Herpetoculture Inc

21/08/2024

My Aru pair will be bred (I hope) this fall. Should produce very nice offspring!

03/08/2024

Florida death adder.

03/08/2024

A nice cb female Spilotes from Guyana / Suriname stock.

03/08/2024

My male Aru with colors, for some reason.

03/08/2024

Growing up with black and white h**p books makes finding the real thing in nature, in living color, a pretty amazing experience. Weird to think now, but I spent a lot of time looking at black and white pics of h**ps, wondering what they must look like in real life. The color descriptions in h**p books were very elaborate in order to compensate for the lack of color photography. But didnt come close to capturing the real deal.

31/07/2024

Finally moving these guys to their outdoor cage. It's a lean-to along one of the out buildings. Perfect morning for them to be out basking. Since this is a workshop I can keep an eye on the while working. I'll need a wifi cam for the evenings

29/07/2024

Question about egg quality. If you zoom in on these freshly laid Spilotes eggs you will see all sorts of little imperfections. I dont believe these are normal, but Im wondering what causes them? Are they an indication of nutrition issues? Cage temps less than optimum? Old age of female?

Notice too the big variation in size, something else I would not consider normal.

Has anyone had these sort of less than perfect eggs that they corrected with supplements, or other means?

28/07/2024

This took forever. Probably 6 or 7 days of endlessly exploring every corner of her cage before FINALLY hunkering down under the leaves in the center of the cage and laying her eggs on top of the Miracle-gro potting mix

26/07/2024

Black and white female is laying eggs today!
Spilotes pulatus, tiger rat snake.

02/07/2024

Starting to look like the "Good 'Ol Days" :-)

Prices from today ....

Ball pythons $35, 6/$30
Tiger rat snakes, $125
Yellow tail cribos: $499
Nerodia $5.00
Corn snake morphs: $45
Crested geckos: 12/$18
Leopard Geckos: 6/$15
Tokay Geckos: 6/$12.50

26/05/2024

My Black and White Guyana female. Most Spilotes are black and cream, so her whiteness really stands out. She bred with my male a month or so ago and looks to be gravid. Next year I'll be able to cross her with a hold back male she produced almost 2 years ago, to see if that whiteness is genetic.

12/04/2024

This is the other 2 emerald tree boa babies I held back. Being placed in their new solitary confinement. :-(
The patternless is smaller than the other, and eats less readily. The reduced pattern is just slightly smaller than the other similar sibling.

04/04/2024

Hey all you emerald tree boa keepers! (Please share this)

Im seeing an increase in the number of people reporting regurgitation syndrome in ETBs. This *might* mean an exporter or importer or re-seller is spreading the disease - probably inadvertently.

We dont have any Federal agency that tracks these h**p diseases so we have to try to do it ourselves. We can help each other by pin-pointing the source of the disease.

If you or someone you know has had an emerald tree boa start regurgitating in the past 6 to 12 months please let me know.

If you can, state the origin of the snake (where and when it was purchased) and when it started regurgitating. Also if it died, the approximate date of death.

29/03/2024

Patternless emerald tree boa

29/03/2024

The good old days ...

I remember being at Zoological Imports looking at some of their illegal fly river turtles when Mario pulled in. He was driving a long black Mercedes, had a load of gold necklaces around his neck, a beautiful woman dressed to the nines on his arm and an ocelot on a leash. :-)
The later stories about him dismembering his wife and her informant lover with a chainsaw were less amusing.
My first "exotic" snake - a Colombian Spilotes - was a gift from a thriving Colombian import business I helped out one day delivering bricks to mansions in Miami Beach. My snake was too thin to have been loaded up with balloons of co***ne like the boas in the dark Miami back alley shop. Stacked to the ceiling in wire cages full of Colombian boas.
I remember the importer I was working for loading guns and setting them strategically around his shop before "buyers" were due to arrive. And one of the gang - the son of Green Bay Packer's legendary quarterback (I forget his name) - died of a co***ne induced heart attack and was mostly eaten by his Rottweilers.
I suppose some day I'll have to talk about my introduction to the p**n industry down there.

Warm and fuzzy memories!

In one cage a quintuplet of blue-green rhinoceros iguanas crowd driftwood perches. In another, cougar cubs wrestle like rambunctious children. Seized at Miami International Airport two years ago, the cats arrived here when they still fit in the palm of a hand. South American marmosets, banned as imp...

15/03/2024

This annoys me. Lots of imported, wild caught green tree pythons being sold as captive born on MorphMarket by
Reptile Pets Direct . I know times are tough, but selling a wild caught, fragile snake to a beginner as a captive born is just plain rotten. This is not new. There is plenty of money to be made honestly brokering these animals. No one should support any company that will lie about a living thing just to make a few bucks.

15/03/2024

When Emerald tree boas escape from their cages it's like, oh, there you are.

09/03/2024

Nice looking bu**er

07/03/2024

Red phase plain bellied water snake, Nerodia erythrogaster. Formerly red-bellied water snake, Nerodia e. erythrogaster. Young male born here 2022.

07/03/2024

Born here Dec 2022, so at a neat young age / size. They have been eating live since the week they were born but Im switching them slowly over to thawed from tongs. They still all live together.
Emerald tree boa

06/03/2024

Swollen with babies, basking within the security of the cover the leaves provide. Ill never find the babies in this 8 foot cage!

04/03/2024

My Paraguay cross yellow tail cribos bred this winter at 3 years old. They are quite a bit more yellow than pure Guyana / Surinam yellow tails, and uncommon in the hobby. They are darkening now at 3 but still are very cool looking snakes. These eggs should hatch around May 1.

21/02/2024

I was reminded of these old photos this evening. This was years ago before anyone really knew what a hognose snake bite would or could do. The snake missed the mouse and got my finger so I let it chew for a minute or two. It easterly got its rear teeth involved and I was surprised what vice like pressure it could manage with those jaws.
I had swelling up to my elbow and my hand really felt like it might pop. Couldn't move my fingers at all.
Ive had a number of people say this was an allergic reaction, but thats not accurate. This was just an old fashion envenomation. :-)

20/02/2024

My big female FL banded water snake, Nerodia fasciata pictiventris. She is the lightest of my dark phase group.

28/11/2023

My yellow cribos are breeding age this year I think. These are yellow because they have Paraguay blood in them. Pure Paraguay cribos can be close to pure yellow snakes - really beautiful. These are Guyana / Paraguay. They are glowing here because of the halogen they are basking under, but are nice looking snakes even without the enhancement. I bought 200 live chicks at the hatchery (0.25 each!) and tried to set them up in a temp fenced in area in the snake room. They all got out and are running back and forth teasing these guys who would like to eat about 20 of them.

23/11/2023

I declared a couple years ago that I had attended my very last h**p show. It was Tinley at the height of the pyramid schemes - geckos, dragons and ball pythons.

Jam packed with large people all sweating profusely and stinking of sweet BBQ sauce. At least I hoped it was sweet BBQ sauce. Please don’t tell me it wasn’t.

When I thought it could get no worse in flooded at least 400 adult shaped children dressed in full sized, fuzzy animal costumes. I was told they all came at the invite of a place called Snake Discovery and they were there to meet the star of that show and get some plastic trinket from him or her. Fu***ng great.

This physical and psychological torture was made acutely worse by the fact that every table was packed with little other than the bubble species. And that seemingly every ;last person there had traveled from their trailer home in rural Michigan, or Ohio or Missouri in order to bring home animal “investments’. Fu***ng gross.

But Im re-thinkong my declaration now that 90% of the money is quickly draining out of the hobby. I am worried about what will happen to the hundreds of thousands of reptiles and amphibians that are now nearly worthless to their “investors”. Tragically, most will probably be neglected to death. Many others will be euthanized as the owner / investors realize it costs more to care for them than it is worth. Rescues will be overwhelmed, thousands will be released to suffer and die in the wild.

But the h**p shows may actually be interesting again. In a way they haven’t been since about 2005. More diverse species, more knowledgable breeders, smaller crowds who aren’t afraid to wear deodorant, and who are there because they are fascinated with these creatures - and prepared to loose plenty of money caring for them. Im really very happy about this!

But for those who thought they could make easy money abusing h**ps - we have to try to make sure you dont get back into the hobby. And maybe that means forming some sort of captive care group that works with legislatures and animal welfare groups to create minimal standards of care, and figure out how to enforce these standards.

16/10/2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kwJZSoeS08

Even experienced keepers seem to misunderstand humidity in our vivariums. This short video will help.

16/07/2023

In order to get from bright orange babies to bright green adults they have to go thru gold!

13/07/2023

An adult male Tiger rat snake, Spilotes pullatus. He is the father of the babies Im raising.

11/07/2023

3 little fatties. Almost 8 months old now and have never been tease fed, or tong fed. All meals have just been live, offered in a bowl set on the scaffolding. Because of the cage design I have never had to remove them from their cage or otherwise touch them. Just once to determine s*x. The built in rain system means no water bowls either.