Darren takes the last couple questions because he's in Australia and where we sit here and we're like, if you could have any Python in the world, we're like, instantly go to what do they have in Australia that I can't have. So I'm going to see what your take is on these questions because you're on the flip side because I remember you handling the blood pythons at Matt's table. Yeah. Yeah. Checking them out and being like, these are so cool. And we're like, it's a blood python. Not to knock that. It's blood python. But anyway, now that I'm going to get a couple for that one. Oh, good job. Yeah. Can I? Yeah, no. He'll just do what he normally does and email me tomorrow. Anyway, hey, um, so Darren, if you could keep any reptile without any limitations, be it price or law, what would it be and why? Oh, I'd keep a silver pepper mary, darling. It's funny because what you say is dead right. You always want what someone else has got across the other side of the ocean. You know, I kind of looked around for what I killed. And to me, there's a few things. Like I love, I love pints. And if there was a pine carpet, oh, that would be heaven. That would be the vena one. There's so many pine carpets. I just thought it would have pine carpets of every color and pattern you could think of. But obviously they don't exist yet. I'm sure they'll, well, turn up one day somewhere. Hopefully over here you think you won't have them. Sorry. So there's a few things. And I like, I like rare and unique stuff and I like nature. And it's very hard being just an avid reptile lover in general. It's very hard to pick any one thing. But I thought, I'll see you in the other day. I'll think, oh, how cool to be. You just have like a pet Komodo dragon. You know what? I'm just going to get a big dragon. What are you going to get any back yard for? Have this big dragon wizard. Yeah. That's right. So, you know, this thing, or to a tara or something that's, you know, rare and any new deal and stuff like that. But there's so many, I don't know. I couldn't, like I went through and I was writing things like I saw, like Kevin McCurley with his cow reticulated pythons. I don't know how awesome those things look, you know? Right. People, things that you guys would hate would be like, you know, like an example pie ball python or example pie critique or, you know, but then there's things like, you know, those, um, those dragonflakes or whatever they are. Oh, yeah. Those grey things. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Or the, um, I think they call them a spiny bush viper or a hairy bush viper or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Things like that, like the unusual and the quirky or stuff like that. So, you know, the one thing that's always had a bit of a soft spot, always loved the bandage Guanas and Fijian Band of the Guanas, I thought they would be very cool, just nice green. They're kind of like the chondro of the lizard world, I reckon. You know? Yeah. Right. Yeah. To be honest, I couldn't. I'm too greedy. I don't want to. Okay. We're at Porter in the park. Yes. I'm carrying a bucket under the chin for dribbling at everyone's tables. You go, oh, look at that. You know? It'd be like you guys coming out here and you come down and you, you know, you finally get your hands on the inbracala. It's like, uh, over there. I was like, oh, Eric away from it. It's going to be bad. He's going to cry. So. Yeah. So it's, there's, yeah, there's so many things. I'd love to, I'd be terrible. If I leave, honestly, if I lived over in U.S. or that, I'd be terrible. I'd have so many, so many bloody snakes and lizards will start. I'd be shocking. I just, I can't help myself. Oh, that's cool. Then I can't just buy something and keep it as a, as a pet as such. If I buy it, I've got to buy two at least two. Normally I try to buy like 2.3 or something. If, if I buy a pet and then I have to breed it. Cause I want to understand more about the animal and how it works. And, you know, then housing those babies and getting those babies to feed and then holding those babies back and producing more babies. Yeah, I'd be, I'd be terrible. But yeah, there'd be a few things. I definitely think like a tomato would be sure to have around the back yard. Some of those, some of those were ticks that like Jay Brewer and that, and some of those guys over there produce like a bucket full of colours. Unfortunately, I get 20 odd feet long, but yeah, it'd be nice to be over there. You know, obviously there'd be a bit more of a manageable size, but yeah, yeah, it's hard to, maybe I should just say, you know, Mary Darling's. Play it safe. Yeah, yeah, play it safe. I'd be biased if I try to pick any one thing out of anything else, I suppose. But yeah, I love everything. So I'd be, you know, I'd be like, oh, Christian Gippers, how cool are they? I want some of those. And I'd pack me in the frogs and shit like that. I'd just, I'd be terrible, honestly. Honestly, I'd just, I'd be broke. Couldn't afford to feed anything, and I'd have to have a big fire sound until maybe. Yeah, I feel your pain, man. I feel your pain. Because it's just the opposite for me. Yeah, yeah, I could care less about a Pac-Man frog, but if I come down there, I'm going to, you know, you're going to say, that's just a crappet python. And I'm going to be like, oh, you understand. No, this is awesome. This is like the greatest thing ever. Moralia Capote. Yeah. Well, that's the same problem I've got here. So I've quite got this little, I suppose, bucket list of things I want to tick off and do. And that's breeding all the Moralia. So, you know, it's not like I've got to do it this way. But it's, you know, I've collected all the, slowly collecting all the different forms of Moralia. And obviously, I'm probably might be a little while away, but, you know, and then, and condros, but, yeah, it's, it's quite a thing. I mean, really enjoying the carpets and, you know, what some of the patterns and colors out there with the, the multi-g mutations and stuff that have been produced. It's like, oh, wow, there's some very, very, some very cool stuff being produced at the moment. So, you know, I can't wait to mix up some of that stuff with the peppers. It's a big list of projects to go on with that stuff. Yeah, you'll be doing that for years. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it started, it started. I've got, so I've got Peppa the Jags now. I've got Peppa the Albinos now. So I've got those two lots of double hits. And then, um, hopefully next year I'll get Peppa the Zebra. And then, um, Peppa the Exancic. So that'll be a couple more to, to go off. And then, like, just on a, on a side note, like, if you look at, look at the, the Peppa patterning. And at the moment it's got that silvery kind of background color. But I look at everything, how cool would that be with, like, black and yellow? Or, like, black and red? Yeah, and black and white. So I've kind of looked at those in a, in a polygenic sense. And I think, well, you know, it's, I'm going to look at, I don't know if we're going to do it yet. But I thought you can get some of the marries, you know, like South, um, South West Queensland. You get some of the marries, some of the richer reds. I mean, if you can find marries with the reds in all over the place, that seems to be more of a predominant area. But you do get them scattered around. And I thought, what's a, what's a fast way of putting reds into a silver pepper? I thought, oh, famous, famous should put it, put it over a breadloin. No. Nice. Don't get, don't get some reds. What? Hypo, breadloin. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Stop it. All right. Quick. Next question. Oh. Yeah. I thought I'd touch a bit of it. They did. Anyway. All right. There you go. Herping. Anywhere in the planet. Again, without limitations. Where would it be? And what would you be hoping to see? It's probably, once again, it's on. There's probably two, two places. Uh, probably on. It'd be a split between maybe Borneo or Madagascar. And, um... Okay. Like, you know, this is going to matter. I mean, just aside from rectiles, is she volume of really unusual and really cool wildlife? You know, see, you're in your pings in the wild. You know, would be a very cool thing. But, you know, some of stuff, like, you know, I always wanted to see, like, the Mingo snake or Mingo cat snakes. I think you call those really nice black and gold snakes. Some of it, like, in Borneo. Just to see a wild, reticulated python and, you know, like, green vine snakes and stuff like that. Just, and, you know, amongst all the other lizards and their gamuts and everything else. Chameleons and stuff. And similar to Madagascar, well, I'd love to see a dummels bar. I can have a pretty cool-looking sort of thing and some of the iguanas they've got over there. So, it'd be one of those, too, but I think just from the she... More so, the sheave variety of wildlife in such an, I guess, uncharted areas, I suppose, or where there's a small population or, you know, areas where it's not quite trampled through. You know, like, you can go to Cairns and go find walkways and find a boy's forest. But when you kind of get out into the midst of the jungle and where someone hasn't been for the last 12 months or two years or three years or something, or other where nature's itself, I think it would be pretty cool. And just, you know, frogs and everything. I mean, you know, not that I'm a massive frog guy, but, you know, I love animals and wildlife. So, to see a, you know, cool-looking frog is just as exciting for me as anything else. So, you know, but there'd be a split between that. I did have an opportunity to go to Borneo, but just time and fun. Everything else didn't come through, and some of the photos that those guys saw over there was just an amazing, amazing couple of weeks I spent over there. But, yeah, so they probably would be two places. But, I mean, I could add to the least, if you like. (laughter) Pretty much everywhere but Antarctica. It's like, yeah, okay. So... It's just... Yeah, so, yeah, yeah. Or we could go to the penguins, or go to the ark. Yeah, but that's not herping, it's herping, or whatever. Yeah, I know. So, they'd probably be two of the places. I mean, I could say Australia, but I've actually done quite a bit of herping. (laughter) Over the years, though, it's still cool. I don't get the time to do it as much anymore, but, you know, I've done quite a few tricks around yourself while I was in Queensland and I'm herping and taking photos and stuff like that. But yeah, it might be three places, but it would be very cool. Now, real quick before I think we're gonna, I think we're getting close to the limit here. So, I want you to be able to throw out your contact info, or how can somebody get in contact with you so that they could, like, beg for a silver pepper if you can, like, laugh and hang up on them or something like that. (laughter) So, how would people get in touch with you and what's your business name and stuff like that? Well, I kind of don't really have, I want to be honest. It's, um, find me on Facebook and, uh, under Dan Whittaker. Um, you know, add me on there. Um, you've got a number of friends on there, but I try to put up stuff and obviously you need to screen the other one, Dan Riptals only, on Instagram. Uh, he's, he's the other one. You know, I haven't been on there as much lately. I went on a holiday for a couple of weeks and just been basically on, on catch-ups since I've been back. So, I've got a whole heap of photos of stuff that I want to put up and, including little things like the, you know, the, the, the albino, Darwin, cross-bred life, some of the, some of the jags I've produced, the double-hit, um, pepper albino, it's just a, not that there's anything flash, but in, you know, they're just wall-type of heron animals, but just things of interest. So, I, I normally just do it out of my own. I was just only looking at something and go, "Oh, that looks pretty cool." And take it, I may only take it with my phone, so stop. They're not the least the best of photos. Half the time I'll delete all the photos. I'll take a photo of this. And, like, the Inbrecada, I remember I was, I saw an Eric one point. I thought, "Oh, you know, I'm going to dream up and take a photo of an Inbrecada." And you just think I could get a half-decent phone. [laughter] You know, because they, they kind of, they'll sit there and feed, and if they don't want to feed, they just launch themselves out of the enclosure, like, just, they come flying out at 100 miles an hour. So, you've got to chase them around. So, you've got to kind of get them at that point where they don't realize you're there and get the photo. But then if you've got no light in, you know, no decent natural light, the, the just doesn't look right. So, I was trying to do that. So, normally I'll take a photo and take, like, 10 photos. "Oh, there's a good one, but I'll do." Well, I'll put that one up. So, it's very hard to capture some of the stuff on me or know what it's like, you know. Yeah. So, I'm just scared. So, I normally put it up on there and then I'll go and copy it and put it up on Facebook. Occasionally, I'm posting the group. So, I just, I don't, I used to get involved and try to talk and help. But, all you end up doing was arguing with idiots and all they do is dragging out their level and beating with it. [silence] [silence]