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
