Snakes

Alright, the snakes' tank setups:

California Kingsnake

So, I bought her a new 20-gallon long tank with secure lid, and a heating mat. I lined the bottom with some T-Rex brand cypress mulch. Then I topped it with with their "Sand Naturals", which is a sand substitute made of calcium carbonate. We'll see how this substrate goes. She is fine on sand, because I usually place her mouse on a feeding plate and she doesn't appear to ingest any sand. I like to scatter a bit of aspen shavings around on top to help absorb waste, and so that waste is easier to remove.

Because she's the biggest snake (both currently and future) she has the biggest tank, and has just gotten a larger water dish she could soak in, and larger hiding spots on both sides of the tank (warm and cool). No basking light right now since the temp should be high enough (this room is warmer than the rest of the house, what with all the pets being in here!), though I'll keep an eye on the temp to be sure.

Pueblan Milk Snake

He gets the 10-gallon tank I bought at the reptile show that has the wooden casing and very secure lid. Going for the same substrate here, except they only had 1 bag of the other so he gets "Calcium sand." Also calcium carbonate and safer to consume than silica sand.
Enough light shines over from the tank beside it, and no other heat/light needed.
He has inherited the hide rock since the kingsnake outgrew it. He seems very happy with it! So, I put it on the warm side for him.

Kenyan Sand Boa

I had thought a moister substrate might be nice, but this may not be best long term, due to bacteria and/or parasites. So I will just make sure she has sufficient burrowing material and provision for the safe feeling they need, by having something substantial over them. I've read that a glass plate does the trick for them, while still leaving you with a viewable snake, so I'm working on a cool new tank setup for her.

For right now she's in a place she's super happy in: dirt & coconut stuff (bed-a-beast), a little moss and bark tossed in. This will go in the moist box after I finish the new tank setup.

Oops! Just received bite #2. She was okay about it last night, but it seems she didn't take too kindly to me taking her out of the substrate tonight, lol.

I can't blame her, though. Poor things; all this shuffling around. I'm sure they'll get more settled over the next few days.

Snakesss

Guess what?  Yesterday I got my first snake!  Not counting the wild corn snake I housed last winter 'til it got warm enough in Spring to release him back outside, after he snuck into my basement and trapped himself on my glueboard used to catch other bugs, lol.
 (click any pics in this post to enlarge them)
He was a royal pain,wouldn't eat, so I had to let him go.

So here he is, my first snake!


And...... my second snake!  This one's a female.  I just couldn't decide, so I got them both.
 
And, consequently, I also got my first snake bite... ROFL.  I knew it would happen sooner or later, but I didn't think it would be THAT much sooner!  The milk snake does *not* particularly care to be held. Yet.



Yes, that's right.  I got MORE pets.  It really doesn't *look* like that many pets when I look around my home, but it sounds like a lot when they're all listed out.  I've had a running joke that I should charge admission to my "zoo," lol.  You can see most all of them on my Pets page.  Yeah, they have their own page - check it out if you want to see the rest of their pics.  They needed their own photo space.  I like taking their pics. :P  Here's a running tally of what all I have now.

50-gallon saltwater tank
50-gallon cichlid tank
and 1 Convict cichlid in his own tank
1 red-eared slider turtle
3 musk turtles
about a half-dozen fire-belly toads
2 gerbils
2 snakes
1 leopard gecko
1 bearded dragon
2 female bettas, 1 male betta
and 3 goldfish rescues

Not counting the worms, crickets, and feeder fish...!

Bearded Dragon

He's growing fast already. Took this pic a week or so ago:

Oh no, not ANOTHER pet!

It's a baby boy!




When I brought him home, I was so worried because stupidly I forgot to ask the breeder what he's been feeding it. I know the standard foods they accept so I know what all it should be, so I wasn't thinking. I was just so worried about even getting there and finding someone who wasn't packed up and leaving the reptile show yet. (In fact it was so close to closing time that they didn't even charge us admission, lol.) The main person I went there to see wasn't there anyway (at least I can still use the info from her site, though!). But thankfully the other guy who had some beardies for sale was still on the premise. Of course when someone got his attention and let him know someone wanted to buy, he was glad to bring out a tub of lil' cuties to show me. And for less than what they had been selling for. Just a hatchling, but only $40 for a bearded dragon. And not one from the local pet store, either: one that's been handled a lot, and is very personable already. :) They're soooo cute!!! XD

He's crossed with a Sandfire and has red markings behind the ears. Anyway, back to the beginning. I tried feeding him greens and a tiny cricket but he was just not at all interested, and even a bit scared of the cricket. o_o So he missed eating anything Sunday evening. Thankfully, I still have mealworms who have been raising themselves for the past few months..... ^_^; who have a ton of baby worms. Last night after I went to bed (when I'm finally sitting still enough do my best remembering, lol) it struck me that they'd be perfect. This morning when I got up, I grabbed several and headed off to his cage and WOW he snapped them right up. If you've never watched a bearded dragon eat, you should! They're so cute. They look sooooo gratified.

Thankfully I have his initial 10 gallon tank, and his 20 ready for in a few months, but will have to do some re-arranging to get what he'll need after that. Suggested 40 or 50 gallon. I have my leopard gecko in a 40 right now, and if he doesn't make use of the space, he just may go back into the 20 long for the beardie's sake. The turtle has to stay where he is! At any rate, it won't cost me much to afford this awesome pet. :D Otherwise I could NOT have had it. And really I shouldn't have anyway. But.....

Anyway, wish me luck in rearing this wee fella. Now that I'm confident he is an avid eater, I think it will be just fine! He's already the darned cutest thing ever. Hates to be put down. Wow, this is going to be my biggest reptile yet.

Chameleon Troubles

A couple of days ago I noticed a problem with my veiled chameleon. I really wasn't sure what compaction looked like from the outside, so as best I could figure, I thought maybe this could have been the issue. It didn't really seem like it, so I waited until the weekend to see what happened... if he could ever pass what was obstructing his tract or not.... and it's not like I could really handle it during the week, what with the new job and all. O_O Tried to soak the poor creature a bit in water to soften things up. It seemed that it would help, if I could keep him in for 15 minutes or more, but this just wasn't possible. He had something hopelessly lodged, stucked, or something, coming out of his butt. It wouldn't budge and it appeared to be ... well, like, fused to his skin.

Nothing had changed by the time I got up today, so I decided to actually take him in to a vet today. Clearly he could not excrete any waste and if it kept up any longer I knew he wouldn't make it. He started to become very restless in his tank today, so I knew things were probably getting to a really uncomfortable point for him. I could not just watch him suffer and die, and I sure as heck could not put him down.

Of course I had to do a bit of calling around to see who had any training/experience in dealing with reptiles at all. I thankfully found a vet VERY nearby (that I didn't even know existed, lol) with a doctor who was in!, who was able to treat him. I must admit, I ended up paying more for the trip than I did for the chameleon himself (not too much more though, thankfully; I bought him for a little over $70 at a reptile show, and the bill was $85 ::ouch::). But they were able to remove his blockage pretty easily, and sent me home with some mineral oil and a syringe to give him water through. Apparently they had to get a needle and use it to slowly cut his skin away from the hopelessly dried up turd of doom.

Naturally they said that his area would be a bit inflammed for a few days. So I'm to put a bit of Neosporin on it a couple times a day.
I was very pleased that they commented on how nice and healthy he is, and that his weight is good. They said most people who get one of these for pets don't manage to keep them too long. They certainly aren't easy pets to keep. Exotic indeed! I had decided that if I lost him I wasn't going to buy a replacement for a while. He's not hard to tend to at all and I enjoy him, but it just wouldn't have been the same. I'm glad that he should now be with me for hopefully a good while longer. ^_^

Burnout

I never thought I would get burned out on my fish hobby, but I think it's beginning to happen. It's not fish in general; I certainly still love my bettas dearly and want to raise some spawns. I won't dream of taking down any of my "pet" fish tanks, either. I think the real problem is not having enough time to maintain a breeding program. And I don't intend on selling off any of my equipment. But I'm considering taking some of it ... well, offline for now. I have the guppy rack that.... well, has suffered some casualties due to I am assuming the lack of water changes.... with the empty tanks (not all of them, just some), I could migrate my bettas into this and have just 1 rack. I will still have the barracks, as I cannot house the bettas in the 10 gallon tanks. I was planning to build a drip table for juvenile bettas but I am going to withhold on this for now. The barracks is again beginning to stop up so it requires a very thorough cleaning and flushing, and this will be a huge undertaking I haven't had the time to do yet. I had to remove several boxes from the wall so I could arrange all the fish under all the available dripping emitters; the rest do not drip at all right now. They were all going strong when I got the emitters, but debris has undoubtably gotten in the way of the rest. I don't know how I will clean out the hoses yet, but I must do so. I guess I'll have to take all the emitters out and flush water through the lines when all the fish are off the wall, on a table or something, for a while. I suppose I could put a fish each in the old gallon jars in the basement for up to a week while I work on it. With the hurricane, losing 1 job due to the closing, and getting a new job, I have just been too preoccupied so far for about the past month now. :>

So yeah, maybe I am going to slow down a bit on the fishing for now, if only I could figure out how. I can't exactly stop the barracks, and it's the biggest hassle right now. :E And there's *no* way I could maintain jar changes again if I didn't have the drip system. Maybe I will just take down a few tanks, and breed very few fish for a while. It's not a hobby I'm going to tire of anytime soon, so I should just take it slow and keep a handle on the rest of life first, for now, I guess. :P

Grindal Worms

Wheeee! Once again I have a multitude of grindal worms. Steph revived her old dried up block of what was once worms and was inspired to write up a Word doc (which I still have yet to check out! I always forget from home, and I don't have it with me at work, ack). So I decided that maybe I should try my cultures again. I had to let them die down due to the sickening invasion of fruit flies. The cultures began to stink after a while so I just let them go. I let some of them dry up (the stinky ones), and I just stopped feeding some of the others that'd had the fruit flies and/or mites in them, to see if the baddies would go away. They did and I saw a worm or two. Man, those things survived for a month or two with no extra food in the dirt. Which I guess really is not a big surprise after all, considering they're worms and that's what worms do, heh.

So anyway, we went to Applebee's this weekend to eat. I got something to go in this really cool domed shaped bowl with lid that's maybe 8 inches across and I'd guess about 6 inches high. Shaped kinda like a UFO, heh heh. So I filled it up with dirt and slapped a bit of moistened food on top, and sat down 2 of the collection plates from my other now-overflowing cultures (quite literally! they were crawling all the way out of the tubs and into the rubbermaid!). I bet soon that thing will be filled up too.

Yay, maybe I can start selling grindal cultures soon in addition to the microworm cultures. :D ACK!! That reminds me that I forgot to ship out 2 cultures today. I didn't forget, really, I just didn't pack them last night while I still had time AND remembered.