New Year New Projects

Hello everyone,

December 2012 was a busy time here. I was in the middle of new additions of our reptile collections and a few headaches involving our reptiles. First off I spent most of the month constructing a snake/lizard rack heated by 4" belly FlexWatt heat tape.

This was harder then I originally thought it was going to be. The wood was not all completely straight and small modifications had to be made or else snakes would be able to get out. I built this rack to fit Sterilite 32 quart tubs. I had also bought 15 quart tubs also by Sterilite that said they were the same size height and they were not. The 15 quarts are actually 1/4 inch shorter, so I will have to use these tubs with lids. The first two shelves are wired together which will house our red eye croc skinks and the bottom three shelves with house the western hognose snakes.

The plain with the hognose snakes is to produce snow morphs, but depending on what we see at the Los Angeles SuperShow will decided what will be produced.

Some of the new additions that were made were we bought a new female "Aquaflame" Collared lizard and 2 more Steppe Runner lizards. The reason why I put the quotes around aquaflame is that the female we bought is much bluer then our originally collareds we bought from Hardcore herps. We know he produces aquaflames and is a reliable source. When we talked to the seller of this new collared she told us the male that produced this was extremely blue. I have a feeling that this new female collared lizard we picked up might be a Dickerson's Collared lizard.  Here is a photo of what that lizard looks like taking from herpnation.com

During the month of December we also tried breeding our Red Eye Tree frogs. We have two males and two females. We created our rain tank and had it raining for about 5-8 hours a day. Males were jumping on the females like crazy and riding on top of them all night and most of their sleeping days but the females were not laying eyes. We are going to stop trying to breeding them for the remainder for now and give them a couple of months off and try again.

If you want to see and follow some of our reptile projects check us out at http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePhotocaddy

Natural Sunning and Observations

Sunday November 4th was a great day for natural sunning for our high temp lizards. In the container that we use to house our lizards during habitat cleaning and weekly weighting proved to be a good option to house them to get natural sun. Outside temps were in the mid 80s but inside the plastic tub was around 100F. The aquaflame collareds loved it. As you can see from the picture they are starting to lose their darker spots and gain more of the blue color. The male is on the rock and the female is sitting on the tub attempting to eat grass. They female as be gaining a lot of weight recently and is catching up with the male. Male currently is 12.4g while the female is 11.2g.

After the collareds were done. I moved them back into their tank and put all 4 of our steppe runners in to get some natural sun. Watching them you could see they did not like the exposure of being open. Next time we will provide more hiding places during these outings. Another surprising thing was they did not like the high temps. Care sheets say they like temps in the low 100s but while outside they kept their mouths open to let heat out. Ruled out stress because they were moving around the tub and eating crickets normally.  Picture to the right shows the male in the bottom center. Currently he weighs 10.7g. Next steppe runner is 6g.

Update on Aquaflame collared lizards:

 This is our male here to the left. He is starting to show more and more blue on his body. Also the orange is really starting to pop. Male is roughly about 8grams.

 Here is our female. As you can see she is smaller then the male. *About 1gram smaller in weight.

They are also becoming bonded to one another as well. Been noticing that they are starting to share the same hide when they sleep. Good signs!

Third baby red croc skink hatched

Our third baby croc skink hatched on Friday 9/28/2012. Took a couple of hours for him to break through the shell. He is now is a small critter keeper so that we can monitor how many mealworms he is eating. After his first night it appears that he ate one mealworm. Our other babies skinks didn't touch a mealworm for at least a couple of days after hatching. Usually babies are still finishing the yoke that they were using while in the egg. This baby came in weighing 2.1 grams. We will be monitoring weight to see how much they grow.

To give you an idea what the parents look like, the mother is to the right. She is about 6-7 inches long and roughly 40 grams.

Reptile Breeding Projects

This blog website is going to be used to share information on our current breeding projects. Currently we have two breeding pairs of red eye crocodile skinks, colony of Indonesian Tree boas, one pair of aquaflame collared lizards, and 4 steppe runner lizards. 

Their will be pages dedicated to each project giving information just as care and helpful information on how the breeding is coming along.