The Reptile/Amphibian Thread

[Surtur]

As suggested by @mortal_wombat to avoid spamming up the boatard thread, here we can talk about all our favorite creepy critters.

 

[DV 259]

I mentioned in the boaman thread that I had a story about how I lost my entire collection of snakes ...

Spoiler: WALL O’ TEXT

Here’s a little backstory: I got into herps in 2002. After doing my research for over a year, I started with (mostly) aquatic salamanders - axolotls, lesser sirens, a mudpuppy and a tiger salamander (that I originally thought was an axolotl.) From there, I got into snakes - ball pythons (because I was still a snake beginner and preferred boids over colubrids) and that evolved into ball morphs, and eventually other pythons - a blood python and a white-lipped python. I worked at Petco as the resident fish/reptile expert, so when people wanted to unload their reptiles, they’d bring them to my store. Because we didn’t have the facilities to care for reptiles, I was always pressured into adopting them. Just before I lost everything, I was going into my first season breeding balls. I only bred two snakes - the Pastel x Possible Black Pastel (mostly just to see if she was a Black Pastel, if not, then at least I’d still get some pastel babies) and the het pieds.

By the time I lost my reptile collection, I was at:
1.0 Pastel
1.1 100% Het Pied (gravid when I left, 5 eggs when I returned)
0.1 (Poss.) Black Pastel - WC (gravid when I left, 6 eggs when I returned)
2.0 Granite
3.5 Normal (4 “fancy” juvenile, 2 sub-adult, 2 adult)
0.2 Red-Tailed Boas
1.0 Blood Python
0.0.1 White-Lipped Python
1.0 Savannah Monitor

I had over a thousand axolotls by then (my 3 females had laid eggs and my garage was covered with critter keepers full of babies,) 1 mudpuppy, 4 tiger salamanders and 1 lesser siren. My salamanders weren’t affected by what happened to my reptiles, as they were kept in a different part of the house.

Anyway, I was in college at the time and was chosen to go to Scotland for a month in the summer of 2007. My mom was going to take care of the salamanders, but I had to find someone else to care for the reptiles. Because of how many animals I had, boarding them at the local fish & herp store was out of the question. (My friends at the herp store offered to give me a discount, but they didn’t have enough room to house everyone anyway.) So I called up a friend, Eric, who was interested in snakes to care for my collection. In return, I’d give him a pastel baby and one of my adult normals. He mostly had experience with boas and corns, but he’d come over all the time to learn about pythons.

While I was gone, Eric would send pictures and updates on the snakes and everything seemed cool. My mom trusted him, he and his girlfriend were close friends and former co-workers of mine, and she knew he kept overnight work hours, so she gave him a key so he could come by and take care of the snakes while she was at work during the day. Everything was fine until the end of the third week when my mom e-mailed me, saying there was a weird smell coming from the reptile room. (She refused to go in there.) I told her maybe one of the snakes regurgitated and asked her to call Eric and have him come over and clean it up ASAP.

Apparently, I had a long phone conversation with my mom between then and when I came home, but throughout my trip, I was having an issue with my medication (another story) and I don’t remember it.

When I got home, the house smelled awful. My mom told me that she tried calling Eric tons of times, but he never answered or returned her calls. She eventually went in and cleaned up the remainder of the rat one of the normals regurged, but things started getting smelly again the day before I came home. She figured that Eric would take care of it while she was at work, or I’d do it when I got in.

So ... this is the crazy part - Sometime over the three weeks Eric was supposed to be caring for my snakes, he’d been taking them and either replacing them with other snakes or just outright stealing them. I had 10 normal balls (but only 3 were originally mine to begin with), the blood python (who was a cage-aggressive nasty bastard who really only tolerated me because I gave him food and let him swim a bit in the bathtub), the white-lip, 1 RTB, the savannah monitor, the female het pied, the female black pastel, the pastel and the two clutches of eggs, which had been left with the mothers, despite having two incubators set up for when the eggs were laid. Eric had taken both the granites, the male het pied, and all of my “fancy” normals. He did have the courtesy of replacing the normals and the granite with WC/CB normal babies/juveniles. He’d also taken several of my large tanks and dumped the snakes all in together. My dad helped me build a couple double-doored tanks for the white-lipped and the blood python - both of those were gone and the blood and white lipped were put in 20G long tanks. The boas were tossed into a 10G fish tank, and there were three tanks full of normal ball pythons, because he sprinkled the WC/CB replacements in with them.

As you can probably guess, disease from the WC/CB animals that were thrown in with my collection took everyone out over the following couple months. The exotics vet I took everyone to had to come to the house to treat and diagnose everyone. My house was like the reptile house at the zoo - there were tanks everywhere, just to keep the “getting better” from the “not getting better as fast” animals separated. Out of all the snakes, the blood held on the longest, either he was the most responsive to the antibiotics or he wasn’t as far along in the sickness ... or he subsisted on pure anger and that’s what kept him going. Thankfully, my mom and dad both helped pay off the vet bills and it took me two and a half years to pay them back.

As for Eric ... no one really knows what happened to him. Obviously he’s steering clear of me, but from what I heard, he took the money he got from selling my animals and moved out of state. He broke up with his girlfriend via Facebook message right before he went AWOL, too. She never even knew he’d pulled this, since she’s not one for snakes. For about a year or so afterward, I’d hear random stuff about Eric, like he’d come back to visit or something, but nothing really substantial.

I was super depressed and embarrassed that I let that happen to my animals, so I dropped out of the hobby and didn’t tell anyone what happened on the forums I used to post on. A few years later, a friend was moving and couldn’t take his 6.5ft RTB, so I took her, but after she passed away two years ago, my job moved me half-way across the country and I’m not in a place where I can justify having more animals at the moment. Maybe someday I’ll get back into reptiles, though.

Sorry if it comes across as power leveling at times. This is the first time I ever told anyone on a forum the whole story, or really ever talked about it in detail, and it made me really sad to remember it all and write about it.

 

[Nezy999]

Did you report Eric to the police?

 

[DV 259]

I did, but I lived in a small town and after a week, they kind of gave up trying to help me locate my snakes. I valued the animals/cages that were taken at less than $500, so I don’t think that really lit the fire under them to move any quicker, either.

 

[fuehrer_dessler]

Shit, i thought you're discussing David Icke's lizard people shit here!!

 

[Durable Mike Malloy]

I mentioned in the boaman thread that I had a story about how I lost my entire collection of snakes ...

Spoiler: WALL O’ TEXT

Here’s a little backstory: I got into herps in 2002. After doing my research for over a year, I started with (mostly) aquatic salamanders - axolotls, lesser sirens, a mudpuppy and a tiger salamander (that I originally thought was an axolotl.) From there, I got into snakes - ball pythons (because I was still a snake beginner and preferred boids over colubrids) and that evolved into ball morphs, and eventually other pythons - a blood python and a white-lipped python. I worked at Petco as the resident fish/reptile expert, so when people wanted to unload their reptiles, they’d bring them to my store. Because we didn’t have the facilities to care for reptiles, I was always pressured into adopting them. Just before I lost everything, I was going into my first season breeding balls. I only bred two snakes - the Pastel x Possible Black Pastel (mostly just to see if she was a Black Pastel, if not, then at least I’d still get some pastel babies) and the het pieds.

By the time I lost my reptile collection, I was at:
1.0 Pastel
1.1 100% Het Pied (gravid when I left, 5 eggs when I returned)
0.1 (Poss.) Black Pastel - WC (gravid when I left, 6 eggs when I returned)
2.0 Granite
3.5 Normal (4 “fancy” juvenile, 2 sub-adult, 2 adult)
0.2 Red-Tailed Boas
1.0 Blood Python
0.0.1 White-Lipped Python
1.0 Savannah Monitor

I had over a thousand axolotls by then (my 3 females had laid eggs and my garage was covered with critter keepers full of babies,) 1 mudpuppy, 4 tiger salamanders and 1 lesser siren. My salamanders weren’t affected by what happened to my reptiles, as they were kept in a different part of the house.

Anyway, I was in college at the time and was chosen to go to Scotland for a month in the summer of 2007. My mom was going to take care of the salamanders, but I had to find someone else to care for the reptiles. Because of how many animals I had, boarding them at the local fish & herp store was out of the question. (My friends at the herp store offered to give me a discount, but they didn’t have enough room to house everyone anyway.) So I called up a friend, Eric, who was interested in snakes to care for my collection. In return, I’d give him a pastel baby and one of my adult normals. He mostly had experience with boas and corns, but he’d come over all the time to learn about pythons.

While I was gone, Eric would send pictures and updates on the snakes and everything seemed cool. My mom trusted him, he and his girlfriend were close friends and former co-workers of mine, and she knew he kept overnight work hours, so she gave him a key so he could come by and take care of the snakes while she was at work during the day. Everything was fine until the end of the third week when my mom e-mailed me, saying there was a weird smell coming from the reptile room. (She refused to go in there.) I told her maybe one of the snakes regurgitated and asked her to call Eric and have him come over and clean it up ASAP.

Apparently, I had a long phone conversation with my mom between then and when I came home, but throughout my trip, I was having an issue with my medication (another story) and I don’t remember it.

When I got home, the house smelled awful. My mom told me that she tried calling Eric tons of times, but he never answered or returned her calls. She eventually went in and cleaned up the remainder of the rat one of the normals regurged, but things started getting smelly again the day before I came home. She figured that Eric would take care of it while she was at work, or I’d do it when I got in.

So ... this is the crazy part - Sometime over the three weeks Eric was supposed to be caring for my snakes, he’d been taking them and either replacing them with other snakes or just outright stealing them. I had 10 normal balls (but only 3 were originally mine to begin with), the blood python (who was a cage-aggressive nasty bastard who really only tolerated me because I gave him food and let him swim a bit in the bathtub), the white-lip, 1 RTB, the savannah monitor, the female het pied, the female black pastel, the pastel and the two clutches of eggs, which had been left with the mothers, despite having two incubators set up for when the eggs were laid. Eric had taken both the granites, the male het pied, and all of my “fancy” normals. He did have the courtesy of replacing the normals and the granite with WC/CB normal babies/juveniles. He’d also taken several of my large tanks and dumped the snakes all in together. My dad helped me build a couple double-doored tanks for the white-lipped and the blood python - both of those were gone and the blood and white lipped were put in 20G long tanks. The boas were tossed into a 10G fish tank, and there were three tanks full of normal ball pythons, because he sprinkled the WC/CB replacements in with them.

As you can probably guess, disease from the WC/CB animals that were thrown in with my collection took everyone out over the following couple months. The exotics vet I took everyone to had to come to the house to treat and diagnose everyone. My house was like the reptile house at the zoo - there were tanks everywhere, just to keep the “getting better” from the “not getting better as fast” animals separated. Out of all the snakes, the blood held on the longest, either he was the most responsive to the antibiotics or he wasn’t as far along in the sickness ... or he subsisted on pure anger and that’s what kept him going. Thankfully, my mom and dad both helped pay off the vet bills and it took me two and a half years to pay them back.

As for Eric ... no one really knows what happened to him. Obviously he’s steering clear of me, but from what I heard, he took the money he got from selling my animals and moved out of state. He broke up with his girlfriend via Facebook message right before he went AWOL, too. She never even knew he’d pulled this, since she’s not one for snakes. For about a year or so afterward, I’d hear random stuff about Eric, like he’d come back to visit or something, but nothing really substantial.

I was super depressed and embarrassed that I let that happen to my animals, so I dropped out of the hobby and didn’t tell anyone what happened on the forums I used to post on. A few years later, a friend was moving and couldn’t take his 6.5ft RTB, so I took her, but after she passed away two years ago, my job moved me half-way across the country and I’m not in a place where I can justify having more animals at the moment. Maybe someday I’ll get back into reptiles, though.

Sorry if it comes across as power leveling at times. This is the first time I ever told anyone on a forum the whole story, or really ever talked about it in detail, and it made me really sad to remember it all and write about it.

I hate this story
Poor you, and your poor animals! Years ago, I used to live in a house with like eight hundred roommates, one of whom was a reptile hobbyist. I'd watch his babies when he traveled, and it was always really stressful because another guy living in the house had previously stolen some of them to support a painkiller addiction. I was constantly petrified that extremely expensive snakes or lizards would go missing on my watch, but nothing bad ever happened.

I did completely freak out when a clutch of chameleons started hatching, though, because I didn't know it was normal for them to chill in their eggs absorbing their yolks for a while and I thought they were all dying.

 

[RIck Sanchez]

Ted Cruz is my favorite reptile.

 

[DV 259]

I hate this story
Poor you, and your poor animals! Years ago, I used to live in a house with like eight hundred roommates, one of whom was a reptile hobbyist. I'd watch his babies when he traveled, and it was always really stressful because another guy living in the house had previously stolen some of them to support a painkiller addiction. I was constantly petrified that extremely expensive snakes or lizards would go missing on my watch, but nothing bad ever happened.

I did completely freak out when a clutch of chameleons started hatching, though, because I didn't know it was normal for them to chill in their eggs absorbing their yolks for a while and I thought they were all dying.

I lived in a small town and only really talked to two other local hobbyists, one of whom being the guy who stole my animals and the other being the owner of the local fish/reptile store, so I never really considered that the one guy was a piece of shit. I’m glad that everything went smoothly for you, though. I probably should’ve asked one of my non-hobbyist friends who didn’t mind thawing rats to care for my animals, or boarded half of them.

Awww, baby chameleons! They must’ve been adorable. I don’t know anything about chameleons, so I probably would’ve gone into panic-mode too if I saw them all just hanging out in their eggs. “OhshitohshitohshitohshitIkilledmyroomatesbabiesohshitohshitohshit.”

 

[AnOminous]

Ted Cruz is my favorite reptile.

Ted Cruz is worst reptile.

Remove reptile, remove reptile.

 

[R00T]

Hello sorry to necro this thread but I figured this might be the best place to ask.

I am the new parent of a young Pacman frog and have been having some trouble. The first week was fine as he came out in the evening, ate a bit and during the day slept. However about a week ago he stopped taking offered food and began brumation (the process of burrowing and hardening his skin). I understand this is a response to less than desirable conditions. The cold snap is the big issue I think I am having. The tank humidity I had relatively consistent and I’ve since purchased a fogger that keeps it perfectly between 70-80% humidity. My bigger battle has been the temperature. My apartment is sitting around 72-4 degrees and the monitor I have in the tank is reading closer to 69-70. This is somewhat low and so I installed a heating mat on the bottom. I kept it low for a bit but brought it up significantly last night and he did become active in the evening, however he did not accept any food I attempted To give. I lowered the temp as it seemed like he just moved to a cooler spot in the tank initially but he burrowed again in a spot on the mat after it was turned down.

Today I have turned it back up a little higher and have a soil thermometer arriving. The monitor on the inner side of the tank still read 69 and I did not feel that the mat was necessarily *heating* the inside of the tank other than the soil. I’m at a loss to solve this as a lamp dries out the tank’s environment and the little guy himself. The heating Mat itself is not massive. It only covers a portion of the tank so I’m not as concerned with him getting too hot. There are locations in the tank that will remain cool. Do I just keep the mat on a medium high temp and wait for him to come out, or should I look at getting a space heater to increase the over all air temp in my apartment during this increased cold?

I’m also concerned I’m stressing him out when I try to offer food which is causing the burrowing as well. should I give him more time to get alert and comfortable with the changes in the tank before I introduce food? He’s not appearing underweight or unhealthy and I think my biggest issue is that I’m stressing him out because he’s stressing me out from the reduced eating.

He’s my first frog and I just want to make sure I’m taking the right steps in correcting the issues with the environment. The cold snap definitely caught us both off guard and has made it tougher to make sure he is comfortable and happy. Any advice from experienced amphibian owners is greatly appreciated.

 

[Spock]

Hello sorry to necro this thread but I figured this might be the best place to ask.

Where is his tank? Is it near a window? Is it in a drafty place? Try putting it in a closet. Use foil or plastic wrap to cover one half of the lid entirely, and put the lamp on the uncovered side. If your glass is too thick a heating pad isn't gonna cut it. Make a humid hide for him underneath the covered part of the lid area so he has the option to go in there. If you have a temperature controller you can also plug a heat rock into it, if you really don't want to use a lamp. You need to cover the airflow to maintain humidity, but also have a heat source. If he doesn't have a water dish large enough for him to soak in, put one in there.

 

[R00T]

Where is his tank? Is it near a window? Is it in a drafty place? Try putting it in a closet. Use foil or plastic wrap to cover one half of the lid entirely, and put the lamp on the uncovered side. If your glass is too thick a heating pad isn't gonna cut it. Make a humid hide for him underneath the covered part of the lid area so he has the option to go in there. If you have a temperature controller you can also plug a heat rock into it, if you really don't want to use a lamp. You need to cover the airflow to maintain humidity, but also have a heat source. If he doesn't have a water dish large enough for him to soak in, put one in there.

Water dish is present and has been the whole time. Humidifier keeps the humidity level and the soil is even remaining damp throughout the day once I'm home. They advise against lamps in the case of pacman frogs because lamps focus the heat and dry out the soil and the frog, just over all harsher. He is across the room from the window to allow for light to enter and I purchased a space heater which is keeping the room at his suggested temperatures. The reader in the tank says it's fluctuating between 75-80 in the tank and the soil thermometer reads upper 70s into the 80s which is where it should be. The humidifier runs a little more to counteract the heater but both are functioning as I hoped.

From what I have read once they start brumation they just have to naturally come out of it. I dig him up every few days to check on him and make sure he's healthy and he looks the same, if left a little uncovered he will make the adjustments to cover himself up and burrow again. He's not discolored or appearing unhealthy and reacts appropriately to being touched so I'm not going to change anything else with the set up. I know the heating pad is going through the glass since after installation i reached into the bottom of the tank and confirmed that the heat was present on both sides of the glass. I think I just have to wait it out and let him be ready. They do shut off their metabolism to do this, so I imagine coming out of it is something they don't do lightly, and not something that just immediately happens. I'm trying not to mess with him as much as I can because I don't want to stress him out.

 

[Spock]

I think I just have to wait it out and let him be ready.

Yeah, you do. I've never had a pacman but I have other frogs so I just gave you advice for what I would do with mine in this situation. Space heater works great, Just give him time, frogs can go super long without food or movement. Glad to see that the temperatures are back in a good spot.

 

[R00T]

Yeah, you do. I've never had a pacman but I have other frogs so I just gave you advice for what I would do with mine in this situation. Space heater works great, Just give him time, frogs can go super long without food or movement. Glad to see that the temperatures are back in a good spot.

he's my first frog so i'm definitely worrying a bit *too* much. The only other frog i've interacted with was my dad's weird genetic south african water frog mix that just floats in the water and doesn't really do anything else besides eat, so when my lil guy just disappeared i was freaked out. They're neat little creatures and I just want him to be thriving.