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Boelen's Python talk with Keith McPeek

Episode #229 In this episode we are welcoming back Keith McPeek to the show to further discuss his approach to keeping boelen's pythons. He joined us on the Boelen's roundtable and we wanted to talk to him one on one to really get a feel for his approach to being successful with this beautiful species. If you have ever thought about keeping boelen's pythons then this will be an episode that you will want to listen too.

Duration:: 2h 53m
Broadcast on:: 13 Jan 2016
Audio Format:: other

Hey Chad Brown here, you may remember me as a linebacker in NFL, where I was a reptile breeder and their owner of Projak. I've been hurtful since I was a boy and I've dedicated my life to advancing the industry and educating the community about the importance of reptiles. I also love to encourage the joy of breeding and keeping reptiles as a hobbyist, which is why my partner Robin and Markham 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 reptilereport.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 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. You're a buyer or breeder, you gotta check out the reptile report marketplace. The marketplace is the reptile world's most complete buying and selling definition full of features that help put you in touch with the perfect deal. Find exactly what you're looking for with our advanced search system, search by sex, weight, more, or other keywords, and use our Buy Now option to buy that animal right now. Go to marketplace.the reptilereport.com 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 med. It also gets fed to the reptile report and our powerful marketplace Facebook page. Buy on the selling and ship your reptiles.com to 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 rate. The materials need to ship your reptiles successfully, live customer support, and our live, on time, arrival insurance program. We got you covered. Visit the reptilereport.com to learn or share about the animals. Click on the link to the marketplace. Find that perfect pet or breeder. Then visit shipreptile.com to ship that animal anywhere in the United States. We are your one-stop shop for everything reptile related. [silence] [silence] [silence] Hey Chad Brown here. You may have heard me at the Lion Backroom on the FL. Where's the reptile breeder and their owner approach that? I've been hurt since I was a boy and I've dedicated my life to advancing the industry and educating the community about the importance of reptiles. I also love to encourage the joy of breeding and keeping reptiles as a hobbyist, which is why my partner Robin and Markle 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 reptilereport.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. If you're a buyer or a breeder you've got to check out the reptile report marketplace. The marketplace is the reptile world's most complete buying and selling definition full of features that help put you in touch with the perfect deal. Find exactly what you're looking for with our advanced search system, search by sex, weight, more, or other key words. Use our buy-it-now options to buy that animal right now. Go to marketplace.the reptilereport.com and register your account for free. Be sure to link your marketplace account to your ship your reptile accounts or 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 mat. It also gets fed to the reptile report and our powerful marketplace Facebook page. Buy on your selling? You ship your reptiles.com to take advantage of our discounted priority overnight shipping rate. Shipereptiles.com can also supply you with the materials needed to safely ship your animal successfully. Use shipereptiles.com to take advantage of our discounted priority overnight shipping rates. The materials needed to ship your reptile successfully live customer support and our live on-time arrival insurance program. We got you covered. Visit the reptilereport.com to learn or share about the animals. Click on the link to the marketplace. Find that perfect pet or breeder. Then visit shipereptiles.com to ship that animal anywhere in the United States. We are your one-stop for everything reptile related. Hello, everybody. Welcome to a saved episode of Moralea Python radio. I kicked it and kicked it again and they're good to go. All they had to do was run the commercial twice and then it worked. They know intro music. You're getting on today. Well, yeah, so what happens is there's a studio and in this studio is this interface, which Owen knows, that comes on on computer and it wouldn't come up. So I couldn't play any clips and I couldn't click us on. And when I contact Blog Talk, they more or less tell me everybody's busy, so to pay for that feature. Anyhow, I'm glad that we were able to- I swear, man, once we move, I'm going to have NPR studios and all the- We're going to go pull out. Oh yeah, we'll get the whole kit and caboodle. I'll still tell them the same because I won't be there, but yeah. No, no, we'll be able to fix that somehow. But anyway, somehow. So here we are, episode 229 of NPR and tonight we are having Keith McPee. Join us back. We're turning to go deeper into Bolland's Python's and his approach to keeping him and what he's observed so far with trying to breathe him. For those who don't know, Keith joined us way back in last, well, maybe a couple months ago, for our first ever Bolland's Roundtable. Not only was that the first Bolland's Roundtable, that was the biggest roundtable that we ever had. It was ridiculous. It took us like 20 minutes to get through everybody and then get back to the budget. Yeah, there was questions that we didn't even- We didn't even hit at all. But Keith has always fascinated me because, for one, he was a big time into blood pythons and shorttails for quite a while. And he also worked with looking back on his Facebook feeds and some of the things that he put up. He's worked with jungles and all kinds of different pythons and boas. So I'm really excited to talk to him about some of the ways that he's trying to approach working with this pinnacle of pythons, if you will. But Owen, what's going on with you? What's going on over here is someone flipped a switch and now everybody's breathing. The caramel is locked up with the caramel jag. The red jag is wrapped up with the red tiger. Everything's breathing except for the weird stuff like the eyelashes, the stuff I really want. Even the freaking Amazon tree boas I caught them locked and I'm like, "God damn it. No, I want you to leave." I guess it's just waiting for the season to cool down as well as right now it's knowing sideways up here. So that's also playing this helpful. So yeah, it's just like one more thing and it's funny that we're doing a bowling show today because I was actually, I was getting a tattoo on Saturday and it has him do the rough scale and he drew it all up. And my artist was working on me and he's like, "Dude, I was researching this snake and I found this type online. A bowling bullet? I'm like a bullet." He's like, "Yeah, dude, you've got to let me tattoo that on you or something like that. It's a killer looking animal." He's like, "That thing is sick looking. We've got to try that." I'm like, "I don't have any of those." Because you mean that's the rule and you have to own it before I get tattooed on you like something like that. So he goes, "Well, you should get some." I'm like, "God damn it, it's everywhere." Like, you know, can I escape the people that want me to brush out and buy bowling flyboards? Apparently not. No, you cannot. Yeah. So that was funny. I got to kind of chuckle at that one. So it's cool that we're doing that. I predict that you want them before I do. Lies. Lies. Lies, slander. You and I both know that it's just going to be one of those things where I'm going to like, you're going to do it so nonchalant. You're going to be like, "It's going to be like a Wednesday around noon." And you're like, "Oh boy, I just unboxed my bowling flython." And then I'm going to be like, "That's nice. Wait, what?" So that's what it's going to be. For me, it's going to be one of those. You're going to have them for like a couple months. And then I actually get down to your neck of the woods and like, see you. And you'll let me play with them. And then I'll be back here in my place obsessing over them for at least a month and a half. And then I will have to get my own. But I'm going to make sure like, I would message you every step of the way. Like for three days, I'm thinking about bowling. I'm thinking about bowling. I'm really thinking about bowling. Hey, I talked to this guy about bowling. Hey, I put money down at bowling. Hey, I put the bowling. Hey, they're coming. Hey, they're here. I'm opening the box now. Like it would be every five seconds. So that's just how it is. The difference is between you and I. But I think you're going to pull the trigger first. I think you're going to get there before me. Now, you know, I was thinking about it after the round table. And I'm still on the, you know, I'm still sitting on the fence right after the round table. I was pretty, pretty sure that I was going to get them. And then I was kind of like, I don't know, I'm ready yet. I don't know if I'm ready yet. Well, the problem I have is that there's so many things on my list that I would like to fill in beforehand, that the money that it would cost for bowling, I would use for other projects. So it's like, do I really want to pair of bowling when I really, really, really want my blackface weightless back? Or team wars have gotten wrinkled themselves into my brain somehow. You know, there's so many other animals and so many different things. Like I need to get new cages for the olive python. There's, there's a lot of different stuff that I would like to do. Bullens would probably happen for me, but it happens to happen at, it has to be at a point where I've filled most of my list or I don't have that many things that are pressing or that I really want. Like, England have to happen. I would like to do some different stuff with the bread lye. So it's like, it's one of those things where they're on my list, but they keep getting jumped. Like, they keep getting knocked down by other animals. They keep moving up. So it's one of those things, you know, but, but if the opportunity were to arise, like, say somebody would have just like, it's only where to offer me a pair of babies at a ridiculous price that no sane human being on the planet could pass up. Of course, I would do that. And then, you know, it gets heaved out the window. So yeah, so yeah, I'm with you. I mean, we've talked about this on the last show with the weather and for me in the season. And I really kind of my room alone during the chill down. So I'm in there today and really trying to figure out what's going on because I knew that there was a storm coming through tonight and just me and watch what. Well, turns out, it turns out that there must have been breeding going on all this time. And I just have missed it, you know, because I'm the type of guy that just puts the snakes together. And, you know, I just kind of let them do this thing. And really, I'm catching them. You know, I'm in the room in the very early morning, like 4 30 in the morning, and I'm in the room when I come home from like seven to eight before, you know, we're just down. You're in the room and four in the morning, the snakes aren't even awake at four in the morning. You were psychotic. So, you know, my animals would be like, what the hell are you doing here? So it's, it, and I guess I'm kind of in the same boat with you. They're few that I'm like, all right, you guys are already pregnant. Cool. So, yeah, I don't want to count the eggs before they're hatched. But, you know, I know that I always freak out and say, you know, I'm not going to get and we do this every year where we're not going to get anything here. It's like, yeah, we're going to get any eggs. Yeah, I reach into the cages. And what I'm feeling is that feeling, the you have a better description of it. And hopefully I can get it right. But when you feel a female down at the, at the lower end of her body, she has like that, like the, her sides kind of go over her belly skin. Like, usually the, the belly scales pop out, almost look like a square. Yeah. So, the albino and the Citrus Tiger, that's, she's, she's like that. My awful lot of jag and albino. She's like that. My M-Pen, she was basking belly up. So, I'm pretty sure that she's have it. That's, that, that, that thick of a fork in that one. Wait, is that M-Pen to M-Pen? Yeah. Yeah. You dirty bastard. No, no more food, nothing. God, God, damn it. I'll give you so much money. God, damn it. It's, it's crazy because the, the crazy morph projects, I guess they're just not old enough. I don't know. I mean, that's all, again, this will be the third year. I think I have a broken axanic female. I think she's broken. This is the third year in a row that I'm trying to greet her. You, you and that female have never gotten along. Because you're like, yeah, double hit snows, and you got locks. Like, you sent me pictures of locks, and then nothing happens. And it's like, like you in this, you in this Xanic girl, like, I, I think if you could, like, if someone were to walk and be like, I will give you this Xanic girl for that one. You'd be like, take it, take it now. Get the hell out of here. And she's so pretty too. You know? Yeah. And, and, and it's a kick in the freaking pants. So, well, I guess maybe next year what I'll try to do is, I'll breed my albino zebra jag to my zebra Xanic. And just do it that way. You, you, you can't tell, but I just had a small seizure. Because it's just like, oh, it's not that bad to make this good. It's that Darwin jungle postel. Yeah. All right. So, that's that. But for me, I'm, I'm pretty much in the same freaking boat. Because I mean, you know, we have, I have the pairs that I've been seeing regular locks from. And if the females order percentage is gravid, I'm not including the bread lies in this because they're still off in their side room. They mean dumb shit yet. But, right. I don't have the other ones that are just fighting me tooth and nail. I can't give a super caramel to lock up with anything. The Xanic is afraid of her. The caramel male that I have going in with my lengthy female doesn't want anything to do with her. The, and then the two tiger projects, I don't have the male freak yet. So I haven't really, they haven't seen the male yet. And then my jag, my high con jag I had in with my granite male. And they don't know what to do with each other. They're just staring at each other. So I just like, and then I put the jag in with other males. And she still don't know what to do with them. But I'm like, God damn it. I checked the sex on everybody. Everybody's who they're supposed to be. So it's just kind of like everything's up in the air. The bread lie will probably be moving back in, in, in the room and made it February. So again, they're trying to breed them. But you know, right now, it's like I'm looking at three, four clutches and possibly a damn litter of boas. But you know, it's, it's better than last year. I'm extremely excited about that. But there's a few females that haven't done anything. You know, we haven't had any luck out of the owl of python. They've been like just, they're, they're hungry as shit. They will not stop begging for food at the front of their cage. The max I had to separate, because I'm pretty sure the smaller male was beating up on the female because they found fresh bite wounds on her. And I'm like, God damn it. So the hell's going on with those two. I don't know. So it's everything's kind of up in the air. But this is breeding season. Nothing is certain until we get later on into it. And then you can start kind of coming to the conclusion like where you're at, where you have those multiple females that are showing you signs of being gravid and signs of being all right. You know, you can now start making me assumptions that that male has done his job. I can only do that for like three, four animals right now. So yeah, I might end up having a later season than you. Yeah, the one thing that this kind of a bummer is I did get my poison ivy girl, which is my melanistic ij, which is a, you know, she's like a prize in my collection. I go and I feel heard now she bred with the tiger ij, which is awesome. And she appears to either be growing or be, or be, you know, gravid. Problem is, is that she has an ri or the start of an ri. I put her out. I noticed some bubbles and blah, blah, blah. You know, I was talking to you guys earlier about you know, what to do. So I don't want to lose her. So she's going to go to the vet. And you know, you know, if I get eggs out of her, great. If not, then you know, it is what it is. You know, but, you know, my fingers are crossed for that. I mean, it would be awesome if she did get, I mean, she laid eggs before and seems like in the breeding season, she always kind of has this issue. I mean, I don't know. She's just, I don't know, I stressed to get. Was she the one that laid the eggs? And then you noticed like a day or two after that she kind of was cooking something. Yeah, she was maternally incubating and then she rolled off the egg. And then, you know, I looked in and I was like, wow, that's hot. And I thought, you know, she was just, you know, maybe going to, sometimes they do. Sometimes they roll off the eggs. But I don't know, just always kind of take a second look when it happens. And I checked her out. And sure enough, she had a little bit of a wheeze. And, you know, so, I don't know. It's a funny year for IJs. I think here it's, you know, IJs always go early and what the way the things are. I don't know if I'll get any IJs this year. But, you know, I'm really excited for next year because there's probably like maybe possibly 10 pairings of IJs that I have going on. So, so that's kind of everything that's going on with us. We got Keith on the line here. So let's get this, let's get this going. But on the road, for everybody out there that's listening, we will be touching on some blood and short tail talk towards the end of our conversation simply because Keith is well known for his work with Bloods and Shorttails. We would be probably lynched if we didn't at least hit on it from our Matt wouldn't speak to us. Yeah, short tail fans and whatnot. But yeah, I mean towards the end of the show, we're going to we're going to touch on just some general reptile talking. Like I said, Keith has a lot of experience when it comes to reptiles and such but let's get this going and let's get Keith on the show. Hey Keith, welcome back to Morale, you played on radio. Glad to have you. Hey, how are you? Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it. Sure thing. And we're doing good except for the small technical difficulties which always seems to happen in a show that Eric's excited about. So it happens. So we're working. Now Keith, for some of the people who didn't listen to Bullen's show, which I don't know who those people are but they should, you know, we should stop talking to them immediately. Can you give us a brief kind of overview of yourself and what is it about Bullen's specifically that you find fascinating? Well, first I got to give a shout out to the Bullen boys that I've been hanging with lately and Frederick would be first on the list and Ari after him, Chad and of course Casper and Evan. Great nice guy. Really nice to share information with them. They're all very open about their experiences and definitely a good community I fell into here. We'll have to be a part of that group. My history is basically like most everybody that's really deep into this hobby started out, you know, when I could walk basically catching anything I could catch and keeping reptiles and animals of all sorts in general. I was lucky enough to have an exotic uncle vet that was in the big cats and he had lions and jaguars and also, you know, it was just kind of destiny for me to fall into exotic animals and captivity type of thing and always was fascinated with reptiles, kept reptiles for a lot of years, got really heavy into the bloods, started with them probably in the late 80s and just worked with them for many, many, many, many years. The short tales more so than the bloods but I have experienced with both of them for a lot of years and then kind of grew out of that and moved on to new challenges and old things that just caught my fancy and bones were definitely always on the list, you know, and what's not to love about them. I mean, it looks the rarity, the challenges is just absolutely everything. Somebody like myself would want to work with so that's where I went to those and where we are today. Awesome. So about how many bollins do you have in your collection currently? I have three pairs that I'm working with. I have one pair that's definitely sexual literature and and a lot of activity there. I have another pair that's questionable and on size and age but, you know, working with them and seeing what will happen with them is I have another pair that's definitely a few years away. So I got those on my name focus. I have other animals in my collection, different species like one room set up just for these guys and those guys are my definitely my focus right now. That's awesome. So now I know you've given a lot of thought and kind of have a bunch of theories on bollins. And one of the ones that we've been asked a few times is, do you have any thoughts on why we see bollins with yellow markings and some with white markings? Well, Ari believes that it's a locale thing possibly but the animals with the white markings he believes are in an area that is inaccessible to him and other people to go investigate that. But some of the early animals that came into captivity were animals with white markings and it's believed that those animals get larger. Now when you're looking at photographs of animals in people's collections, if you don't have a very strong UV, UVB, bulb on them, the yellow can appear white in photographs but I've photographed my animals whether it looks like it's a stark white on them but you get them underneath a UV bulb and it's unbelievable how the yellow pops on the animal. It's crazy. Just a matter of just putting them under that light. Okay, so could a few of the animals that we like have in photographs that we presume are white could they have just been yellow ones with? Absolutely. Like a chicken. My opinion. Yeah, absolutely. In my opinion, absolutely. Because I've done it here. I've just photographed them both ways sometimes. Like I say the yellow looks like high white or yellow. At other times it looks like a white. It's just depending on where they are in their caging and access to that UV light. I'm sure there's different degrees, you know, through variation but these things are so rare and you don't get to see too many of them that they're really put a big, you know, thumbprint on what's going on with them with the color. I tend to agree with Ari because he's the man that's going over there and checking everything out so I would have to concur with him in thinking that it's probably a local type thanks for that one. And I think that's future research that Ari would definitely like to get into and see if he could prove out. That's cool. But that does make a lot of sense. So very cool. So you said in the, you mentioned in the roundtable discussion that about this huge female from, I think you said is the owner was called Miles. Okay. Yeah, from the faux barn down in Maryland. You know, you remember the Mid-Atlantic show and it's heyday was, you know, everybody went to Daytona and your party's like crazy in Daytona and had a great time. And then everybody looked forward to winding down and going to the Mid-Atlantic show. And, you know, I was lucky enough the year that Paul bred the bones to go to his place and check out his animals. And I can just remember, you know, only ever seeing smaller animals and the animals I had worked with, which was only one pair, waiting for that were a lot smaller than this and they came in bad shape and mine didn't last very long. But when I went to Paul Miles and I walked in expecting to see, you know, basically like, you know, an average size python, I expected him to be a little bigger than some carpet python, like a big carpet python. I walked in and I looked at his female and the first words that came to mind were, "That thing looks like a Burmese python. The size, you know, the length that it is, that's where a berm would be at that weight and length." And it just amazed me that it was that big. His male was substantially smaller and a picture holding his male and I think maybe I might, my page, but the male was substantially smaller, but the female was, you know, definitely something I looked at and like, "Wow, that is a big animal." I had no idea they got that big. Wow. So, I mean, like that animal, that animal was, Tracy Barker had gotten in and I reached out to Tracy after our round cable. She had gotten in a grabbing female and she was one of the first to successfully hatch eggs from a wild caught female. And Paul Miles had picked up a pair from her and those were the animals that Paul had raised and then subsequently bred. And Tracy wasn't sure of the little cows, he's still looking into that to see if she could find out where it was, but she said that her female was about 17 feet, I'm sorry, 17 long, it gave her 17 eggs. That'd be awesome, right? Well, 17 feet, holy crap. And she got 17 eggs from it from which she could recollect. And the baby's been presenting a big problem to her, which was interesting. But yeah, her female was an exceptionally large, so it led me to believe that a lot of husbandry that Paul put into those animals is what grew his female, so going longer and saying out. Yeah, and isn't that kind of going against the thinking that we're kind of having right now with all of Frederick's success, is that the bones need to be kind of slender and, you know, smaller, that's accepted. Yeah, he's already aren't massive. No, his aren't massive either. And that's what I wrestle with, what my animals are telling me, but what Frederick, who's, you know, to me, the most successful person out there right now with him. So, you know, I'm comparing notes with what I'm thinking and where I want to go with my animals, but I'm going back to what he's doing. And I definitely see conflicts here, but there's just so many things at play when you start thinking about feeding regimes with a snake and temperatures, you know, it's how the size of the prey you're feeding, how frequently you're feeding, but also the temperatures you're keeping your animals at, which enables them to use those meals in different directions. So you could literally, if you do everything else a certain way, you could really feed your animals frequently, yet keep that lean long look, but have meals processing through their body constantly to do things like, you know, for building follicles and whatnot. So I wrestle with that one. That one's tough for me. I think feeding is definitely one of the big keys to breeding these guys along with temperatures, but I think a feeding regime and understanding your animals and what they eat when they need it is a huge thing. But I am a believer if you got to feed them to breed them, it's proven out to me with a lot of different animals, but it's a tough one with the bones, you know, because you don't want to put too much weight on them, but you also want to get that right balance there with the females especially. Right. I could see that as being like a little razor's edge, you know, fit enough to do all they got to do, but also big enough to breed safely. It's kind of like one of those, you know, catch 22 things. Nick, you mentioned it. It just makes sense for an animal. Well, let's see, I wrestle with the metabolism of these guys too, because everybody says their metabolism is so fast, so fast, so fast, but their metabolism is so fast because we as keepers have been keeping them too warm. Blood plate runs, you know, when you keep too warm, the blood plate runs, stool and their mess is a lot different than when you're keeping them by proper temperatures. And if Bo and I are in general kept at cooler temperatures or mother nature has them at cooler temperatures, the metabolism just speeded up in captivity because the way I'm keeping them now, I'm not finding them to be as messy as they were when I first started working with them. And the stool is more consistent with pythons in captivity and the frequency and everything. Yeah, they still have a faster metabolism than other animals, but usually animals with a fast metabolism require a lot of food. It's not an animal with a fast metabolism, not requiring a lot of food. So it's a tough one. I think food is definitely one of the big keys, and obviously Frederick has a dialed in to his group of animals and when to feed and how to feed and how often to feed in size of prey. You know, I think that's definitely a huge thing for breeding these guys. Yeah, I would definitely agree to that. That is interesting that you said like the metabolism because, I mean, we keep hearing about certain pythons species that poop in their cages every two days and have the metabolism like corn snakes. Yeah, it's almost like a wonder if we're keeping some species a little too warm and if cooling the dowel a little bit will help out with that. The stool to my animals has definitely gotten firmer and more consistent of a typical python than when I was keeping them a lot warmer than I am now. And I would think that that's a healthier way to go. I mean, you know, when you keep them too warm, they literally will be smearing around their cage, you know? Oh, and it's a lot which is a lot more frequent, but I think the way I'm keeping them now is much healthier for the animals and I'm seeing the results of that with different things like just defecating, you know? Cool. That might be something, you know, that somebody might want to try with something to say like a team more python with, you know, I've heard horrible things about them, so maybe cooling them down a little bit. I might try with my Dominican bows. All right, now, he kind of also mentioned about during the roundtable about observing your animals and how Ari kind of showed you a video of him hiking up one of the mountains and that kind of changed the way you thought about, you know, observing your animals and what you kept your animals. What are some of the things that you kind of took away from that video and what did you make, what changes did you make to your collection? Well, I guess Ari had posted a video that was a teaser for the book coming out and it shows him kind of out of his base camp and then he's on a trail and it's a long trek that he's just walking on. And, you know, where he was walking through, if you're ever a deer hunter, and I want to say like Saskatchewan or maybe out in the state of Washington or something like that, just the terrain, the scenery, the way the grass is where everything about it just kind of sent a mental picture to me more clearly of what these snakes are probably doing in that area where he was hiking through. It just gave me more of a sense of, I don't know what the terminology is I want to use, but it's more of an animal in a cooler environment that's relying on that sun so much for its existence, you know, and not so much the ambient temperatures. So everything that that animal does is controlled by a sun because where he was at that particular moment, and I'm not saying all bones come from areas like this, but it just sent a picture to me because there wasn't like super heavy, heavy vegetation. It was more open where, you know, a snake could really do a lot of fasting and whatnot, more than a dense thick forest jungle where, you know, it doesn't have access to much sunshine, you know what I mean? So that snake is definitely, in my opinion, totally geared to the sun. Everything about it is about the sun. And this video just really, I mean, I always, you always think about things in your head and what if, what if, what if, but when you actually see the video when he's walking and she's a terrain, it just, it just confirmed a lot of things that I wanted to try with the snakes, you know. Yeah, that is cool. Very cool. So what are some of your thoughts when it comes to genetic diversity? Do you think it's important to establish bloodlines? The more readily they are producing captivity, like, are you thinking that we should probably try to get as many bloodlines established as possible, possible with this captive-born and bred population that we're getting now? Well, I'm definitely, definitely very concerned about that for a lot of reasons. I used to have breed a lot of very exotic sedans and some of the sedans that I used to breed were, you know, they allow us firebacks and different birds that were definitely very hard to come by. And what happened was when you're breeding them over generations, all kinds of deformities started coming out with crooked drugs and infertility and all these kind of things. And when we started a little digging into the reasons why we were having these problems because so many birds were collected from the wild, you find out that where these birds come from is such rugged terrain, and such inaccessible areas that collectors collect from very specific areas. And the diversity that you think you're getting animals from the wild, but in fact, you're getting them from a very small area because it's what's accessible to the collectors in the wild. So even though you think they're bringing these things in from the wild, it may be a very small area that they're actually making their collections. I mean, they're not bringing thousands into our country, you know, I mean, there's small numbers that come into our country a lot of times. So I would tend to think that the areas that they collect them in are very small. So I worry about what kind of genetics we have available to us even right now, just coming in the wild. And I think it's very important to document at least even the person you're getting from the importer and whatnot and try to get as much background on them as you can. Well, thankfully right now, we're not all breeding the heck out of them. And we have a chance to do this the right way. And I think it really needs to be done the right way. That's why our research is so important and, you know, definitely getting him the funds he needs to go over there and do it as many times as he can will help us all. And this just happens to be my species of choice right now. I'm sure there's a lot of other work going on in different things, but it would be really nice to definitely get more of an understanding for that and help and protect our future with these guys, you know, because I think more people will start breeding them as we just, I mean, you know, with Frederick as guidance and all of us just starting to think in different ways and other people having to pass them open up, more people to start breeding them. So we really need, we're around the cutting edge of needing to really start thinking about the genetic diversity for sure. Yeah. And especially as Frederick's babies get older, now you have captive born and bred babies entering the breeding stock. And that might make it a little bit easier to start producing babies as well. So it's nice to try to get some wild caught animals mixed into Frederick's captive born and bred to kind of just diversify the gene pool. Absolutely. That would be nice. I'd like that. But even with that, you know, even with that, we wonder is there really a difference between the animals I have and the animals that Frederick has. I don't know if they were really collected in that great of a range, you know what I mean? So, I'm really about it already, you know, only because of history I've had with other animals, like I say, especially with the birds, it was definitely a big problem that we had. And with an animal is rare and hard to collect and how many of them are only allowed to leave the country and what not, it's definitely a big concern for the species. Right. I mean, the good thing is that there is definitely, you know, a wild caught population that you can't be tapped into, which would allow the biodiversity. I mean, like, it's not like carp of python here in the United States where I think only IJs can come in as wild caught. I mean, we do get new blood from Europe, but it's still not that different. And the funniest thing in the world is when somebody tells me that they're going to get a pair of unrelated rough scale pythons. And it's like they only came from two animals collected in Australia. Everything's related to each other. So it's kind of like that. So at least then when you guys get rolling with the breeding, if you want to add some wild caught bloodlines, you could definitely do that, which would be awesome. So you can as long as the animals are collected in a different area. Exactly. You know what I mean? You know, so it's very, it's very, it's very essential for Ari and whoever else can go over and do this to document where these animals are being collected, I think. Right. For sure. Right. Yeah, I wonder why there hasn't been a focus. Well, okay, so let me rephrase that. I think that my thinking would be that they would be coming from the same location. And I'll tell you why, because every other python that comes from New Guinea is basically locality type animals. I mean, think of chondras, think of scrubs. You know, IJs really aren't focused on locality simply because they pretty much come from the same area. So I think it would be that when bones really be coming from the same area simply be, or at least that's where they're you know, collected for the, you know, the captivity. But, because you would think that if if they came from different, that would just be a crazy selling point. I mean, they could make that up. I probably shouldn't say that. Right. Because next thing in the middle of the science. Somebody's listening in Indonesia is now going to, we're not seeing locality specific bullets. You know what I mean? Like, you would think that that would be, you know, just from different reasons as far as, you know, okay, well, this locality may be tough to breed, but maybe this locality might be easier. And, you know, maybe if you mix this locality with that locality and, you know, it's just weird that that all the other. I would think that that could become a big selling point. I think as more people start to breed the animal. I will generate more interest and make the collectors do that. But right now if you think about it, I mean, you know, these guys even are already going in there to look at these guys. They're in like some pretty rugged terrain where, you know, accidents could happen very easily. So if you can jump to your animals, if you can get to your animals in one day of trekking through the mountains there, why would you go three days to get that animal when you go one day? So multiple collectors are probably going to the edges of their range to make their collection in probably one of the easier areas it is to collect them. Because they're not going to work hard. And, you know, like I say, only so many are coming out of country. Only so many people will buy them. I mean, you know, it's definitely a species for somebody that really wants something different, very unusual, and will put the effort into the animal. So it's not a huge commodity right now. So they're only going to go to where they need to go to get the animals that, you know, are wanted in the country right now or overseas. Right. Now with, this is kind of an off top of question, but I'm just curious on your thoughts. Say, do you think they'll come a point maybe 10 years, 15 years now, where you'll see ballons, pythons in the same vein as some of the harder or used to be harder type of species of pythons to breed? And they'll be more readily available in captivity? Nothing will surprise me. When I'm going to say the early 90s, maybe when Bol and I were still in the 10 to $15,000 a piece range, and they literally looked like they could die at any moment, I went into, I forget the name of the chain at the time, but let's say it was like a pecco of nowadays back then, and there was a ballons python in a 10 gallon tank in a reptile store that mainly dealt with fish to see that back then, you know, yeah, and the thing was like so near death, like I was going to sell my car to buy the thing to try to give it a shot because they didn't know what they were doing. But it was in terrible shape. So I mean, I've seen, I've seen Bol and pythons in pet stores, you know, 15 years ago. My hope would be that it's going to remain a species that the more dedicated person is going to want to deal with, you know what I mean? And sure, just because of the nature of the animal, it's just, it's something that you can keep in your normal collection, I know you want to earn your questions, you were going to talk about this later, you can keep it, I believe, in a normal python room, maybe in the lower cages of the room, so it's a little bit cooler, but I think they'll survive at 78 to 80 degree ambient temperatures in the room, and be fine, you may never breathe the sink, but if you want to pair of bones and you want them in your collection, there'll be a very hardy snake for you to keep, you know. It's when you start trying to get into really what makes that animal tick, and wanting to breathe it that, you know, you start getting a little bit more on the delicate side and have to really stay adopted or gain to stay with the animal, you know. So I don't know how many people are really going to want to do that. Sure, yeah. And that's why I think, you know. Yeah, I think in a way that's kind of a good thing, you know, because it kind of keeps that, I think I said on the last show that, you know, keeps that, for a lack of a better word, jobber out of the whole, you know, I'm going to get these, breathe them, sell them, make tons of money type of reptile attitude that some people have, you know. Yeah, and Frederick, you know, he has, talking with him, I really respect the man because of the way he looks at things and approaches problems. And obviously, he's a very gifted guy at Reed Animals, or he wouldn't be bringing him so many years in a row. And babies for him are a struggle. And we heard, you know, get them going a little bit. And we heard Evan with, you know, babies that he's purchased and having hardships get the babies going. So I think there's a lot of factors that will keep them from becoming so mainstream, which is fine. You know, the hobby needs animals that are, you know, something that a lot of people keep in the back of their minds some day they want to try and give a shot at. So I think it's great that they're kind of in that status right now, you know. Right, sure. So yeah, let's talk about that a little bit about as far as when you're getting in, you know, these captive hatched imported animal. I mean, how difficult would you say they are to establish and, you know, what are your, some of your experiences that you've had? Yeah, well, everything I've worked with has been a black python already. I haven't ever taken on a challenge of a red baby. But what Evan was saying stands true for me just with other pythons species I've worked with. If you have these animals that are hard to get going, I'm sure you guys will agree. Puff them with meals, once you get them going, you want to keep hitting them and get them past that fragile stage. And Evan touched on that with the animals that he's worked with where he keeps the temperature a little bit warmer. You know, they'll use what they're being said at those times to put size on and get them out of that delicate age. And it almost seems like, you know, like you're in a rush to get them past that point is probably the way to go with these guys from people I've talked through that have had experience raising them out of the red phase. So I think that's the way, you know, my approach is going to be, you know, I talked to Tracy. She said her babies were, you know, no problem to get started. Her took off right away and said like most other pythons. So you wonder what the cues were that she was doing any different than, you know, a couple of other people that have had a tough time going. I don't know. But hopefully I'll have that challenge in the near future and can elaborate on that a little bit more. But that's going to be my approach to them. Get them, you know, finally get them going once they're trying to get them out of that red phase, you know, a little faster than normal. I'm not going to be afraid with the food at that stage. Right. Okay. So let's talk about, I mean, I guess this will be as far as your collection now, which I would assume you said is either subadult or adult. So like, let's talk about caging. I mean, in the round table, pre-interview, caging came up specifically with one of the things that you wanted to hit on as you're caging to achieve specific goals. And you had the design that you had been working on. Would you want to share that with us and what your thoughts were? Yeah. I actually, when I first started with these guys, I built as big a cage as I could. And I actually doubled here because my thought is I don't really know a lot about these guys yet. And I always take everything like I read what everybody else has experienced. But I don't use that as my Bible. I tend to rather let the animals tell me because everybody's variations and their conditions and everything are a little bit different. And if you strictly adhere to what you hear from somebody else, you'll never go anywhere with a difficult species. You know, you've got to really trust your instinct and your experience and go with that. So I built a cage as big as I could. I built an AC wall, doubled here though. So, you know, they have really 16 foot by almost three foot four space. Because I wanted to see what they would do. I wanted to see if they would prefer being in dark, but they prefer being in the sun. Would they prefer being on the cool end of the warm end or be high or be low or in a tight secluded box? And so I had to give them all of that to start reading the animals to see what I would like. And now that I've worked with them for a while, and what I've come up with is a new cage that I'm going to be doing for the adults, will basically be six to eight foot long as wide as I can make it between two to three feet wide. And I'm actually going to have a hole in the floor on my spotlight reading heat panel end. And that hole will lead down to a nest box or tight box, whatever you prefer. And so what will happen during the day is that nest box high box will be being worn by the reading heat panel like a snake's passing. And then when I cool down at night, which I'm going to do year round, but as I cool down at night, the animal will be able to retreat into that nest box that has been warmed throughout the day. Now it's only going to be a future that is warmer, but they can retain the heat for so long into the night, or carry them through to the next morning. So the new design will actually have a slide out hiding spot underneath that end of the cage, hopefully to collect eggs or take an animal out or clean the hide. So that's what I'm going to be working towards. That's what I'm actually building now. I'm not going to move my animals this year because I actually have a female as a pony follicles now. So I'm going to just keep going with what they're in now. But next season, they'll be in that type of cage. Wow. That's pretty awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I guess, I guess, you know, I think we've had a couple of people on the show that have talked about, you know, their thoughts as far as bolognes and the whole idea of them having a nest and feeling secure. And maybe that's one of the reasons why females don't go the distance. You know, that hopefully you'll have success at that. But then Frederick, I don't think that he does that, does he? No, I believe Frederick's eggs were collected last year. It's just under a piece of court bark. That's a female generator, right? Oh my God. I mean, I would think this year they're going to just lay them right in this and put them in the incubator. But yeah, I think last year they just did them right underneath a hide box. I mean, underneath that piece of court bark. So I think if your animals are conditioned to their environment and they feel secure and they're into their routine, I don't think this is important as maybe the first year that you're trying with maybe new animals in your collection. And then getting them that more secure hide. I really, you know, keep thinking temperature. Getting all your components the right way, but playing with the temperatures and the way your feeding machine is, I think are the two biggest factors, personally. Right. Okay. Well, that's glad because temperature is the next thing that I wanted to talk about. And as you mentioned a couple minutes ago, you know, I think that one of the things that kind of people I know for myself is kind of the idea that, you know, are you able to keep these animals and say your standard, you know, Python room where you have an ambient temperature of 80 degrees, you know, like I use diamond pythons with me as an example. They're not in my reptile room because obviously they have to be kept colder. What's your approach when it comes to temperatures? What's your, I know we talked a little bit about cycling temperatures and you know, that radiant heat panel going on and off. And I think you equated it to more or less, you know, the clouds over there and all that. What's your thoughts on on that? Well, I think these guys are just so efficient at collecting heat. And they're been programmed for so long to collect heat while you can collect heat that. As long as you're providing heat for them, they're going to take advantage of it and stay there and collect it as hard as they can because they know night or cool temps are coming and they need to store that temperature. So vote, bask and bask and bask and bask if you provide it to them. I think they'll do fine in the reptile room that does not get above 80 as they're ambient and maybe just provide them a fluorescent UV bulb for daylight so they can simulate basking and you'll have a happy bones python. I think you'll breed the bones python but I think you'll have a happy healthy bones python. I'm definitely even in my off season like my bones room, my nature of how it's set up. I never go above 74 in the room. The room is always 74 or below and right now I'm letting it go down to about 61-62 at night. I can go lower but I've found talking with Frederick and some of the other guys and I ran into that R.I. with my two males that I posted in R.I. Facebook page. The beginning is of an R.I. with the two males and I don't think they have to go below 60 degrees. I think it's more or less just being consistent with cooler temperatures overall for the animal. They don't need that extreme cold and what I found and what Frederick has found and he confirmed is when these guys are stressed they tighten up into a ball like a ball python and they bury their head in the center of those coils and that's the first sign that they're under stress from being too cool. They'll tighten up into a ball like that when they're trying to retain heat. When they bury that head tight deep into their coils they're really getting stressed. I don't know if they're trying to protect the brain or what they're trying to do but they definitely bury that head deep into the coils. The second thing that starts happening is they get a little bit dull and they'll actually start raising that. I noticed the scales almost gets fluffed out like a cage bird when they get sick and the rough of the feathers out. They just look like they're all the shovel that's kind of like the bones look. The good thing about them is they're so darn hardy though really in general that if you provide them with heat they overcome those symptoms and by the time they go through their next shed cycle you have a pristine state back but you have to really stand and watch what they're doing and get that heat back to them out. I got those males to come back out of it they both said they're both eating again they both look fine just by giving them a radiant heat panel 24 hours a day but I still kept my ambient temperatures going down to the low 60s at night and only going up to 70 to 74 during the day but just giving that radiant heat panel what they stayed under the whole time day and night was enough to get them to snap out of what they had going on and I really believe that they're so active because the females are starting to build follicles and all the conditions I started telling them look for me. They were cruising their cages a lot more than the females were and the females were taking advantage of basking during the day and collecting that heat to get into the night where the males weren't they were more on the move looking around and everything else and paying attention to basking and I think that's that's what caused the problem with them. So I've given them a little bit more heat than the females the females are still doing a day I'm half hour half hour half hour half hour half hour off right now this time of year and I'll probably continue at year round. Okay very cool. When it gets down to 60 degrees at night what are what are what are some of the observations that you noticed with them? You want to hear something really? You want to hear something really strange? I walked in my room and the room was 65 degrees and I felt like the room was too warm. When do you walk into a state on the range? I never viewed your losing your mind why are you thinking it's really too warm at 65? But when I first started calling these guys down you know and I actually had last year I'd put them down to 48 believe it or not and I didn't have any issues with the animals because I was providing a lot more heat during the day. It's it's insane when you go into these rooms and the thing is back cold but I'm sorry to interrupt you Erica. I just thought it was funny when I walked in there at 65 and I'm like this python was too warm. I was like oh man yeah I can relate to that because I walked into my python room today it was 70 degrees and I said man this is too cold. You walk in and you're like oh my gosh but uh huh that's interesting. So I guess what I was going to ask you is like when it gets down to those temps what are the snakes doing? Are they are they going into their hide box? Are they just like nothing of oil or what's your observation? They do go into the hide and they're very secure. I gave each female well every snake actually has two boxes and the boxes I fill with spag and moss and I found that they definitely don't prefer the spag and to be too moist. They definitely like it almost dried and they'll go in there and they definitely pack that up a little bit around them and they'll go into a coil but not as tight as when they're starting to be stressed by it but they'll be in that box they'll be coiled up and they'll not move all night long. They'll just be in that box and then when the lights come on in the morning and the radiant heat panel comes on again my light my I only use fluorescent lights because I'm just trying to provide them a light cycle. I'm a big believer in light cycle so I'm not trying to get any heat out of my bowl which is just there strictly to provide a light cycle and I have a radiant heat panel right next to that bowl so when the light comes on the snake knows it's going to get warm because the radiant heat panel comes out at the same time so the lights will come on and I would say within a half an hour they come out and they use their tongue and they slit around and they definitely go right up and they coil right under the basket spot and they'll just bask and once they reach whatever temperature they're reaching I shoot them with the the gun and they're like eighty one to eighty three degrees then they'll start cruising the cage if they're in hunger mode if they're not they'll sit there and bask all day and maybe like an hour or two hours before the lights go off they go back and they'll get back into their hide box. I'll go down there to seeing the lights still on and and everybody's in their hide box already and I know that they know that the lights about to get off. So you know I cut them way back on you know I keep looking at charts of pop let me be any and you know what I was saying about the cloud cover and all is there's times of the day their temperatures don't necessarily change too much but they go where they get full sunlight to like I saw one chart sit only like three and a half hours a day of full sunlight the rest is all cloud cover at certain times of year and it and it's for like a three to four month period. So let's start to make any think that you know okay so your ambient temperature could still be 70 to 75 degrees but if the stakes not out there in the sunlight the basket getting up to eighty two to eighty four degrees or whatever they want to get up to they're really not achieving that so it is essentially a cooling period at that point because even though the ambient temperatures are the same they're not having as much access to the sun to warm up to those temperatures. So that's why I started coming back on the heat panel and giving them less and less heat during the day just periods where they could bask. As long as the lights on though I do confuse them because if the lights on they think that the sun should be warming them up but the heat panel goes off so me you might be better off with it I just like the way a radio heat panel works you know. Friends with that Bob Pound from pro products and you know he really explained to me how that rating heat panel works and how it's heat the animal up and it's most like sunlight so I really do like using a rating heat panel on him but Frederick I believe just teaches animals with a bulb. I mean I was right asking bulb or UV bulb and he and he has another bulb that throws heat and he's obviously very successful with it so yeah right there's more ways to skin the cat I guess right oh puns. So yeah you bring up UV lighting I mean this is a topic that I find myself wondering about you know we know that pythons don't require UV to be kept and bred successfully in captivity however is it one of those things that could better improve you know their overall health and long-term success whether it be with keeping or breeding. I mean it just seems odd that animals that are so geared around the sun would not require UV lighting I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah no absolutely I definitely I think it can be done without it because again Frederick what he's doing is he's not using real high intensity UV bulbs or UV and bulbs but he is providing a little bit so it obviously is an essential for being successful with the animal but I agree with you I can't see an animal that's so geared to the sun not getting some kind of a benefit whether it's longevity of life more fertility healthier pledges or something there's got to be a benefit to that if that animal's so geared for it wasn't designed to use the sun for those things and not get some kind of a benefit out of it so I'm going to continue providing it just if there's nothing else that makes me feel better. Yeah you know I often wonder like here's an idea and I'm just thinking out loud but you know we we think about all these things like I think of people that get our eyes and they say like you know I don't understand my my heat is right this is right the temperatures are right but I would think I mean if you're geared to the sun like even just for a person when you go out in the sun you just feel better so is it like a you know what I mean like is it is it physically like relieve some of that stress and maybe that would keep them from you know developing on our eyes where we think it's because of you know A it's really you know maybe something geared towards that. Yeah I totally agree with that. Another thought on our eyes if I might is one thing I'm definitely convinced about with blood pythons all of those saying humidity in their eyes and they're all worried about temperatures and all that with them but they're very hard to stay and 90 percent of the our eyes out there believe or not are from stagnant air in my opinion in the cage. Blood pythons definitely need ventilation good ventilation and if you know anything about blood pythons or short pails they'll go months before they defecate and when they defecate they defecate you think an elephant being in your house I mean yeah like you've got to put a shovel get some gloves and get in there and start cleaning and the problem is is you know the ammonia snow and everything else and and literally I don't care how stringent your cleanliness is people go to work people do this people do that and the snake could defecate in the cage and it can be even an hour later and that has done its damage to the animal and and I'm definitely 100 percent positive with blood pythons that it irritates the lines of of the lungs of the snake and it causes our eyes that pop up unexpectedly with these animals you clean the cage you don't notice it but it's already done its damage and it's already you know stressed the animal and caused that problem and when I started increasing ventilation on them many many years ago it helped with our eyes tremendously so when I got into the bowl and I um I I designed my cages I don't know if you saw my cages but my cages I don't have any viewing pane of glass or plexiglass or anything on my cages my back wall is nothing but a plastic coated pegboard and my front doors are nothing but pegboard that's how we used to do it many years ago burns became popular everybody was breathing burns that's how everybody built their cages but it's it's a really great thing when you have a sand running in your room just creating air movement as the air moves over those pegboard holes it's drawing air out of the cage so on the front of the cage why the air is going cast and it's drawing air out and it's drawing air in the back of the cage and with a montane species like bologna I was convinced that they needed a lot of fresh air and not stagnant conditions because with birds and whatnot to from higher elevations you know they really need to act that fresh air and not stagnant conditions so I think a lot of other species probably could benefit more ventilation um in combating our eyes huh yeah it's interesting I never would have thought about that yeah it does make sense because some people do uh they put the humidifiers in there and that can with some of the things you can put in there that can purify the room as well as get the air moving so that might be even more ventilation than needed and that helps so right yeah huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh huh okay well I'll know that for my short tails and my uh for my gloves I have to go check my ventilation on those guys I don't have any I don't have any so I'm good yeah um so okay so what about feeding um what type of feeding regimen are you are you dealing with the species um and what about you know the sides of the prey you know and any thoughts on a very diet with uh with these guys um well I think I might have touched on it in the ground table I'm lucky where I have a very local person that breeds rodents for the local pet stores and some local breeders and they have access to um sell them to wholesalers so I'm able to go there and get my stuff weekly alive so doing that I'm able to also feed that prey um before I feed it um so I can vary the diet I don't know if it's necessary but again you know some of these things we do we do it to make ourselves feel better about everything now so I do do that I do vary the diet and I'm not going to lie I've told a couple blood people that um I don't know what this grass metal is there's a nettle that grows in this area and we used to give it to the pheasants and different birds um it's a weed that grows in people's lawns and people spend thousands of dollars to kill us weed but we call it wacky weed and when we lead it to our birds the males would get lit up and like you know harassed the female so much to breed that you'd have to back off on it you had to give it in doses because whatever is in this weed whatever vitamin is in there steely birds during the breeding season um it was like viagra for birds it was like incredible so if I have experimented with actually feeding that to the rats um before I fed it to the snake um okay and I have no idea if it does anything but I I do do it and um you know like I say I'm sure it's more for me than anything else but I know a lot of people in the past have thought maybe there's something in the diet of praying against that bone I eat that's lacking in captivity um so it's just something that I play around with and I don't think it has any bearing on being successful but um I for sure do do it and like I say just to make myself feel better as far as schedules um I definitely probably feed more than other people but again you know I'm um I'm smaller meals I'm more frequently I'm big on animals that have a high metabolism having food you know feeding that engine that you know if they're have fast metabolism it's for a reason and I think food needs to be going through their system and keeping them active and keeping them going so I do it by feeding smaller prey items um and I balance it with the heat that I provide and and frequency but I do definitely try to get more meals in and probably than the average person does okay what about as uh have you ever experimented with uh cycle feeding and any thoughts on that um yeah absolutely I mean there's I think it's huge with females um and through the summer I said them probably a normal five to seven days more at meal um and then I backed off just before the breeding season for a little bit and fed them maybe every 10 to 14 days but um as we got into cooling temperatures and everything I I kept the males a little bit more of being to keep them active but the females I definitely started increasing the feeding um because uh I really think that's going to help stimulate building uh the follicles and get them uh going with all of that I think as long as they have food coming in you know one of me just telling them hey food things are good here things are plentiful this is a good year to reproduce so I I use small meals I'm using you know I'm a nine foot female that's uh probably around 13 14 pounds um feeding her just medium sized rats um and she said like I said this is the first year I'm convinced 100% she's building follicles right now and uh she's got to look at um you know Frederick's animals have and uh I'm really really excited about what's going on with her and I definitely think um my feeding regime with her had a lot to do with getting her to this point wow that's awesome I hope she goes the distance for you um yeah yeah I bet um and uh something that um I don't think we've ever really focused on this topic on the show and I know that it was in the round table uh questions but we never got to hit on it but um you know I was looking at some of your posts um and there was one that you had that was uh a couple weeks ago and you mentioned about um shallow water bowls um can you elaborate on the on this for listeners and why you would recommend using shallower water bowls um just in general for I think I think you had mentioned for bloods and short tails as well um yeah um well especially with with baby bloods but I I know I definitely love talking snakes to anybody and everybody and I don't care if they're just getting their first make or if they you know got experience for 30 years if somebody's willing to talk thanks and I'm always willing to talk so I get a lot of people asking questions I haven't sent me pictures of their setups or something then I just noticed a lot of issues with water bowls but with baby bloods for sure I mean I've definitely you know literally raised thousands of those things um they're a high strong species they're a little bit nervous and you know babies that are very insecure at that moment they'll stay in their hive box but till best and if you don't if you put I put it I use um I go to get deli cups because I can your 10 cents each I can use them and set a wash and a million balls I throw them away and I put any deli cup in with all my babies that's just the way I do it but even a deli cup just a small deli cup in a shoebox size container with a blood python they'll stay in their hive box and and you'll look at them if you don't stay on top of them they'll look like you know like they shriveled up in the and a poster of it and they just need that water and they just can't find that water in that water bowl they're just they're not exploring their cage or just staying they're very shy every close and they lose babies just from from not drinking even though there's a huge waterfall in front of them so I do keep a water bowl in there but I also went to keeping a clean bottom on the tub and letting a little film of water in there that was always clean and they could always just drink that water laying that water and stay hydrated and I would keep the baby bloods like that for the killer first shed which as you know it can be you know six months down the road before baby sets blood shed so I keep them like that all the way to them never have skin issues never have any problems nothing they they're like you know they can live in water like when they're at that age without having any problems but then I started looking at older snakes and everything and I really believe that in general most snakes find your water by accident a lot of work that I see and things are small and they're in the middle of the the box and the snakes coil around that water bowl but it's just coil around because it's got nothing else to get some contact security about but when that snakes roaming around they always call to the end of the container and they're calling around they're calling around the end of the container it's hard for a snake to go to the middle of that box raise its head up on a four inch dish stick its head in there to get water like knowing that that's water they definitely find it by accident and they're not finding it as often as they really need it let me survive for 30 years for me but I don't think they're properly hydrated like they always shake great and a lot of people have that up in dye syndrome or snakes you know they said I don't know what happened I was saying this one it was you know all of a sudden it was just that and there's a lot of reasons why that happens but I do think dehydration is one of the answers for some of that sometimes so if you you know when we put a water bowl in a cage you know a lot of times there was a water bowl in that cage in the same spot and nothing going on but you take it out you watch it and you put that water bowl back in the same spot and immediately the snake comes over and best takes that and it'll drink and it'll drink and it'll drink and it'll drink and it'll drink and it'll drink that water was just there five minutes ago but the animal wasn't drinking out of them now you put that new water in there and it's just as clean as a water that was in there now they're drinking out of it because they were stimulated to go check out what you just put in that cage right now you didn't know it was there so I've I definitely switched to all my animals to those low heavy crocs even a big animal can't tip that over just to nature the design of it so that's for a water bowl I use those shallow crocs I like the 12 inch ones for adult type ones and they're like three inches tall I would say and I put it in the corner of a cage or in an area that's frequented by the animal a lot and I'll put for bloods because they do like a good soak I'll still use a keelier pen in the cage that the animal could when he does find it get in there and take a nice soak but a water bowl that's easy access especially to a blood python or a bowl and python that drink drink drink heavily I think is a huge factor that a lot of people overlook and you know it's definitely something very keeding for me to make sure that those balls are in a spot for each animal you know because they have their preferences where they want to be in a cage each snake and that's right we all know where those spots are and I think it's key to get those water bowls in the proper spot and at the proper height and they got to be big enough around too I mean a real small diameter bowl even though this fresh water in there every day it's hard it's like shooting an arrow through a cologne for that sake that's right yeah all right so you know that's just my feelings on it okay what about and that's that's interesting but what about the actual thought of water itself I mean this is something that you know I know even myself really haven't put much thought into whether you use filtered water or tap water and I guess it really depends on the tap water in your area but what's your thought especially with like you said with fallen instead yeah well hey all my I with my blood pythons I used my town water bread a lot of snakes never had a problem now that my collection is smaller and it's not such a chore for me though and being what I'm working with nowadays I do buy bottled water now um and my thought is you know my drinking water my town tells me it's safe for me to drink but I have I've always had fish tanks and I have fish and I have a fish tank now I have a nice 150 in the wall in my living room and I can't take my tap water and put it in there without treating it for chlorine chloromines or my fish are dead in half an hour and I realize it's different but I still say to myself you know why put that in an animal that's youth being up in the mountains and popple under beauty and you know drinking is probably you know pristine water and why am I going to pump that stuff into a system when you know they're all you know hard to breathe let's face it there's a lot of things going on so why not take out all the variables that could be causing that so I do give bottled water you know a lot of people tell me well I got well water I got well water's good but no lot well well water isn't good you know so if you're going to give them what you have I think you should take it to I leave a good tropical fish place and have the guys test it for you and tell you what's in there and what's going on with it you know before you start using it again like I say in my town my first dial I use it but yet I raise a lot of blood pythons on it so I don't know but with the collection I have now I definitely use bottled water. Cool awesome all right so now let's get into what everybody really kind of a big question that surrounds bull and pythons and that's breeding now you have not been successful breeding but you've tried and currently are trying and you got a lot of thoughts on this stuff and and you know we're anxious to learn what you got with this because Eric and I do not have bull and pythons and I have no idea what we're talking about when it comes to bull and pythons just a lot of educated guessing so when it comes to breeding the species what are your thoughts on some of the major factors that would get them to go the distance? Some of the major factors are kind of what we've been touching on I definitely I definitely think that the increasing heat at the wrong time with a female that's building follicles will shut her down and stop her from from going the distance so the first thing we have to overcome is getting the proper temperatures to get her through to her ovulation I don't think the males need to be cold as much as if you know people have been trying to myself included like I say I'm just going into the 60s I definitely would blood pythons I would breed my animals from October to December that's what I put males with females that's when males actively bred the females and that's when they would stop breeding the females by the end of December because I just bred bred bred bred bred but yeah I wasn't getting clutches till June and sometimes I wouldn't get clutches till the following year blood python will be like masters at storm sperm so you start wondering with a python like the bull's python maybe that animal being medicine harsh or conditions can't retain viable sperm for as long as some of these other pythons maybe you have to be more keeping on when you're putting your males with the females or keeping your males with the females maybe that window is a very short window compared to other species so that's something I'm definitely doing this year's when everything is right my female is in a shed right now which comes out of shed the males going in there and you know your males will tell you guys know is that the males super active and on that female right away chances are she's you know her set to them and she's in in a good spot to be reproductive for that season I've had you know ones that the females the males show no interest in those females for this is you're not going to get eggs out of them the next year he's all over and you get eggs you know there's just a female really governs what the males going to do on a species like this I think so keeping her building those follicles right now and and not overheating her so she shuts down keep going with the process and get that male in at the right time keep feeding that female so she does think times are good and the food's coming in so I'm going to reproduce this year without getting her two obese I think those are the key factors for for success you know get them in to get that male in there keep them with her until she ovulates and once she ovulates you know that's separate to sex is a letter to her thing with basketball right and you just say something about having the female slightly overweight prior to breeding season so I mean that that like you don't want to massive be one of a little bit chunky for you let them go down right yeah like my female still has a lonely look but she's definitely bigger and girls and and Frederick and I like to say in the black section where the bands kind of fade out and the animal goes to black you know from that section down she's got a little bit of sickness toner more than the male you know that's where I want my animals this year I've tried last year and I think my animals were definitely of size and age last year and I didn't see as much as I'm seeing this year because I was keeping that female a lot cleaner and you know this year I said her a little bit more heavily and I keep going back to the Palm Miles thing telling me not to see them too much but I can't help myself but they definitely give them a little bit more but again you know I think my other conditions are balancing that and I'm thinking that's a female who can really do this year so I definitely like I say you know I'm I'm seeing them to bring them I think more than other people want to think more with the species okay this is really cool um now you you posted about your bollins and your thoughts that even if it remains 70 degrees Fahrenheit year round in their wild environment for arguments say that there could be heavy cloud cover during parts that would limit their basking and that would kind of be almost effectively cooling them right basically we need to think of uh their environment and also think about little micro environments these that are affecting these guys so accurate so can you kind of elaborate on that one a little bit yeah I believe Ari and Mark uh have shot nests of the females and they're they can be the female in a nest chamber can be up to 20 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature outside so yeah that the air might be cool out there but in that in that nest chamber it's going to be a little bit warmer so you got to wrestle with that with yourself too because while we're cooling the animal to the temperatures of the ambient temperature it's really not what was in your microclimate in in uh mother nature um right you know but like I say I was looking at these charts from Papua New Guinea and there's definitely cycles of the year where the sunlight is is trying out because it's a rainy season and the temperatures and daylight doesn't vary overall you know they remain at roughly 12 hours throughout the year of daylight the amount of sunlight getting to the ground varies uh counts at three hours per day so it's got to be affecting a snake like the bolognes that's they're basking and collecting all that heat um I I this whole summer my snake room never got above 75 degrees they were 75 all summer was that ambient um but they have the basking spots so I think he can keeping in them a lot cooler than most people do on their ambient temperatures but providing heat sporadically and not overkill with the heat is I mean look at pressed deck those people keep them right they keep them at room temperature and something that you know typically you wouldn't think as a reptile they just keep them in there they're 70s year round there's 60s in their house year round you know and breathe the animals very successfully um I think with pythons we're just so geared except for diamonds to to keep our pythons a lot warmer and um I think these guys just you know they don't need an ambient temperature in their closure through providing a basket more than 70 to 75 degrees cool I mean and you're exactly correct I mean my first year breeding my bread lie everybody's like drop them down I'm like I can't physically do that everything like in my body tells me to stop it so you know it was kind of difficult to try to get them to get it through my head that they'd be okay um at a lower temperature uh than the other guys so I guess it's our nature to keep everything a little warmer you know when I when I read Sanzania um many many years ago and I was told like I was the first private person Tracy thought I might be the first private person ever breaches and yeah and um I had him down in Daytona all of these down there and Philip DiFazio came up to the table and he's like you bright up like I did and he's like so what did to do and I said you know I just took them out of the snake room I kept them in um another part of my house where they had access to 50 degrees I didn't even provide them with a hot spot I mean they would go up to like 65 going a day and like 58 59 at night and I didn't even provide them really with a hot spot or anything and he knew it he's like I can remember turning a um a log or something over he sent to me and then there was frost on the ground and there was a Sanzania and he's like I just knew that they had to get a lot cooler than people were calling him and I was lucky I brought the green grass and I brought the mandrins and you know I never had to make that species uh to that um temperatures before ever and so that definitely given me a little bit of confidence going on with the ball and I you know wow that's a beautiful species I love them yeah yeah now I do too and I'm so sorry that I got rid of the animals uh because I would love to have them in my collection right now yeah sorry I wouldn't rule it's okay no it's okay you can jump in whatever you want yeah so suppose I did lose my spot because you're talking about Sanzania and I had to google a picture so um that had to happen so got it all right all right uh what have you what have been your observations so far when trying to breed these guys have you learned anything just from your attempts and from watching your guys that you're trying to breed yeah you know a lot of people say that the males are very aggressive breeders um and I know Frederick got a lot today actually he put his mail and email who's um and he had a picture on Facebook of the pair locked up and I think he only had it together for a few hours my mail last year it wasn't until um I'm gonna say late February early March before my mail became really active um so I'm actually kind of holding myself off from getting that mail towards the female right now she's in the shed actually right now so when she comes out of the shed I will probably try the mail but if he's not aggressively on her I'm gonna pull him out and wait a little bit longer um so one of the things that I've learned for myself anyway is you know I'm not gonna waste attempts with them because I definitely think that mail me to be in there at the right time so I'm gonna try to hold off and try to not you know get him in there and just so I can say I saw a breeding and hold him off until the times are a lot better for for that so um that's probably one thing I learned last year I definitely learned about you know how far cool and down um and what their stress levels were um going to cool in process so that was a huge learning curve to get over um between last year and this year um I feel more confident about that but you know it's just a big learning curve you know every year you gotta just take it and uh do what I wish I had for the animals to work with so you know you could pull things a lot faster but with six animals you gotta take what you get and you gotta learn as you go and if it takes you 10 years I don't care what it's gonna take I'm just gonna stick with it till I do it now and uh that's that's the whole thing with working with these guys right now so it's like right in the first attempt uh they wouldn't be the challenge they wouldn't be the animal I want to be working with right now just playing my my reptile career if you want to call it that um you know I needed a species like this at this point something that was a challenge get you back to the basics of what made you love working with reptiles in the first place not worry about what color was on the skin or you know who had it who did this or who did that just go back to the basics of the animal and what it is and you know making it um do what mother nature intended and once you do that then you can consider yourself successful at that species so it takes 10 years man I'm in it for a long long time until I do it you know right very cool very cool so this I'll go ahead no go ahead I was gonna say so are these guys I don't know why I don't know this question and this is probably gonna sound stupid but are these guys breeding in the springtime are they breeding in the like a cooler time well in the wild forget I heard from Ari is I believe that they they've actually um recorded females with eggs at every month of the year but there is a cluster of them at certain times but you know I don't know in captivity definitely act different than animals in the wild and right I use I use I use my blood pythons because you know I I mean I worked with a species for over 20 years so those are my you know I could talk about them in my sleep type of thing and be accurate with the information I hear but those guys you know they also come from an area where there's 12 hours of light 12 hours of darkness pretty much year round yet my animals you know to create a cycle in my room I would use light because temperature stays it's same for them pretty much and and light stays the same for them where they come from pretty much so you know you still have to create that cycle in your room so you know I would I would go from literally one day of 14 hours a day light down to six hours a day light and just you know just turn my timers and just make it six hours a day light it's not theoretically supposed to happen because it doesn't happen in a while but when I would go to February and I would I would crank my lights back on 14 hours a day all my females in the room would ovulate within a month of me doing that because I created a cycle I created a rhythm and whatever you need to do to get those stakes in a cycle in a rhythm I believe is when you have your breeding seasons I think in a while they take advantage of whatever the conditions are and they'll breed whenever but there's definitely a clustering from what I understand tomorrow when females are laying and producing eggs even though they have found them I think pretty much every month of the year well I do have a follow-up thought to that you know often I hear we've we've had many people and then we talk about animals especially coming from areas like Papua New Guinea where they have a you know like 12 hours of light and 12 hours of dark but is it possible that you know even the slightest variation in that so like say all of a sudden they're used to 12 12 and then they go to 13 you know 11 could that be enough to cue them like we may not think that that's important but I don't know these little subtle cues make me think that you know maybe that is important and what we're seeing just like you just said is like you're exaggerating that so that even makes it you know even more exaggerated so maybe people are missing the boat when it comes to some of these you know Indonesian species where they basically are coming you know a 12 12 cycle in the wild even the slightest variation and that's because it's not always 12 12 I mean it's right you know what I mean there is a variation absolutely and and I think that's what separates the men from the boys when you're talking about harder to breed species they're more tuned in to to keying in on changes like that to cue them to start to reproductive cycle and the animals that are easier to breed you know it's it's not as important to but when you have a very hard to breed species like a balls python you got to pull every tool out of your toolbox and you know try things that maybe aren't happening in nature but you're just trying to create that cycle that rhythm of getting those animals into a yearly process Tracy you know she's had more important blood play films and anybody come in that she's acclimated and then eventually bred she she preferred to get a baby snake and raise it to breeding age to breed versus a wild crop because it took less time to acclimate a baby snake to the rhythm of your room you know it's three four years before you're breeding them it's still quicker than taking an animal out of the wild as an adult that's tuned into what's going on there and try and create a little bit of cycle and getting them into the routine of what's going on in your room so that you you change their clock onto that rhythm for breeding so you know you may be putting your mail when all these cats have raised babies together um and you're getting so much success you like why the hell can i breed this wild crop because i wild crop different clock all together you know what i mean it takes a long time to get a work plot onto that clock right that makes sense i've heard about that especially with in like indo and species that i work with so probably very true with the holens and things like that so yeah cool um Keith now uh there i've heard something that i know Jason bailing has actually told me this one before is that the females feel the need to be secure in like a hide box especially when nesting uh do you think a good nest box is a factor i mean you know of course we say this and then earlier you said that Frederick female just laid him underneath a piece of pork bark so i guess that would be an animal preference i guess yeah i i think it's probably in the visual uh with your animal and how comfortable it is in its environment i i have a very good friend um who who has a store um that's a facility where he uh that's educational programs um and he has hundreds of kids come in that store and bang on the glass of you know he's got sloths and he's got code i he has been to wrongs and he has a lot of reptiles and he has black frog monitors and he has all this stuff and i he's another guy that's very in tune with his animals and i can't tell you how many species of animals he's bred in that store even under those conditions with kids in their you know banging on the glass and the animals coming out and doing a show and everything else like that i think it's what the animals conditions do you know what i mean um i i there's two schools of thought on animals in captivity some schools of thought believe that the animals should be so comfortable with everything going on around it's an uh thing that it's not disturbed and and it'll act more natural and breed i tend to believe that animal i like my animals a little bit more on the wild side i don't mind my my amazon tree boaster i can have your blood place on having to go at me or any of that kind of stuff when i was breeding birds but the more wild the bird was the more the bird act like the bird and i mean that's with snakes too like i say like my snakes though i'm in the room but they're not disturbed by it because they're behind pegboard they can see me they can sense me they can smell me they know i'm in that room um so they're used to the interaction of me going in the out of my room but i'm not disturbing them by cleaning the cage next to them and you know pulling out um the paper the clean and rattling them and them get stressed out um so i think it's really highly on how you keep that animal and what you do inside and outside of your room on how secure of a hide they need now i can pay that my ball and i female the container store i love that store i mean i go in there and i see so much stuff that i know you know and i do these pitch black boxes that have these locking tops that are very sturdy and having those handles that come up and lock that top-on type is key because those females will get in there i like having a hide that she's in and she's got so much contact security all the way around or on the sides on the top on the bottom so when she's in there she feels like she's wedged in there and nothing's going to get her so i do provide those boxes and when they're in there at night they're in there at night um so i do provide it um but i do think it's individual to the female and if you have problems with female breeding that's definitely one of the first things i would look at too is making her feel secure as you possibly could it makes sense and uh it's something i've heard so it's cool but i have to tell you my blood pythons they they did not care they they would play eggs absolutely anywhere everywhere i mean it didn't matter you know i even have met boxes that and so what i did my carbon python i had four females lay on top of the box i don't like how i get it nobody nobody gets boxes anymore so yeah they just put it wherever so yeah interesting all right um this is a little bit off topic but um i was uh i was i really liked your post that you had about uh Daytona and uh back in the heyday and uh you know um maybe you had tried to light a uh a spark into to these younger people that maybe don't understand it you know what was it like i mean i guess for like for me now tingly is kind of that way but i don't even think it's it's quite to the level of where Daytona was and it's prime back in the day you never i mean you definitely experienced it right i mean you went down there and it's heyday and and and there's just nothing like it like you know i'll i'll kind of go back to what i was saying in that post is it's that was the show of shows where every i don't care if you were from Japan or Indonesia or Sweden or Germany or what everybody went to that show anybody who was anybody went to that show so there wasn't such access to the internet and there wasn't all these other avenues of getting what you've been doing day to day out there and make it blase so when you went to that show you had no idea what somebody was going to have on their cable and it and it you know was the excitement built for years like months before that show to get down there to see what you know um gary sippo he was breathing or or um thick gurgen or don hamper or any of the guys from you know that started to all this stuff and and you'd go down to that show and luckily i had a table um up until three years ago i think is roughly when i stopped going to that show but i always had a table so i could get in beforehand and that was like such a treat to be honored to be able to get in that show before people because there was a line outside that i think wrapped around the building first time that hotel was booked you could not find any place in Orlando where it started to stay because that many people traveled from around the world and over and wow you know when you walk in the doors like you just saw the most unbelievable stuff that we all take for granted now because you know internet and facebook and everything else you see it every day but there yeah you only saw it once a year but the really cool thing was is all the guys that you know you read about in a book or whatever or there and they were very accessible to you at night so at night the the hosting hotel be it in Orlando or Daytona it's like basically ran because the reptile people were going to see how old it was right oh yeah lanes over old in the town and you get in there and and i mean the hotel lobby spoke out onto the mezzanine out to the beach or wherever so many people were there kevin kevin some nerd would bring down main lobster and be cooking them outside on the beach and everything and everybody was there you talk and see everybody who's anybody in the reptile business and you would stay up till three o'clock in the morning just talk and stay talk and just talk in that but you made real connections real friendships and and you know the information was freer then and the animals flowed freer then you know you get an animal before you even had the money to pay for it because you built a face-to-face relationship with that person and there was a lot of trust then and everything so you know somebody would hand you know Tracy Parker would give me an appointment by if i don't say pay when you can pay you know what i mean that's the kind of trust that was built back and it doesn't have to be going home you know i'm all excited going home with this but you know three thousand dollars stake on my wife's like are you out of your mind but i'm like what are you doing what was it gonna say you know yeah yeah so it was just awesome i mean it was just such an easy you got maybe for the whole four days you were down there you got maybe two hours to sleep because you were just on the run once you know everybody was out to dinner i mean i mean you literally took over that town it didn't matter what restaurant you went to there was reptile people in there the talk was reptile at every table and you know everybody you know you were free to go and just sit down and start talking with whoever you wanted i like i went to the story of i was really into dwarf monitors and Frank Ries was there man he's the man you know right and i just go over his table while he's setting up and start talking to him and he's like hey this guy is really into this maybe i'll uh you know talk to him a little bit he started talking to me and like Frank you want to go for lunch he's like absolutely took him out bought him lunch man i had the best conversation about dwarf monitors maybe great connection you can't do that over the internet you can't do that on facebook it's very hard although i have to say i never made good friendships with the bowl in my community from facebook so but it was just great sitting down and talking to people one on one you know it was definitely uh definitely something you had experienced to really understand what it was all about you know yeah that's all for sure you know we try to uh we do a yearly thing where we call it carpifest and we try to recreate that type of thing you know like because you know when you're sitting there talking with somebody until three in the morning drinking beers and you know the conversation weaves in and out you know between reptiles and you know music or you know other things or whatever you do other than reptiles and the next thing you know you you realize that oh man you know you really start to you know find out that we do have a lot more in common than just you know reptile absolutely this guy's really cool and i don't know you just really build uh connections that uh kindred souls man i always say you know we build in a relationship with a kindred soul and and you know the reptiles of the base is to open that door but um and open many doors it did for me and and um it's just an unbelievable thing you know to really sit down with a person when i want to talk towards you know i wonder if it was an idea i wonder if the i'm sorry i was wondering if the idea maybe there's a a sort of a saturation when it comes to shows like maybe the you know i i guess back in that day you know there was like like you said you know you waited all year for this for the show you know now it's like every weekend on the east coast you could go to a reptile show yeah that show that that show was just so dominant and drew so many of the i mean mark values to bring crazy stuff there and you know everybody did but everybody just waited for that show to do the unveiling they you know if little shows tried to crop up it took them a while a lot of time to get a foothold because nobody was going to them because they were waiting for that show nobody wanted to spend their 500 hours they say because they were waiting for that show so it took a long time for little shows the gaming and really the internet is probably what did the big show and um you know finally because it just became instant gratification you push a button you give them the numbers on your credit card and the status on its way to you know but it just really lost um a lot for me the industry and and meeting those kind of people face to face like i say you know anybody can be anybody over the internet but you knew that person when you talked to them for hours on end over those weekends you know sure but yeah you kind of get that at at tingly and i do like it that you do going to get uh to see friends from kind of all over the country at tingly park um yeah i'm going for that this year i mean my wife and i've already talked about it we're going off whether i have anything to bring or not i'm going i'm gonna definitely hang with as many people uh as i've made friends we've had her there and i'm definitely gonna you know hopefully start making that new team for me for sure cool yeah i know we do uh we oh go ahead oh i'm sorry no i'm saying i'm giving Keith one job one job only convince the Viking to get his ass over here yeah i know i i'm just working on it i've been working on dog castor i don't care what mammal he's playing with right now you go fast for until he gets over here working in october you can tell him i said all of this um yeah all of it yeah everything so you get him over here so absolutely i mean the more guys like that that we can bring you know it'll even just kick it up another notch there you know exactly exactly and people really got to go they really got to go and they really got an experience that you know yeah and and the more people you can get going to it the more people you can understand what the value of that is i think uh you know it could really get back to where it used to be and i would love to see that man i would definitely love to see us get back to that and where else are you gonna see eric drunk off his ass stumbling around i mean you know i like i always tell the story we were down in uh detona and um uh category four hurricane was coming over detona and and yeah and and the wind hill didn't know what to do but he said you know just show him what's going on so we all stuck it out all those diehards were there there wasn't anybody there to buy any reptiles but all the guys were there well i was in a hotel that had underground parking and they had an underground drop off so all of us that were at the show stood in that underground parking due to the angle of it the wind wasn't really coming in there and we literally just all stood under their drinking beer watching the town of detona getting taken apart you know so there's street signs that like big signs for thunk and donuts like i think it was peak call ran out there and he took a picture next to that sign in the middle of this category four hurricane he comes oh my god the next thing you know that sign is sparking and lighting up and it's actually bent over to the ground the dunk and donuts door ripped open and all the chairs can fly up and go down uh main street that they cone in there so all stand there we're just watching this like it gets really quiet and we're just watching the town be taken apart and everybody's getting really quiet right and this duck i'm telling you it was a mallard duck comes flying into the underground saying his wings were bent his feathers are turned inside out and the duck comes flying in and everybody at the same time starts cheering that the duck made into the face well it freaks the duck out and the duck goes flying back out and the wind takes it it's just going back oh like we were all like yes you made it and we shared the damn thing back out in here yeah it was bad it was bad but i mean like you know like i'll see Don hamper at a show or something going around taking pictures and we'll start talking about you know that experience that you had with that a person is because you all congregate at the same place at the same time you have all those memories it was just great yeah you know uh well now i look forward to every year because um me uh Bowen zach and uh matt metatola we all you know we take the trip out from here and man that's a great time we we sure didn't have a good stuff no no it's usually filled with debates and this year it was three hours of me yelling at him that gas watch does not exist all right yeah for the entire state of Ohio i was mad at eric or for that bullshit i don't know how to push his buttons you know you do it but it's not fair yeah but yeah i was yeah that's good stuff i'll tell a real quick story about uh tindley park is and this kind of uh relates to your uh to what you were saying key is that um you know the first year i went out to tindley park um i remember you know it's sort of my first year of of getting into the marrelia crowd and you know it kind of segmented into the condro guys and the carpet guys and i'll never forget it because i got the drink beers and hang out with guys like terry harry fill up uh you know uh rico waller uh that there was uh you know i think of all the carpet guys um you know jason and houred and and heavy hitters now and yeah all the guys and and we're just sitting around and we're just drinking beers and i'm like you know i'm and i'm star struck with these dudes because you know these are the guys you know what i mean and right here i am and they're just hanging out with me like i'm just one of their you know one of the dudes you know and it was just like wow this is awesome you know and yeah you can't have that experience if you don't take that trip it seems like it's uh you know something that uh do i really want to spend the money do i really want to i got to take off work oh man that drives so far all these excuses that you make but once you're there man is it worth it it's totally worth it you know yeah absolutely you can't even explain it you just kind of lived through it one time you know you'll understand it you get it and and hopefully you know build a trip uh one last few relationship to keep doing that show and it's thinly you know from what i'm hearing from what everybody mat you know you know like mat comes over my house for barbecues all the time and he's been trying to get me to go for years but i think i'm just gonna bite the bullet and uh and do it this year and then just start making it the routine you know yeah definitely so yeah i guess my uh my next and this will sort of segue into some uh some blood python and short tail python talk um but you know with work i can't imagine me personally ever not working with carpet pythons and i think like oh you are kind of one of the one of the guys when it comes to you know short tail pythons what yeah what was it like to sort of say you know what i've done this i'm going to move on and you know like what what caused you to to do that and move on to bollens i'll tell you when i when i started with with uh bloods and and and short tails it was so long ago you know i can remember that on the on the price list they used to say for the borneo safety like the newly rediscovered species that's how they were playing them off you know the newly rediscovered species and and i said the only people working seriously with them at the time were myself tracy and tim need and you know we were the three that really you know got rid of everything else um and really started folk i mean at one point the barker said it i think they even had on a pelt if i'm saying that right they had like every species of python in their collection and and that's what people did back then everybody had a lot of everything they didn't concentrate on things but then Tracey started concentrating on on blood pythons and short tails and and bollens and ball pythons you know she morphed into that um but she had a collection you know that was world ring out as far as every python species in captivity pretty much um or an existence they had in their collection um to me you know focused solely on the short tail pythons and and that's when i was into it i didn't know tim off the bat i knew Tracey and you know i did those animals for a long long time and and i'll still always till the day i'm in the ground i'm going to think of myself as a blood guy even though i don't have any of those animals right now but you know you guys know man when you're in the game and you're breeding for morris and you're breeding for traits and you're breeding for different things you need a lot of animals to do that and it's yeah so me and and for a guy you know i work i'm a project manager for a commercial construction company and i put up you know nursing homes and i do um you know big jobs so i'm working anywhere from 50 to 60 hours a week and you know even when i'm out at work i'm looking at emails and i'm doing whatever so you know to have a collection of up to 500 animals at one time you know when i was doing a blood play found it was like very consuming and as you start getting deeper in the game and more people start coming in the game to stay on that cutting edge you have to keep even more animals back and breed more stuff and go this way and and the altitude it just it got too big for me it just just it just started getting too big and the animals were established there was a lot of great people working with them now you know matt is a very dear friend i consider matt and kin family and um you know matt's doing a great job with the animals and you know it was just the time in my life where i needed to back off and i mean take a step back and you know i'm a grandfather now i got a grandson and you know all these things are starting to happen i'm like you know man you i want to be able to take my kids you know my grandson fishing and still go fishing with my daughters and you know do the things that the animals were taking a lot of the time away and it would start to become a burden um right and to me it became a point where i had to make a choice i either had to get rid of them or stay in the game i couldn't just it's a weird thing with me but i couldn't just even keep one animal it's almost like an addiction where you just had to get rid of them all or stay in the game you know what i mean and i i had been feeling for the last couple of years like you know man go back to the basics go back to what you love don't worry about what the animal looks like go for something you always wanted to work with ball and python you always want to try try to crack the code for yourself and you know that's a lot of things that a lot of guys want to do i know but it was something that i always thought in my if you want to call it semi retirement of the industry um was something that i just really wanted to do so now i have you know i have some amazon tree bowlers i have some mental tree bowlers i have a couple carpets i have some woman and my focus on the ball and i i have malookins um but the ball and i are my focus and that's what i want to work on and that's what you know i want to do so i just took a step back i sitting down substantially where it's enjoyable i i can't wait to get home to go in a snake room again because it's not work i can get in and out of there within a half hour an hour now versus you know every minute of every week an hour i was taking care of the animals which i loved for a lot of years when it just became a point in my life where i had to back off you know yeah i share a horse on to people that that were doing a great job with the animals you know right yeah i can totally relate to that you know me you know when we're talking last week it's uh you know with carpet pythons are kind of my my thing you know it's it's it's i can't explain it but you know you can relate as you just said you know blood pythons or kind of you know bloods and short tails are your thing and you know to you'll die uh you'll you'll always be a blood guy so i'm always going to consider myself a carpet guy and i go in and out of these different species and the only other one that has come close to sort of you know uh capturing my uh fancy so to speak that i haven't moved from is the bloods and short tails mainly because i kind of like have this fascination with burmese pythons but i can't stand the size of them so you know well i always said i always said the people that were asked to be you know new to the species i i always told them you know because they would say that i said it's a lot of python it's a lot of snake and a little snake you know what i mean because you don't get the great lengths and all that but you you get a substantial snake in a small package and and that was the traction to me i live in jersey you cannot have hearts i mean i don't have a better chance to get a carrot permit for a pistol and get a hot venomous animal in new jersey so you know the boom vipers have always been totally up on my list and it seems like a lot of people i like the boons like blood pythons too it's just that you know real short stout strong beefy snake um you know that i always loved it and the shape of the head was just classic to me and you know it's just something i always wanted to work with as a kid you know but when i first got my first ones it was just insane and i knew i was hooked and like i said you know the thing going back to the shows is you build relationships that's how i met matt and that's how i met a lot of really good people um won you know from the city dextlor he yep he would come to shows and and you know he would come to a show and keep what you need me to do you know he'd help me set up he'd help me sex snakes he'd help me talk to the people i built a lot of great friendships because of blood pythons and to this day i don't you know work with them for three years but those people still can certainly one of them and that's because of the shows and getting to meet these people face to face and like i said i'll always be a blood guy i talk blood still day to day people still contact me and i try to give them advice and helpful hints and things i look for from breeding i'll always be a blood guy man it's just it's just who i was for a lot of years i can't get away from it and i'm glad i i can't i would love still being in that community but it was just it was just time for me to go you know yeah yeah yeah so yeah i was going to say that i can relate to the space issue and whatnot you know and i was telling oh and i i have a pair of maclops which i love but i know that oh and it's like a maclop python freak so i know i act as crazy person yeah i'm going back and forth on whether or not you know like do i keep these do i not do you know i mean you know i'm gonna have to have this space for carpet pythons and da da da da da so it you know it's uh well i'm just gonna give them the oh and because at least then i know where they're at you know what i mean yeah right if i ever am fancyed again to want to work with them but you know it's just like i don't know the i kind of like the idea of of the focus you know and it's like for me trying to figure out like really what makes that animal tick is kind of funny you know what i mean it it can't it doesn't really matter about the the paint job so to speak like i can still have a cool morph and still really want to try to figure out you know what really makes this thing want to breed or you know what is what is the right cycle and all that kind of stuff you know so right so absolutely and i'll tell you like and you're probably too i'm sure you are to that point with your carpets but you know with the blood pythons like like i said my heyday i had up to 500 animals and when you would go in that room like i never worried about working with any of those animals because you get so tuned in that animal it's almost like you know what that animal is going to do before it does it yeah and that's where i want to be with bowling pythons you know that that's what i'm starting for now the challenge that i have again and i'm trying to get to that point and figure them all out and it'll take some years but i'll get there you know and you know before with other species and and you know like i had emerald back in the day and i kept emeralds for a while and and you can go back to species just nothing wrong with going back to mackerel it's either down the road you know what i mean you're sure as long as you're breathing man i'm sure you're like i am well i'll have some form of um reptile for the day i die so you know you can go back to animals too there's no reason that when you get them you can't go back you know yeah absolutely definitely all right all you everyone very cool so um one like thing closed anyway um so we're on blood talk now right you already just covered all the blood stuff i i yeah we kind of thought about it well you know what i one thing i would like to talk about with the blood is the impression because people say they're not like aggressive and nasty but it's really not the key to high strong animals and they're nervous animals yes but once like i just say and if you know your animals and you know that species really well most of the time that animal is really just a fear fighter like a dog and it's people that are insecure about dealing with this snake and they're they're worried about going in there that the animal often gives the tone of the day so to speak and and you can set a blood off and you can shut them down very easily when you're used to work with an animal i've had to look like pythons that i would hand to anybody and they could kiss them on the nose i mean they would obviously you don't trust every animal hundred percent of animals but i mean there was definitely animals that i trusted one hundred percent and then there's other animals that you know what the cues are if you touch the palate send them off you get freaked out by getting your tail touch and they start getting nervous and if you do the right moves and you handle the animal Steve Rowan was a master come on we all know that guy could come any aggressive snake out and it's true with blood pythons it's all in your personal with the animal of how you deal with that animal um if you interact with it daily and all the time and keep to a certain team you you have no problems with the animals forever and i never thought of them as a massier aggressive snake i just thought of them as a high strong nervous animal um that you deal with accordingly and to be honest with you i like an animal i command you respect i like an animal that you don't take out and you know throw up on the counter and you know you're in control of a moment i like that animal's being controlled a moment and i'm in its presence and i'm going to do what it needs to keep it calm safe and happy i like the animal governing that you know i kind of really expected that about blood pythons and like i say man i work with them all time and i can't tell you like it was very rare that i got good you know what i mean it's very rare that i had an animal off and it was usually something very stupid tonight but i had plenty of animals that i could take and you know bring will be to the cleaning sink to wash bowls and have it on my shoulder have it in my hand while i'm doing the work and the animals find and come you know what a lot of keepers want in the blood pythons and then you have the animals that are very high showing that you literally you know you took them out you checked them out you put them in a cleaning box like you clean your cage you took about that you put them back in you didn't mess with them for too long your your time with that animal was pleasant and for both of you you didn't have any bad things but if you kept that animal out you started building it with things that it wasn't familiar with even as simple as a pd or a light going on or the way you're moving you know when you set that animal off and make it nervous you know then you got to watch what you're doing with it but they're not aggressive or nasty snakes it's just a little high strong and not all of them on me that's more of what their general personality is it's not as nasty as it's really not and if you approach them that way you'll have a very pleasant experience with the animal what are you thinking about that you know that you can't restrain if you're one of these guys that you need to restrain the animal blood pythons are not for you because you can take the team animal in the world and you try to grab it around the neck and that snake will literally twist its own head off you can't be just forget about restraining blood pythons you do not restrain a blood pythons and you know people that have that concept well i'm just going to go in there and man handle that thing and get out of the cage and stuff look like i have a pleasant experience with it right you know they're just right and he held that way and dealt with that way yeah what would you say that is like one of the things that people uh are the most misunderstood thing about bloods and short tails is that is the aggression part of it or definitely the aggression part of it and also thinking that they have to this is going to sound contradictory to what i said earlier but when i was speaking earlier about keeping hydrated and wet that was babies until their first shit a lot of people say you gotta keep on like you know like saturated dripping cage with the unbelievable amount of stupidity and all that does is promote things that you hold on growing in that cage to grow you know um they definitely are an animal that can withstand the wet conditions probably better than most pythons without a doubt but it's not really essential for their need and people definitely do also keep them too warm which definitely is is a huge factor in making the animal aggressive because you just heightened every sense in that animal so if you have an animal that's high stroning you're keeping it too warm you just magnified any of its bad traits in that animal by keeping it too hot um you know my my room was 78 to 80 degrees ambient with no hot spots and that's how i test them all the time and you know why i see people feeding them up to 85 degrees these are very high front blood python at temperature and it does make them more aggressive you know when they're at those temperatures sure now did you offer a hot spot once the female was grab it no never never hot spots ever wow never any hot spots any any attempts yeah yeah that's how i came on and uh huh awesome that's good to know yeah i'm thinking i'm a big user of fans in my room too you know i fans on the floor that blow up and just keep pretty even temperatures throughout the room um but i'm sure that the front of cages are a little bit warm in the back of the cage but i didn't purposely for blood pythons provide a temperature brain and at all i i kept my room 78 to 80 degrees and that was it do you have a uh did you have a uh a species that you preferred you know bloods borneos or the uh some ottron i love them all i really did i truly love them all i had them all and i've read them all but the thing i like about borneos is is you know they're just the genetics are just so wacked and it made it so interesting breeding for for different traits that i saw in the animals and you know i proved it with many different you know things that i developed but it was just a great thing to have that eye um mat minitola obviously has a she has the eye to to know what works together and what where that animal will go and that was always a kick for me for breeding the short pail and i'm sure it was a big factor for tenutes sticking with the animal is it is just that you know you could do so many things with patterns and colors on them just from line breeding and i'm so much more prefer that over breeding for a morph um because you know what you're going to get with that pretty much you know you combine it x y and z and the first time sure it might be a different thing but with those guys you really don't know the clutches are just so variable it was so great like for the tigers for instance to to see that trait and enhance it to the point and then take that animal and breed it and see that it can reproduce itself and you can intensify that look and get the lines crisper and more sporadic down liking both on the side of the animal all i just want for short kills for that reason um right now and that's why i i probably had a bigger collection and was more known for that because those animals just totally fascinating with what you can do breeding for traits and like i said i always found that much more challenging wow yeah i think uh i think matt subscribed to that same uh same same concept piece you know seeing his collection i think he he has a a special spot for borneos uh in his uh in his group for sure but yeah matt matt i saw that matt you know i met matt down in Daytona here we are with now all the way from each other but took a Daytona to meet matt and he would come to the table and you could tell right away that he was a guy that really like he didn't just look at the animal he was like you know looking at every detail in that animal and when he was looking for something to buy it took him a long time to make the decision you know i really respected that and that's how our friendship started um because he has that same kind of thing and like i say it going back to the shows i never would have known them about them if i if i didn't took them you better show now absolutely um cool so where do you see like you know what's your thoughts on a where the uh you know the short tail uh group is going and and where do you see it i mean there's morphs that people are working with and i'm sure once they uh you know that aren't necessarily readily available once they get out there maybe they'll get more attention there's they're sort of like carpet still where they're kind of like one of those niche uh species um do you see that um staying that way or do you see it kind of you know what now i do see it i do see it staying that way but i definitely obviously the base is tremendously grown i mean when i was doing day don't end the early days or still Orlando at that point i had three tables with nothing but blood pythons i have it took a lot to get people to stop and start talking to me you know what i mean um because you know everybody had that persona about them and now you know i've only been on Facebook maybe close to a year now i guess it was um before that man i was living under a rock you know nice i i really didn't have uh i i didn't really didn't see how many people were in it you know now i'm on Facebook and i see all the blood python groups and how many new people are coming into it how many people just have one or two you know um i i only really knew the serious collectors that's the people that i knew um just from doing the shows and what not and definitely this is a lot bigger fan base now than there was in the early days and and you know people are so much more knowledgeable about species and now they're successful i mean believe it or not when i saw with blood pythons they were the bold python of the day i mean they were coming into the country and if you kept them alive you were considered a very advanced hobbyist to keep blood pythons alive little old breed i'm forget about it the only captain bred babies were born babies were female you know from females that came in uh full of eggs and and people got them and dropped and that's the egg so those were your captain born babies back in the day they were a very hard species to to you know get around now you know there's a guy that has no more experience except for keeping great green animals and he's being successful with them now a day so the salmon is definitely growing tremendously you know and uh i see good things and bad things come along with apple luckily the core group of people uh you know that's stuck with the bloods and are still the people that everybody looked to you know are teaching good things to those and uh i see the families grown up very knowledgeable and it seems like it's going in the right directions for sure right absolutely yeah they are definitely a cool species no doubt uh i i dig them and you know we have uh we have a lot of our listeners you know because there's not a lot of people that you know it's very hard to find people to come on and talk about them you know and uh yeah i know we don't get that long done right you've had one in the past yeah oh yeah yeah yeah and we used to be a well-prepped all-manned on tour yeah we drag mad on all the time i mean like give me a free spot we just grab you know so you know awesome that's awesome good teachers right there yeah well i i tried the you know the whole blood thing and i just ended up giving mine to matt because it hated me so and of course he's there he's like oh look oh and i can cuddle with it and it's so nice i'm like god damn it yeah but don't don't let matt fool you don't let matt fool you i'm going to let us lusica all right i have the tamest eye-remailed blood python ever this snake was so good and i didn't need him for a year i should matt you want to use him in any of your breeds he said sure so i met him he took it he got home he goes damn you should have warned me this thing is hell on wheels i'm like are you kidding me i'm like it's demon blood i own he's like Keith i'm telling you this thing is crazy i'm like that he's no way he's like i'm telling you keep this thing's crazy i i mean matt knows blood vitamins you know what i mean so i'm like second cast in a matter of all so he gets done using the animal and everything he gives it back to me and i tell you when it came back here it was came as hell again i don't get it you know what i mean i swear to god ask matt he'll tell you you said this thing was insane why have you owned it i got it back here i'm like oh man what am i going to encounter when i get this thing out of the bag yeah get out of the bag i put it in a cage i read alone i go in the next day to check it out and the thing is exactly like it was when it left i'm like what the hell is my dude in this thing i'm fine so i must have stopped about at all five or no three input yeah i'm telling you and i've heard that a lot and i've gotten and you know what the same thing to me i've got snakes from Tracy or something and they tell me it's a you know fine don't worry about it get out of the bag the snakes line and the same thing that thing was hell on wheels were made it's it's really strange how that works and i think they get so imprinted on yeah i routine or Tracy's routine or matt's routine they just get so imprinted on that that you know you change that and they're nervous and they're high strong and they're distancing and they get upset and exactly you know and i really distributed to that they're definitely an animal of you know nature and what happens every day cool i got you all right uh Keith we're going to close it out but we have the questions at the end of the show that we'd like to close out with and the first one is is um if you could keep any reptile uh in the world without any limitations be it legal or space wise what would it be and why you know what that is probably the hardest question isn't it anybody has ever asked me it really was i wrestled with this since you guys would tell me you're gonna ask look i was like what would it be and i wrestled with it and i got to tell you the first the thing that kept coming into my mind was to a car that kept coming into mind to work with coal cars cool and really then i yeah and then because obviously the challenge man i'm all about the challenge nowadays you know what i mean and hey come on you know what it could be more challenging than it was at all i thought my first choice was but i got to tell you i started saying you know what but what would it be a neat species so i went and i'd spray a little list and and if it was bullet i would go back to the green sense in it that would be my my dream to put back together a really nice group with the greens and that would be my choice in bullets and um in the lizards it would be the mall like with a thorny devil from australia out with those um you know that would definitely give you a species of lizards you love a challenge no yeah um for torses it would be irradiated they're just insanely beautiful um i would love to you know be in an area where i can have them outside and natural sunlight and just work with that species for a 20 cent i would be the one for colubrid nothing better for me than in eastern and you know man i would love to work with the eastern area back in the day you know i used to go into pet stores and they used to sell indicos there was ten dollars yeah that's how they sold and you could buy a ring that store around here you know and like you know that was the species back then and then my father finally bought me one and i'll tell you something that indigo has for me the hardest point of any snake i've ever been big because it's like a monitor of lizards i thought a philosopher after i grabbed my hand would that say grab it i could not as well think of eastern indigo and for venomous it would be a gaboon and a rhino for sure for venomous that's where i would go um and then i thought it just turtles and dude if i went this long or this power ball i'm sure we're wondering what reptiles we would buy but i have a pair you know right i would have a pair of the largest alligator snapping turtles i could have in aquarium like 10 feet by 20 feet and just have them in there like a watch a window or whatever dude i would love to have one of those monster alligator snaps yes and uh for crocodilian it would be a black came in i would be like that would be the species if if i could have anything in the world that would probably be a group that i don't know if i'd find together damn you were probably the only guest that ever came with a list of species if you were to bring it down yeah he's okay he's not prepared oh yeah hard question i think i've ever been asked because here's for guys like umi can you really name what the one species would be i mean no no no yeah that's that's a difficult one you know because there's so many that we haven't worked with and so many that you know you love that you have worked with and oh man i don't know so many that limit by money and legality yeah yeah and if you ask me this question five years ago it would have been bull and I yeah yeah yeah that was the animal so and we've talked about this when you really really want something and then you get it you're kind of like people always you move to the next mountain or you you select your next thing you're gonna chase or sometimes like you're like keep and you just make a list of everything so yeah sometimes for me the chase is a huge part of the absolutely you know the three third shouldn't yeah it's like oh man you it's like opening up a whole new world of of reptiles that you didn't know about sometimes when you get your little groups you don't really realize that there's a you know wow there's there's a whole group of people that likes geckos i i would have never know exactly exactly you get you definitely get very uh like pigeonholed and seen what's right in front of you and not really what's all the way out there right yeah all right guys so next one is Keith if you could go herping anywhere in the world without limitations of legality or money where would you go and what would you be hoping to find well i wrestled with that and i flip i flip flop between australia obviously for the diversity i don't think there's any place like it um but it would have to be new guinea and um often the guinea because there's just the the insanity of what's theirs just blows my mind and the insanity of what is there we don't know about yet is what i would be looking for um if you guys probably remember hopefully you remember the show that steve erwin had where he started out at sea level and he went all the way up through it yes that was like my favorite episode of everything show me everything that lived at the different elevations and um when uh marco shay was there and he's looking for the crocodile monitor because i had crock monitors i love crock monitors and he was there looking for the crock monitors and and i believe he discovered um the uh what python was at that he discovered there was a subspecies but you know just the unknown of what you will find in poppa when you can use it's definitely what would bring me that would be the first on my list of where i'd have to go yeah you have to wonder i'm with you you have to wonder like if if there's like okay so i think about you know you think about carpet python scrubs chondros all these is there like species over there that you know of pythons that a maybe we don't even know about is there other subspecies of these animals that you know we don't even know about different localities i think there could be big foot over there god damn it yes there's gotta be populations of something in that dense forest and inhabitable areas that we don't even know about yet it's just gotta be yeah i would agree that and so you know and i would definitely be the first thing on my list to go there you know and i keep i keep thinking to myself man you got to just drive already one day and just like yeah along fun the whole trip and see area i'll go with y'all pay for everything to get off attack one but then i think that's like the culture and everything else and i'm like man what a six foot you know 250 pound red-haired guy do you really like outstanding over there we're sticking out like a sore throat maybe oh yeah you know there are you can kind of blend but i think i would stick at it a little bit talking about it but i'm pretty sure i die on a mountain with already somewhere like you'd be like oh and go check over there where don't go and just walk off a mountain and fly it yeah absolutely i mean that's cool that's how that would go for me so it but still it would be awesome to do yeah now that's still definitely one of my dreams like i say i get the power ball man and i'm like all right i'm on the next trip over there where there's no doubt we're going and we're going in style yeah yeah absolutely yeah we were we were talking about if we won the power ball and the one thing i was i was saying at work it's like i don't know if i necessarily would stop working because i'd be afraid that you know i'd fall into this lottery curse and you know be broken in a in a couple of years but the one thing i told but i told my boss was that i'm definitely taking off a month and that everybody that the maralia place on radio circle will take off a month as well and i will pay whatever your salary is for that month and we will go to wall for alia and we will burn the shit out of it yeah that would be happy with the dream right there right yeah i hope Eric wins you know yeah because everybody will say oh i can't take off for a month that you can't use that excuse because i'll pay it you know yeah yeah yeah sweet all right so the next thing is uh what's the one thing we can't get off our minds um i guess key if you are the guest so what is a one red power related thing this week you could not get off your mind uh being on the show to be honest yeah there you go yeah i'm so much better putting my thoughts down on and writing than i am uh conversing uh so i'm definitely nervous if i would get all the thoughts that are jumbled around in my head out concisely so people knew what i was talking about so that definitely was the biggest thought on my mind this week was related to the house and then after that it was it was it was my female and your follicles for sure i'm definitely very pumped definitely yeah cool luckily we're just controlled chaos over here so it's really easy to throw your ideas out here so uh i guess i will go next and what i can't get out of my head all week would definitely be the snowstorm that's going on right now and how it will affect my breeding pairs so i was kind of hoping that the snowstorm would hit and hit hard and that all those animals that i know wait until it's a snowstorm to start breeding would start breeding um and we can try to get some more locks uh i'm seeing some good signs out of a bunch of females but i'd like to see some more good signs out of more so i guess what i couldn't get out of my head all this week was just basic breeding teas and stuff isn't it isn't amazing like what different groups of people are into like a lot of the guys i work with are in the snowmobiling so they see a snowstorm and they're thinking wow we get to go snowmobiling guys like you and me are like yeah i used to hate the winter until i started breeding snakes and i was like oh yes come on american i feel hate the winter and i still hate snow partially because i'm an insurance agent secondly because then i got to shovel it but it's like today i'm like god damn it's snowing and eric's like snakes breeding the snow i'm like whoa it's snowing so it's like snow you know what our winter here in jersey had been super favorable to bollum's python breeding that's for sure i mean on christmas day we were 70 i actually had the air conditioning on in my house in new jersey on christmas day yeah i was like this is right we uh you know it's weird i i'm reading this new carpet python book and one of the things that i saw in there was um uh this map of australia and in the map of australia it was showing the precipitation um and basically where the heaviest precipitation is coincides with the actual map of where the carpet pythons are so it made me think that these carpet pythons are really because i'm thinking wow the room is 70 degrees you know i don't understand like they should be they should be going why into going you know and and then i thought about it and i'm like these snakes are probably more in tune with the actual you know fronts that are coming in more so than say you know these cooler temperatures or maybe it's a mix of both you know what i mean but without that those fronts that are really coming through maybe you're not going to get uh be as successful with breeding them you know so right um but the the one thing that i i saw i saw this post from uh michael uh sir mac and he's uh he's a guy down in australia and he keeps uh green tree pythons but i found this interesting and i never really thought about this but he said basically there's a common belief among snake keepers that snakes can be hydrated by soaking or spraying them with water we know that snakeskin after the first shed is not water permeable but i was curious um if it shed if the dead skin would allow water to pass through so he pumped 12 milliliters of water into a piece of uh shed skin which was inside out held it for a minute and not a drop of water seep through so the conclusion was that snakes can only be uh hydrated internally i thought that was pretty interesting that uh here we are spraying the spraying the shit out of our snakes and it really is not necessarily uh yeah i don't know whether that does it does the spraying of the snakes and the subsequent evaporation of that spray add for a rapid cooling that could possibly be the stimulant not so much you know the water on the snake itself or you know are you just raising the ambient humidity within the cage um but you know i i had madamatas um and i still have madamatas i have an adult pair and took a couple of years to get them acclimated and i took the aquarium and i actually moved it over to um john's store so he could have them on display because i needed room for polonizing whatnot and um what i did notice so before they went there and we got eggs by the way and we had fertile eggs but i failed to hatch them but what i did notice is that um i had a spray bar in there that would spray on top of a water and believe it or not that was the stimulus that would get these guys into the breeding cycle and what we came up with me and john is that that spattering on the surface of the water was indicative of maybe a rainy season and it was weird they shut down feeding they did all these different behaviors when the spray bar was spraying on the surface of the water and you know i was like man these guys haven't eaten in a while and i started messing around with different things and i took the spray bar and got it back underneath the water so it's just a current and they went back on feed and all that kind of stuff and you know that i think that could be a stimulus for for actually why we got as far as we did with the parrot hurdles but you know maybe it's just the effect of the dabbling of water on them as you're spraying them or something like that more than the actual um hydration of the animal itself you know there's a lot of factors that could come into play with that i think when breeding animals i don't know if you guys agree but i think there's probably i said this before there's probably a checklist of like you know seven different things eight whatever the number would be but you could get four of them and you're going to have success but if you don't get you know what i mean like it could be all different four i mean it doesn't necessarily like if you don't do a light cycle doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to have success but you know if you you know if your animals are keyed into that you know light cycle and you know temp cycle and you know then maybe you need those fronts to come through and that's that that you know the that the cherry on the top type of thing absolutely you know what i mean yeah you cannot follow somebody else's recipe to the letter and be successful in your situation because Frederick's environment where he is is different than my environment i can only interpret what he's doing to my conditions and adjust and water and and change things around and make them work for me there's no doubt about that you know um everybody's conditions are definitely different um for your basis to start your work with but you can use those variables to be successful without a doubt yeah absolutely so cool very cool um so Keith if somebody wanted to get in touch with you what would be the best way to do it yeah anybody wants to talk reptiles or any kind of animal or whatever i'm definitely down to that and uh probably the best way is uh just my AOL email um and that's python man figure that python man wanted at AOL.com um believe it or not back i mean i have to have had that email forever um probably i don't even know how many years and believe it or not when i tried to get python man i couldn't believe somebody else already had it so i had to add the one after python man except i'm like how could somebody else have that come on it was like hardly really internet at the time i couldn't believe somebody else had python or yeah so i got python man one at AOL.com it's probably a guy with big biceps or something like that yeah somebody who has no idea what he's yeah you know what's really sad now it's like i'll go into a bank for a loan or something i'm 56 years old and they'll be like well what's email i'm like uh they want to do all the junk crap and they're like what are they a little louder you know you know out there in the bank python man yeah i'll write it down and you can read it there you go exactly awesome that's great well keith it was awesome talking to you uh thanks so much for coming on and uh chatting with us and you're welcome back anytime maybe when we get a uh i know me and matt we're talking about doing our of of blood uh short tail round table maybe uh you know you'll be down following me absolutely that'd be great i would love it yeah cool awesome so thanks so much hey thanks for having me and thanks uh thanks for making the environment so easy to to talking because i'm definitely not a talker i do better like i said with writing but you guys definitely make it very comfortable for uh anybody to talk so i appreciate it yeah absolutely you've been doing it for four years you're pretty good at something but yeah i hope i get to meet you guys out in tindy this year too yeah dad or come to hamber we're gonna be there and uh if i can get that well are you really what's the next show yeah i've ended uh the 27th all right i'll probably be there yeah sweet well i'll be able to talk back to the tallest i mean you're in jersey make it out to us best with us yeah you know that's the best you can be in even though you don't even need to have a carpet just come yeah thank you my s-time on with there yeah it's a great time so yes all right key thank you so much thanks a lot guys i appreciate it all right have a good night all right key you too take care of it okay all right let's uh let's quick wrap this up and uh get going so um next week's show is yes our first ever venomous show yes oh my god we are going to be talking with scott eaper um and we're going to be talking about australian uh venomous snakes um but god messes with like the dangerous dangerous venomous snakes it's not like yeah this is a myelized fiber he's like this isn't in one type and that i poke in his face like oh yeah okay so um for anybody that has any questions um you know hopefully um we're able to do the show justice i think calvin scott uh it would be uh he's going to be an awesome guest you know he was on the show before but he actually wrote a book uh you know called australian alapids and colubrids um so i think that his experience both in the field and with working with these animals and captivity will give us a little bit of insight into the world of venomous snakes from australia you know if you write a book on venomous snakes i'm pretty sure we're going to do the show justice you wrote a book on venomous snakes yeah i just hope that we i mean we asked the right question oh no we're we're in here but he will do the show justice he will carry out like most kids do but that's yes he's not out of here today so so this is a little bit off topic uh type of thing um you know uh it's one of those uh off the beaten past shows as far as maralia goes and then we'll probably uh bring it back full circle in the next couple shows of some maralia stuff but uh but uh yeah i'm looking forward to it it's something different um this is going to be a show that i'm definitely not going to run out and buy any type of animals after yeah that's not going to happen do it the show yeah you know but i i'm not going to end the show and be like you know you what i really want to have to ever i mean that it's not going to happen this time i want to brown make um yeah i think that uh you know we'll probably approach the the the show from two different areas maybe we'll we'll talk about the natural history and some of the you know the type of venomous stuff like that and then maybe some of the uh you know if you are interested in perhaps keeping um you know these species uh then maybe talk about some uh captivity requirements uh you know that uh she that you need to really think of and who knows maybe even um you know uh what's his name will stop by and uh introduce the show um what's the same y'all do it don't i know what you're showing and i'm not oh yeah yeah okay i don't want i don't want to i don't want to i don't want my name to be attached to this but go on that's gonna send me a message and say do it i know it when he's listening to the end of the story yeah um that is evil like that but go on yeah okay so uh all right so so there we go um as far as awesome america python radio uh if you like the podcast and you want to learn more about remorrelia check out marrelia python radio.com um if you have any questions or comments about the show future guest uh you can send us an email and info at marrelia python radio.com you can check out our facebook page marrelia python radio be sure to give us a like and be sure to share the show uh if there's shows that you like get it out there spread the word and uh we are the nominating process i believe for radio show here so uh if you like go and uh go over to the reptile report and uh give us a mention to nominate us uh for radio show i'll put a link i'll put a link on the pic of the week okay we always do and so yeah key grab heel there yep so uh let's see where else you can also also follow us on twitter at marrelia python and uh if you want to subscribe to the show to the podcast you can do it on iTunes or whatever podcast app you happen to use you know uh we appreciate uh all the breeders and all the people that keepers and come on and and talk with us and uh share their knowledge with us so you know do us a favor and do them a favor and get those shows out there and spread the word um let's see what else says far as myself uh eb marrelia uh you can check out my website eb marrelia dot com my facebook page eb marrelia i'm on twitter i'm also on instagram uh if you have a question for me personally uh you can send it to eric at eb marrelia dot com or send me a message on facebook that's fine too uh either way we'll work um obviously with us there's no shipping at the moment um however i believe that we'll be with Owen at the uh Hamburg show in february oh my god he comes down from on high to mingle with commoners okay yeah i will be able to take off work uh for once and uh be able to uh hopefully hang out and shoot the shit and i'll probably bring some stuff like that too good because i don't have any so you should bring as many as you can to build my displays that's if i have non-broken displays before forever clear oh it's still i have on that now oh good so uh i have uh i'll also throw this out there real quick before you give your shout outs is um i also have a few calendars left uh most of the people that um have ordered them uh should have gotten them by now i see a lot of people especially people overseas that are they're starting to trickle slowly but surely uh sorry about the delay this year for sure we'll be starting them in probably the end of august that way they're done put the rest yeah uh we will also i had people contacting me about carpets fest so we're gonna have to pick a date soon and uh figure that out literally you have to move first yeah i know it's literally five months away i don't know oh and it's looking like it might be at your spot again no not again yeah uh so anyway we'll have to uh we have to get together anyway because i got stuff for you and what not before that so uh calendar people overseas are getting calendars i can't get one but i'm part of the day show yeah right um so uh yeah so look out for that um i know a couple people have contacted me uh they're wondering about that i guess because they have to take off of work and such so you plan yeah i got you yep that's all i got so if you want to calendar just reach out and you know i tried to uh there's only a few left so uh if you want one 20 bucks shipped uh just uh reach out to me and we'll get it to you that's all i got cool all right for me you can go through rogue-reptiles.com it's got the whole thing it's going on a rogue um the for sale page is up to date uh that i'm aware i have to go look um like eric we're not doing any shipping so if you're going to be at a show in the east coast that i regularly either attend or vendor you can pick up a baby at those free of charge uh you can also go through rogue-reptiles on facebook.com give us a like as well as you can peruse everything that's going on over there a full list of all the animals and pairs that we're breeding are on both the website and the facebook page if you want to get on any list for any of those babies just let me know we'll put you on the list and as babies become available we will offer them to first come first serve uh i will be at the outvending the next show we're vending is the hamford reptile show in hamford pennsylvania and that is the 27th of february uh if you are interested in the babies want to make sure that i bring them let us know i think i i now that eric's coming i know he'll be there and i'll probably split in some animals with him uh i think we're going to split some of the two other people uh we do not have that many babies left so if you're waiting for a caramel jack uh don't wait i only have two more left and that's it so jump now um and that's all i got here for me and that's all we got for you guys tonight so what i will say is thank you all for listening and we will catch you all next week for some more morality of python radio good night! hey chad brown here you may remember me at the line back in the NFL or the reptile breeder and the owner of proge dot i've been hurtin 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 breeding and keeping reptiles as a hobbyist which is why my partner robin and markeland 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 dot 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 we can feature outstanding breeders and hobbyists just like you the reptile report offers powerful brandy and marketing exposure for your business and the best part is it's free you're a buyer or a breeder you got to check out the reptile report marketplace the marketplace is the reptile world's most 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