Reptile Fight Club - Go Small or Go Home with Billy Sveen

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Justin and Rob tackle the most controversial topics in herpetoculture. The co-hosts or guests take one side of the issue and try to hold their own in a no-holds-barred contest of intellect. Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!In this episode, Justin and Chuck tackle the topic of Go Small or Go Home with Billy Sveen         Who will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comFollow Rob @ https://www.instagram.com/highplainsherp/Follow MPR Network on:FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoreliaPythonRadioIG: https://www.instagram.com/mpr_network/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtrEaKcyN8KvC3pqaiYc0RQMore ways to support the shows.Swag store: https://teespring.com/stores/mprnetworkPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreliapythonradio

🎵 Welcome to another episode of Riptide Fight Club. We are joined today, of course, by Mr. Rob Stone. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm excited for this. This will be good. Lots of interesting points either way.

Sound a little good. For sure. We've got Billy Sven back on. So, welcome back to the show. show and glad to have you back again. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, no, no problem. Thanks for coming on and for providing a nice topic of discussion today that we'll get into here in a bit. But how's life treating y'all? Pretty good. Pretty good. nothing to complain about yeah uh i just uh got back from a work trip to dc uh yesterday so um i had to swing we uh or after we flew back i swung by a little spot to

try my hand see if i could flip a milk snake, but not that, not that lucky. I think it's a little early in the year. So, but I thought, Oh, it's like 60 degrees and maybe something would be under a rock, but I think the nighttime lows are still a little low. So we'll see. It was worth a shot, but I did see a beautiful Western skink, which, uh, this bright blue tail, but then like a stupid large ape, I tried to grab it and knocked his beautiful blue tail off. I felt terrible. I don't know why I think of these things afterwards, but I should have gotten a video of it.

And then I probably could have pulled a picture from the video, you know, and do it done a screenshot or something. So not the brightest thing, but I just got really excited to see something moving, you know, first, uh, her for the season, I think, well, no, I guess I saw some in Arizona, a couple of lizards, but so first Utah her, I guess I should say, but, uh, it was a nice little detour. I was out in the middle of nowhere, seeing kind of out in the West desert looking around. I found a

couple spots on Google Earth that I wanted to check out. They looked right. I looked pretty good, so hopefully they'll be fruitful when the time is right. I was going to go up in the mountains, but we got dumped on with snow, so I figured that wouldn't be very productive either, so I stuck to the the mountains, but we got dumped on with snow. So I figured that wouldn't be very, uh, productive either. So I stuck to the lowlands, which was a little bit of a further trip, but, uh, I got back at like noon. So I had a few hours to kill, figured traveling, you know, counts as work time. So, uh, but yeah, it was a nice, nice time to get out in the field, go flip some rocks.

But man, my forearms and my, the back of my thighs are really sore from bending over and lifting rocks for a couple hours there. Need to get into some shape and you start lifting weights to prepare to lift rocks. Not just how it goes. Right, we'll see how it goes in SoCal at the end of the month with Eric and Brandon and Dustin. At least we have their youth and enthusiasm to help with that. Maybe it's the next day that it'll be tough with being sore. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I'm excited.

I wish I could make it to this one, but I've just been got too many trips planned, I guess. I'm gearing up, getting excited. I just made kind of the final reservations for the trip over in Australia, getting getting all the stuff packed in for cans, trying to show the two youngest girls some fun stuff over there. We booked a crocodile tour, so we're going to go on the Dane Tree and look at crocs with the solar whispers. That one was recommended. So we'll see. It's a good Instagram account at a minimum, right? Maybe that's the one.

We had stopped in at one of those places, but we didn't go on the tour when we had gone there the first time first time but um yeah i know certainly the instagram for that looks pretty good seems like they go you know know them really well which is obviously one of the huge benefits of that other things that to spot along the way or where it likes to hide out and all that so yeah and those tours i mean when they go out you know several times a day they kind of see stuff and kind of know where stuff is. Although we're going on the first, the first hour of the day, you know, the first day, but, but it's at nine 30. So it's like three hours after sunrise.

So hopefully it'll be warm enough that they're out basking and that kind of thing. He's, uh, so I was talking with Matt, uh, Somerville cause he works at Hartley's and I was thinking, oh, we'll just go to Hartley's and maybe meet Matt and go see some crocs. But he's like, ah, they're all just kind of captives in a lagoon. You know, they're not true, true wild crocs. So he's like, I'd recommend that one. So hope I don't get him in trouble with his work. But he's, yeah, he said that would be, if you want to see wild crocs, that's the to do it so we'll see how that goes but he also said go in the morning so yeah that's when they're kind of asking and things so yeah excited to get back out there uh um we're gonna go kind of uh a loop so we'll start in cans we'll hit you know the um that was another some other good advice from Matt was to, you know,

I was kind of debating between two different islands. Um, one was larger and had, you know, goannas and stuff on the island. And I was thinking, oh, that'd be kind of cool. But he said the, the sea life there is not great. There's not much reef. And so, so we're going to go to green Island, which is the one I took the older siblings on. So the younger siblings will have some notes to share with their older sisters and brothers.

So that'll be fun for them, I think. And then we're going to do kind of a loop over into the Tablelands and up to Daintree over in the Tablelands and then down maybe over to Eddy Beach. I think my youngest wants to go look for cassowaries. So we're going to go down. Yeah. See if we can find it. Well, Kuranda, to go look for cassowaries. So we're going to go down, you know, see if we can find a little. Well, Kuranda, right? That's, that's where ours was. I know you had the one on the beach, which is a cool look for sure. But,

I think, well, as far as I've, you know, read, it seems like Eddie beach is like a, the most reliable place to see him. I mean, we'll be looking for him on the whole trip. So I guess if we see one somewhere else, we won't necessarily drive all the way down there, but just trying to, I don't know, it's hard with teenagers getting, you know, what, what do you want to do over there? And it's not like they're doing the research or something. So it's like, I have to give them a bunch of options and see what they want to do, but we'll definitely be doing some night herping. Hopefully they'll,

they won't be, they won't chicken out too early i know we went to um the curtain fig and we were looking you know for geckos and something but they heard like a tree kangaroo rustling above them and they're like what's that dad we got to get out of here this is too spooky i'm like it's probably a big tree kangaroo it's not that big of a deal but they also had kind of crappy headlamps, so that might have added to their anxiety of being out in the night. We'll have much better headlamps this time around.

Won't pull a neck and not bring one at all, hey? No, no. And we won't be eating many noodles either, I don't think. What kind of trip even is that? Right? Among other things, I don't think. What kind of trip even is that? Right? Among other things,

I suppose. And no show muscles. I'm going to be lifting rocks. Well, yeah. I'm still waiting on that black-headed python female to lay. This is kind of late for her. She usually lays a little earlier. So maybe that means she'll cook them a little better.

They'll have a better hatch rate. We'll see how that goes. And got another walnut ready to lay a couple pygmy pythons that should be laying as well. A couple other anteresia, but yeah, they're, they're looking like they're progressing well,

but still no eggs. So we'll see how that goes. Always the waiting game, right? I don't know. You guys, how's your herp collections doing? Any exciting jumps forward? I don't, I mean, I have a pretty small group that I manage, but my dendrobate, the yellow and black poison frogs, I got the first eggs from them for the season just yesterday. So that was fun.

Yeah. Last year was their first year breeding, and they made a few eggs that were dud, so like like but eight froglets came out of it and this first clutch of eggs was 11 eggs so um off to a strong start for the year so we'll see how that goes um at uh tinley i picked up some um phyllobates terribilis orange blackfoot um and then i made a custom enclosure with um all native plants so like a biotope of the choco rainforest and so starting in like january or so i got them all into that enclosure so that's been really fun to see if they're so bold just yeah a little bulldog is a frog just hopping around begging for food.

And then I'm finally getting my cave gecko. I have it paid for. The shipping weather is coming around here. So maybe next week we'll see.

Which species? Hens. The main one species? Well, he answers. So the main one, or the most common one. Very nice. Yeah, good one to start with, I figure. Yeah, yeah. Right on. Yeah, the terabilis, I think, are my favorite dart frogs.

I keep thinking I should get some of those, but I keep telling myself I don't want to deal with fruit flies. Yeah, yeah. Well, those orange backfoots, man, that's a cool look. and I should get some of those, but I keep telling myself I don't want to deal with fruit flies. Yeah. Yeah. Well, those orange back foots, man, that's a cool look. They're so cool. Yeah. And I have four in there, and I can almost always see all of them. You know, they're just right there.

Yeah, they're very bold. So bold and active. Yeah, that's what you like with the with the dart frog for sure you want to be able to see there those flashy colors yeah i guess when you're the most poisonous thing right or at least one of the most poisonous things on earth you're you're gonna be bold you don't have to worry about it yeah that. That's cool. Yeah, probably an association there as opposed to the other, you know, the little tiny run-of-the-mill stuff where it's like, yeah, they seem all, in my experience for the most part, they're, you know, pretty jumpy and reclusive. And it's like, yeah, you're probably not nearly as toxic in the wild. A little better. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. not nearly as toxic in the wild so a little better yeah all right yeah well my i guess my captive herp excitement mimics their what you've been doing there billy in terms of a long-running project a long-running goal that has been a slightly less long project has been trying to move my rhino rat snakes into cages that are true to biotype as well, specific to where we're at now, basically. It's a combination of Tam Dao, what was the National Forest when they were first collected for captivity in 94, 95 by a joint Russian-Vietnamese-American scientific expedition. And then those went to both Germany and Russia, those captive animals, and Cat Ba Island, which is actually referencing the trip that Ryan and Nick and Chris took, right, that they had gone there, which is very much limestone karst and is the spot where most of them are seen nowadays. So the enclosure has a universal rock gray limestone background.

Leaf litter is all based on plants that at a minimum exist there now. So it's got magnolia, mangosteen, jackfruit, and bamboo. Bamboo to add some additional verticality, a verticality feature. And probably the coolest part is I planted them with this species of Vietnamese violet that was originally collected for horticulture on a joint Soviet-Vietnamese expedition in 1988 from Tam Dao. So from the same spot that the rhinos come from. So it's right side in there. And I tell you what, I have six of them all good to go. I have five more to build out. But I've got the luminized bulbs, all this stuff going on,

and it's just the joy and satisfaction of that project has been, yeah, it's been a long, long time since I've been as happy about a captive herp project as that. That's very cool. Set up really, you know, they took to it seemingly right away. And then the next day I was like, know, they took to it seemingly right away. And then the next day I was like, okay, well, now it comes time to pair them up. And with three of the six, I put in males. And sure enough, within an hour, they're locking up and doing the stuff.

So, yeah, it's been fantastic. Very cool. That's awesome. That sounds really awesome. I was going to ask you, you sent a picture around in one of our message boards and had a female kind of in a tunnel or an excavation? Did you excavate that or how does that work? No, so the one non-unique feature to it or non-geographically appropriate, I love cork bark. But in this context, I didn't want cork bark visible in the enclosure. So essentially I used it as a buttress for an underground to go underneath. There's a little bit of substrate underneath it, so I have a cork bark, and then there's more substrate on top, and then the leaf litter on top of that.

So it kind of functions as a subterranean hide area or whatever. But yeah, and all of them went right to it on the first day. Like it was nothing weird, you know, coming from, you know, however, they're basically now all of those, I think save all the ones that, uh, went into those cages I've produced myself. So I've had them their whole time and they certainly, certainly know and utilize cork bark. So that wasn't that weird.

It was just under a little bit of dirt. That's cool i mean in in the wild are they also hanging out underneath you know yes that's been interesting i yeah i think the uh well one thing would be so on cat by as i said that that's like more than half of the records on iNaturalist are from there at this point. And you kind of see them, I think half of those records are basically on the road. So obviously that's not their natural habitat. They're going through someplace. Then there's some that are swimming in the big lakes. There's some that are on the beach on little sticks. I think basically, and this would correspond to my captive experience with them, is they're basically all-terrain snakes, so that they're capable of climbing, but they're not arboreal in the sense of being, you know, strictly arboreal or manifest to that point. I think they,

for the most part, utilize basically every aspect of where they are. I don't think they're limited in any way. And that's the experience I've seen with them over the week or so that they've been set up that way. Part of the day they're underground. Part of the day they're basking at elevation. Other times they're lying amongst the leaf litter. Some of them like to sleep amongst the leaf litter. Some of them sleep perched. And some sleep underground in the little buttressed cave. So yeah,terrain snakes for sure that's interesting any idea what kind of function the the horn serves naturally i mean

that just seems like something a tree you know snake would have or something to kind of mimic a leaf or pointy stick or something but i think it probably breaks up their form so it's it's not hard right it's pliable and they'll the one sort of challenge right in transitioning some things that have been in tubs or in cages that have like papered over fronts or, you know, semi opaque front is sure enough, I put them in there and they spent the whole time sort of exploring, whoa, there's a lack of a visual barrier here. So in response, I put some books on the edges, particularly for the ones that were, they show seemingly no care to just mashing it into things. And they're all objectively fine, but it was one of these, I don't want this to be a, I don't necessarily want the learning curve to turn into taking a shed to heal or anything like that. So I put visual barriers there and then that stopped it. They responded to that presumably over time. They haven't done it to the front. So I don't think, I think I can

probably eventually wean them off of that, but as they get used to it, but it's not surprising, right? They've spent between five and 10 years not living in a clear box. So that's not all that surprising, right? And, but yeah, to your point, right, they're just mashing it around and stuff. They really don't show any hesitation to do that. I think from my perspective, it's both breaking up their form when they're in a tree. And I think it probably breaks up their form when they're little and they're trying to feed in the water, right? And so when they're little, they're little gray worms basically. And maybe it's, and they're feeding on fish and tadpoles and that if they're putting their head in the water, that it's not as noticeably a snake if it's got that projection coming off the front.

That being said, I mean, functionally they, to me, they're essentially the same physiologically. They're different in terms of their attitude, feeding habits and things to the Chinese rain snake, REIN snake, now Ganyosoma frenatum. To me, it should be Rhynchophis boulangeri and frenatum in the same genus because functionally their eye shape is a little bit different, their body structure is slightly different, but functionally, if boulangeri didn't have a horn, they're almost, meaning unless you have a very practiced eye,

you couldn't tell them apart from a Frenatum. So there's a snake that lives in the same place, or they overlap, both of them at Tamdau. They overlap, but they both exist, so there has to be some benefits to have caused that trait to be maintained, right? Otherwise, they'd just be outselected, presuming there's some cost to forming it. Sure. That's cool. And have you ever kept the other species?

I have. They tend to be much more irascible and don't feed as well, generally. Don't start as well. They both are born, as I say, gray worms with sort of the rhinos. It's more like black and white inclusions, whereas most phrenotum have – it's more like brown and a little bit of yellow, less white. You can have a little bit of white, but that yellow look to them on the dorsal surface is something you don't really see in the rhinos. And they're far less popular. Actually, the most recent, colubrid and colubroid – I think it was the most recent – talked about for not i'm a fair bit or no i apologize i had gotten confused thinking that most but uh it was the snakes and so use 200 when matt was on there they were talking about for not him a little bit and uh i think there is somebody who i'd talked to who is really into them but they're they've never been nearly as popular never nearly had the same level of success, which is, as I said, surprising because they're seemingly visually, functionally similar.

But there's something that's causing that, presumably. Yeah. That's kind of – I mean, I was thinking about that, listening to that 200th episode, you know, when, when you lose a champion of a species, you know, sometimes those species just go away and you never see them in, or, or very rarely see them in captivity again. So that's, uh, it's good to have people that are interested in similar projects, you know, to find, find those like-minded souls or something, but I don't know. Herpetoculture is fickle sometimes. And it's funny how everybody wants to keep the same stuff. Anytime I vend a reptile show, I'm just like, somebody says,

oh, I usually ask them, what do you keep? And invariably, it's usually ball python, boa, just the same pat answers, a crested gecko, a corn snake, you know. And I guess I just like diversity or unique things or different things than everybody else has. I don't know. Kind of tricky, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think half the fun is, you know, we have a group of folks we go on trips with, right, and all that. And for the most part or in large part, we keep different things. And I think that makes a ton of sense, both in terms of, you know, it's

cool to go to your place and see stuff that I don't have, you know, what fun would it be if we just all had the same thing? And I think there really is something to, there are things that will work well with the way you keep animals in the space that you have in your area that almost certainly won't be this, you know, between you and I, they might be pretty similar, but between Billy, myself and yourself, they're almost certainly our conditions, our underlying conditions before you even get into how often we, what we think of feeding and light cycling, all these different things, what externalities we're going to apply before you even get into that, our, our space is going to be different, right?

And almost certainly that's going to be suited to different things. The Colorado Chondro thing always surprises me because our, same as you, relative ambient humidity doesn't really seem to associate particularly well with that. I guess you get the benefit if you're putting in the external, you know, if you're adding, then at least you can naturally go dry, which has its purpose in terms of the cycle effect on them. But, you know, it's kind of a weird and unusual thing, right, that you would think and probably has more to do with Bushmaster than it does anything else. In the same way, Maryland being a hotbed, you know, relative to the national zoo and trooper and all that stuff.

So that it's those sort of external factors that not, oh, it's just that our conditions are so similar that it makes them easy to keep in this area. Cause I don't think so. Unless you change your whole room dynamic, which is both a big project and if anything at all goes wrong, then that can be a real problem. Yeah. Speaking of Trooper Walsh, his influence can still be seen at the National Zoo. They have a very nice designer green tree python on exhibit there. It's got a lot of the yellow scales,

you know, throughout the green and stuff. What's that look? What do they call that again where it has a lot of yellow in it, in the pattern? So the ones that were really, really yellow was the lemon tree stuff. But that's Tim Tremese, you know, from back in the late 80s, early 90s, that stuff. And then some of that was still kicking around or is mixed into things. Then there was Eugene's OS High Yellow stuff. It was also, it looks quite a bit different to that Lemon Tree stuff. And then, you know, get a Biak in the mix and you got a shot.

Yeah. They were definitely, well, there was just one on exhibit, but it was a nice looking snake. You know, lots of white, lots of yellow, lots of green. So a couple of black scales. Kind of green. So a couple of black scales, kind of fun. But yeah, I remember back, it's been many years ago. I kind of invoked Trooper Walsh's name and I think I contacted him via email and I said, you know, headed the National Zoo. Anybody there can show me around or something. And this, I can't remember his name.

I think I wrote it down somewhere, but, uh, he showed me around, like took me behind the scenes. Let me even pet a Komodo dragon, which probably, I don't know that could happen these days, but you know, that was long enough ago that they probably had a little less stringent rules back then. Yeah. It was pretty fun. Oh. And incidentally, I did a little, uh little herping in the zoo. I walked in the zoo and the first enclosure was the sloth bears. Was it the sloth bears? Yeah. And I go to put my foot up on the on the wall to kind of stand up and see if I could see him hiding out or something. And I and there was a little decay right? By where my foot was. And so I'm like, Hey, a snake. They're like, where did you get that? You pull that out of an enclosure. These guys, a ranger. And then there was this family coming up and they saw me taking pictures of it and they're like, I have a snake. And so I showed it to him, let him pet it and stuff.

And then released it kind of behind the wall in the keeper area and some leaf litter and just kind of let it go. But kind of cool. That was a lifer for me. I'd never seen a decay snake in the wild. Yeah. So cool. And it was a nice looking one. It was kind of fun.

So that was my herping excitement, I guess, in D.C. Really working through your area, huh? Yep. Yeah. We got the was the red red backed snake and red. I guess in DC really working through your stir area, huh? Yup. Yeah. We got the, was it the red, red backed snake and red belly, I think red belly.

Yeah. And then I think those are the only, how many stir are there? There's. That's what I was looking at. Yeah. Yeah. Was the,

was the worm snakes not a stir area? Is it? I don't think so, no. But yeah, I guess if there's only two species, then I've made my way well through the streria. So it looks like there's five species and a whole heck of a lot of subspecies of decays in particular. But 40%. Pretty wide ranging. Yeah, there we go. Right on. Well, guys, you ready to do a little fighting?

Yeah, sure. I think it's about time. So, all right. Well, I don't know if you had it, have anything, I mean, where you've been on the show a couple of times, you know, we usually have already kind of introduced themselves and where they fit into herpetoculture. I don't know if anything's changed or if you're still kind of, I don't know if you want to, you know, say just a little bit about kind of what your, what your, uh, I guess mindset is in regards to herpetoculture.

And I mean, you've got a busy full-time job as a doctor. And so I imagine you don't have a ton of time for a big herb collection so yeah no it's definitely a small collection um and definitely quite tailored to be all contained within one room which is also like my home office so everything is um kind of like understory, tropical animals, low temperature, high humidity. So that I don't need to, you know, so that I can work in here throughout the day and get too warm. So mostly frogs, a couple of day geckos. I've been on the pad for a number of years now

that I got in medical training. And that was kind of the oddball as far as not small. But yeah, I focus on trying to have, um, some naturalistic planted enclosures, um, which in the natural history of the animals. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. I, uh, I like the, you know, the philosophies and, you know, some of your ideas and some

of the past shows. So yeah, if you guys haven't heard, uh, Billy previous uh episodes go back and check them out and and the stuff that he shared on other podcasts as well you were on uh um project on uh project for pediculture somewhat early on like in the teens i think um that was the first podcast I did definitely a conversation about my thoughts on why keeping and how to keep things and then I've been out of here a couple times

and then I've been I've been through the past okay your audio is kind of is that better yeah yeah I think I was just moving away from it

there we go alright well okay so today you sent an idea over messaging there and had kind of an idea to talk about whether or not we should really be pushing keeping smaller and small like smaller species right so um finding alternatives for the the current you know popular pet species and so i think i i think that's a great topic and

and we'll kind of discuss you know the pros and cons of kind of moving towards smaller and smaller, smaller and smaller species in herpetoculture and, uh, make a nice little fight out of that. So, um, Rob and I will go ahead and flip the coin to see who gets to, to battle you today. So, uh, Rob, if you'll do the honors of calling the flip there, let's go heads again. It's tails and you are not having a good run at the flip there. Let's go heads again. Heads. It's tails.

Man, you are not having a good run at the coin toss. You need to use the Chuck method of gauging how high the flip is. I know. I thought he had some formula. It started to work out for him, but I guess maybe this just isn't your year. Yeah, maybe so. Well, I've got some thoughts, and I'm sure, you know, of course, Rob can chime in, but I'll go ahead and kind of take the lead there. So fight old Billy here. Okay.

And then go ahead and make the other call there, Billy. Oh, it is heads, man. I'm a double winner again. That happened to me last time too I will Take the con I'm going to go Let's stick with some big stuff

In there It doesn't have to be big It can just be normal size That's true, that's true We're not talking retics and Galapagos tortoises We're just talking Trying to push into the smaller and smaller realm. So I guess I'll let you go first so you can kind of sort this out. I think the obvious big benefit of getting would say is, a lot of people that would advocate for a naturalistic

enclosure would say that's like what we should be keeping them in as like a minimum, whether or not that's the right way to go about that. But like just like arbitrarily saying that that's like a good size for a ball python. If you put an anteresia in that, you're going to have

so much more snakes for them to move around. Like in a four-foot enclosure, most wild pythons can stretch out or they at least fairly well, but they're not going to actually be able to move sequentially. Their whole body doesn't fit multiple times in there, but you get an anteresia

in there, let alone... Now you're talking about snakes with quite a bit different ecologies and natural histories, but you can get a garter snake or that little decay snake that you had, see if you had a larger animal in that enclosure. You can also, like, the ability to, and this is my bias in someone that likes to design complex enclosure and habitat for the animal, it's so much harder to do that for a bigger animal that can move things around, push things over so much easier. Everything needs to get braced. Even like making something, or again, my ball, my bummer, I used to have like a bearded dragon before that,

like it would knock things over. That compared to like my little day geckos, those, you know, you essentially get like a twig that you can like really secure to the background with just a little bit of gorilla glue that's not going anywhere for these little guys and you can make like a lattice work that essentially lets them utilize almost 100% of the volume in the enclosure and now you can see all kinds of behaviors that would be in order to replicate that in um you know an animal 10 times bigger than that you wouldn't you would need more than

a 10 times bigger enclosure because you would need to be able to secure all those things so well um So, yeah, that's my main thing. That's my main point is that for less or even similar resources, you can make a significantly better environment for that animal to be in. That's beneficial for the animal. And then it's also beneficial for us as keepers because we get to enjoy seeing those animals doing complex work. Yeah. No, I mean, I definitely enjoy that aspect of it, you know, keeping the smaller species. And I guess, especially in regards to the complex environment, sometimes that can be a little more challenging in monitoring small species.

You know, if they're in a giant enclosure and, you know, if you haven't nailed it right or something and they get kind of, you know, in an area where maybe it got too cold or they get stuck in something or under something, you know, you don't secure something to the floor and it kind of, they're a little easier to damage, I guess, I remember I got a bunch of, uh, the, um, morning geckos, uh, and I had this nice big planted enclosure and put them in there and, you know, putting in food and that kind of thing. But it was really hard to tell if they were, you know, if they were eating enough and if they were, um, cause I, I very rarely see them because one they're nocturnal and this was in my office where I'm at during the day. And then, um, you know, to, uh, you know, the calcium supplementation, you know, they might

not get their prey species very quickly. And so, um, I ended up, uh, losing one. I find, you know, found it, you know, kind of, uh, in the enclosure dead and I'm like, Oh man, I thought they would just thrive in this, you know, but it is a little bit harder to tell what's going on and potentially for them to, to secure prey and in a really well planted enclosure. If they had never experienced that, you know, I imagine it'd be different if you've got a wild caught lizard that's used to living in a lush tropical environment. But so I ended up moving them into a more simplistic enclosure where I could monitor them easier.

Their eggs weren't like stuck into some crack in the enclosure, making it impossible to get the eggs out of there to you know so the adults wouldn't eat the babies or something once they hatch out you know those kind of things yeah are a lot easier in a in a smaller maybe more simplistic and design definitely i think from like a not even really a counter argument like a practical, I don't just put my animals into a complex enclosure. I usually scale them up. So for my dagueckos,

they're not like the Madagascar giant dagueckos. They're like an atlas. Which is significantly smaller than even the William's eye. These geckos are, you know, body and tail fitting on my pinky finger.

And so when I first got them, I had them individually in like one gallon. What were they? They're cereal boxes, like the plastic cereal boxes. So you have a tiny little a lid that you flip open. It's like really easy to access without them escaping. So I just, I converted those somewhat how you convert like a rack box,

you know, but then I like add plants and stuff. So it was still somewhat complex. And then I moved them like, but I think I have two females. I put them into the same enclosure. That's now like, like a seven or eight gallon

custom vertical build that I made. And then I still don't have the exact plans, but I eventually want to move them into a bigger one and get a male and maybe another female or something to make something quite a bit larger.

Yes, I won't see them every day, but based on now i know how they tend to perch and bask and i know um i can keep them quite a bit hotter than i did in their smaller enclosure because i'm noticing that they're always on the top and so i'm giving them more udb more heat um you know with like a tiny little halogen that should have a higher water on it uh and now they're cruising all over and so just like always staying um so i think getting to know like there's um that style of keeping does require more attention and does require i think practice practice leading up to the final conclusion

of having them in a big complex enclosure. That being said, if you wanted to have your morning geckos in a fairly simple plastic plant or a plant in a pot that doesn't look naturalistic or something and some PVC tubes that are just scattered around, you could do that in a 10 or 20 gallon or a smaller exo-pera compared to if you wanted

to do that with a leachianus or a crescent gecko. Regardless of what style of enclosure you want to do and my personal preference is for these complex ones, which I want to be bigger. The smaller animal needs a smaller space. Yeah, I, you know, I have, I definitely like having, you know, more room for the animals. And I guess it depends on your, your goals in, in, in some ways as well.

So if you're, if you're, you know, a big breeder trying to produce a lot of animals and you need low maintenance and things like that, if, um, or, or trying to have more clean environment or something, um, sometimes, you know, with those well-planted environments, um, a lot of times the, the, some of the work is, is spent maintaining the enclosure rather than, you know, maintaining the animal necessarily. I guess that goes hand in hand, but, um, so the other, the other kind of point I wanted to make on this topic in regards to caging is that a lot of the cages in, in herpetoculture kind of designed for larger species. And so whether, whether or not they're the right size or not, they, you know, have gaps

and openings and cracks and, you know, that, that very small species can slip out of very easily. Now, I think, uh, Armand's a great example from herp time is a great example of somebody who's kind of building an industry around these smaller species. He's done very well with those micro geckos and anoles and stuff like that. And he's also, um, designing his own cages. And so he'll, you know, basically sell you an animal with a cage. And so it kind of, it's a smart move, I think on his, his part,

and he's done a very good job of, of making that, um, very profitable, I'm sure. But also, uh, you know, it, it requires a little bit of, um, a little bit more thought and work to make sure that these small little things don't just escape into your home. And that can be a huge nightmare trying to locate a micro gecko in a in a room with books and posters and stuff on the wall. Oh, yeah. They're going to disappear pretty quickly. And and you'll probably find it shriveled up in a corner, you know, in a spider web or something, you know, there. Yeah. I've, I've had a Antaresia, you know, that escaped out of holes that I thought would be too small.

These, these baby, you know, hatchling Antaresia. There's not both too small. Yeah. Right. They, they can find a way in, in a lot of ways. And then, you know, inevitably a couple would, would not make it. And you'd find them serious, like in a spider, the spider had captured them and basically eaten them. So it's kind of not the, not the best. I, I, I had a lot of hard lessons early on with Antaresia,

you know, learning what they couldn't, couldn't escape from. So. Yeah. That's my first Ligodac bus escaped through a tiny gap in the door. I think the doors, you know, had custom cut glass to make the pink. And I think, well, I know they weren't completely square, but they were completely right angles and so if you didn't perfectly shut it there could be a tiny little gap so the new doors are perfect there's like a silicone seal in between them and then i took sponge filter foam and like used the pencil and wedged it up into like the top of the crack

so it's hard to get the door in and out so they can't even slide up and hide underneath there. So yes, absolutely. If I was arguing the other side, that was high on my list on my notes, was escaping because I think that's the difference between

small and tiny. I kind of like the... It's a challenge for challenge myself how small can i go um but even like so you take a bearded dragon and instead you get one of um bill leases uh xenogama for example you know that's not going to escape that much easier than a bearded dragon but you put that in a four by two by two, and you're going to see that thing cruise around like mad compared to what a bearded dragon would be able to do. It could probably get full speed, you know, before it gets to the other end.

And then if you didn't want to do that and you wanted to put it in a 40 gallon, that would probably be like a great life for it too. And that probably wouldn't be the case. Yeah, I agree. And I think that I I'm always baffled. I'll bring a Rankin's dragon or something to the show. And yeah,

Rankin's should be so cool. Right. And they're like, what kind of, you know, is it, Oh, look,

he's got a baby beard dragon. Actually, it's a cousin of a beard dragon. This is as big as they get. And they're, Oh, Whoa. And they're like, what kind of, you know, is it, Oh, look, he's got a baby bearded dragon. Actually, it's a cousin of a bearded dragon. And this is as big as they get. Oh, Whoa. And I'm like, yeah, they eat a 10th, you know, 10th of the food of a normal bearded dragon and take up a 10th of the space of a normal bearded dragon. You know, you can have a nice big, you know, enclosure for them and, and, uh, they go, Oh, that's cool.

And then they walk away and buy a normal bearded dragon. So I don't know like how you, how you get this message across, but yeah, I think people like to keep what other people keep in a lot of ways. And I think it might be a little bit of laziness or risk aversion or something where, or, or other people are just good at saying, oh, you know, the ball Python or the bearded dragon or the crested gecko or the best pets in the world. And you have to have one or you're, you know, missing out or something like that. I mean, I started out breeding bearded dragons and I had to build like these custom enclosures, you know, I made these elaborate, you know, things to, and that covered

quite a bit of floor space in my herp room, you know, when I started out and, and, you know, I really enjoyed them, but yeah, they, they take a lot of food and a lot of space. And sometimes that not, that's not the best thing for, especially for a new keeper, you know? And I think if, if people realize that they could be you know i guess that's the other side so that's i guess that's the next point i'll make is is in in favor of the larger species they usually have more eggs more babies that kind of thing and that can be a good thing or a bad thing i guess if you're looking to sell offspring then it it can be a good thing or a bad thing. I guess if you're looking to sell offspring, then it can be a nice thing to have quite a few babies. And, um, but also, also when, uh, species tend to have

a lot of eggs or babies, then, you know, the, the prices also drop pretty quickly on a lot of those projects. And so you have to look for different mutations or different colors or variants or whatever to keep the project alive or keep the, you know, the going rate fairly high. So I guess that can be a double edged sword. But, you know, if you have I remember when I was first starting out and I had, you know, 20, 30 baby bearded dragons in the pet store, bought them from me for 50 bucks a piece. You know, that was a nice little payday for a guy who just, you know, spent 200 bucks on a gravid female bearded dragon and then sold the babies a couple of weeks later for, well, a couple of months later for a thousand dollars. You know, it's like, that's not a bad return on investment. You know, that was back in the day when i looked at that kind of thing you know or had that you know the dollar signs in my eyes and how this is cool i can keep

reptiles and be a rich keeper or something when i was naive and and dumb back in the day but anyway i think that's rambling yeah like like the the small species these smaller species aren't as popular um and so um i'm imagining this like directly because they're small it's like a bit of happenstance you know um but yeah so there's market issues and so you have to be creative. Like I think yeah, Phil there is only with his xenogama. I think of Frank Payne with a lot of the things he's doing, like carpet chameleons.

Some of the lacerdas he has are pretty small. A lot of the geckos. Even just the toad-headed agamas. Yeah. Mysticus. Phrydomcephalus, is that right? Yeah.

They, yeah, I think they're really cool. And then Armand, again, for time with its gnolls and microgeckos. They're having to, besides just name dropping, they, for my side, they are having to create besides just name-dropping, they, for my side, they are having to create a market. You know, they're doing a lot of effort to educate and to show off these species and market themselves and what they're doing that you potentially wouldn't have to do if you just had really nice, quality bearded dragons panther chameleons leopard geckos all my problems

i i think too in in regards to you know people who are who are buying reptiles a lot of people want to be able to handle them. They don't want to, you know, if they, if they didn't want to handle them, they'd get a fish, you know, they, they just wanted to look at them. And so I think a lot of people aren't going to get a micro gecko or something like that because you can't really handle it very easily or safely for the animal. And so I think that's kind of a big part. People want to interact with their animals. They want to handle them and get them out and show their friends or, you know, watching meet a rat or, or a bunny or something. I don't know, like they, they want to interact with them

that way. And so, um, that, that kind of favors the larger species that aren't gonna, you know, jump and run, or, or you can at least kind of restrain it without squishing it. To some extent, that's a function of experience though, right? So I think that's kind of a, when you're getting into it, that's more sort of the mindset. I certainly feel in myself and I know in a lot of the group that like you, in general, if you stick with and all that, the natural tendency is to move the other way and to want to create a system where you can just watch animals do what they would do as naturally as they can. Right. Not to say that it's exactly replicating their natural condition in a box. But I think what you're describing there, that impulse, I couldn't be further away

from, I might, I was there at a point today. I couldn't be further away from that. Yeah. Right. And I, and again, you know, I'm, I'm talking beginners who, who want to get an animal so they can interact with it. And I think you kind of grow out of that, like Rob said, and, and that's a, definitely a good point, but, But, so yeah, you might... Some degree of both. I mean, I have, right now I'm definitely focusing on pretty small species for the most part, but I have my ball python that I've had for,

think about both my snakes, like a year older than my daughter. So the snake's like nine years old. And I love that. That's a snake I can just let my kids hold. And I love that snake, yeah, that I can just pull out and it's easy.

Versus like, even my dark frogs don't jump that fast, you know, so they're not like that hard to get a handle on on but like the micro geckos like i like the kids cannot touch that door you know um and they they know that like don't go buy that one um and so yeah like there's a different level there for sure. And I think as Rob suggests, some of that is because people don't know what they're missing out on.

If they don't experience watching a gecko truly leap from like branch to branch to branch to branch across an enclosure because they, you know, well, I mean, this is probably not a behavior like a crested gecko would do, but if you're keeping a crested gecko in like an 18, 18, 24, it can't do that very well. You know, it can't make those kinds of leaps versus you keep one of these tiny geckos or an anole or something, and those are more active, so it's not a directly fair comparison, but you keep those in something half that size,

you'll see them make huge jumps, like back and forth. And, I mean, I'm sitting where I do most of my work, and those geckos are on, like, a baker's rack in, like, the closet, and I'm constantly looking over there because I see tiny little movements outside my eye um and yeah i mean uh i want all different kinds of aspects of interaction and watching them is just a pure joy for me but also holding my ball python even though i probably do that like once a month is is still something that I'm glad I have. And then like to get, not that I plan to hold my cave gecko off and have all, but it's an animal that is slow, that is a little bigger,

that I don't have that type of anxiety about compared to the white anacolis. And so, you know, it's smaller than a leopard gecko, but, you know, about the, you know, um, but I could pick it up versus the, uh, uh, you know, maybe I could put a couple of fruit flies on my finger and try to get them to jump to my finger, you know, is something that I've thought about doing a couple of times that haven't got around to trying it out. Um, but yeah, you can't have much interaction with the micro gecko. Yeah. Um, other than observing,

and I think there's definitely something to that, you know, I think that's a, as Rob said, that's kind of something you, you grow into and you want to enjoy them more that way rather than handling or taking, you know, the, the guy with the shirtless guy with the giant Python around his neck, walking around the neighborhood. It's kind of, you move further and further from that as you progress in herpetoculture i think but uh yeah we we may i know that i was there at one point when i was a kid i had a burmese python and i used to walk around the neighborhood and i think they even had me be in a parade once because you know there's that weird snake kid with the giant snake walking around the

neighborhood let's let's give him some attention so he doesn't uh try to feed it one of our kids to the snake i don't know but uh yeah i i'm uh i'm definitely enjoying the smaller pythons uh these days versus the the burmese python and Another aspect of that that goes directly hand-in-hand to it is that it's cheaper. So it takes less space. So if you have a smaller house or an apartment, that's easier to provide a nice setup for these animals. It's less electricity. So even if you need to get the same you know even

if you're um you know desert agamut needs to get to a really high temperature just like if you're a dragon or an ackee or something you can do that with a much smaller wattage bulb so everything is it can be scaled down and it's cheaper. Yeah. And again, I mean, you know, a lot of the bulbs and the fixtures and things like that are geared towards larger cages. And so, you know, you might have a hard, but at the same time you can run one, you know, tube light over several different cages and kind of make up for it that way, I think. And I'm not going to lie, trying to figure out the one gallon grow outs is hard to get a gradient of like you know multiple of those little gopies in a one gallon enclosure and setting up for a few days and adjusting the heights of the baker's rack to figure it out that's not like something i would expect a first-time keeper to be doing by any means um but now that i have them

in uh it's a it's a weird dimension but it's i mean comparable to a smaller exo terra um that is not hard to heat you know i have like a 25 watt allergen on there um just like one of those like tiny like micro bulbs and so very standard stuff and then just like the smallest uh uv bar yeah yeah that's uh i guess the the next thing i might hit on is uh food and food sources you know that's somewhat limited you know we've got uh fruit flies or um dubia maybe small enough right at the very first when they're the tiniest little nymph. Yeah, baby insects. Yeah, I guess springtails might be good, but

do we have many more feeders than that? You know, there's not very many. At least that I know of. Micro roaches, firebrats, aphids. Not that I have all of those, um, but, um, are those commercially available? You can, uh, they're available.

So yeah, I would say you need to start culturing them. Yeah. So you become an insect keeper along with becoming a reptile keeper yeah um but maybe not for the adults you know for like you're gonna again that the difference between like like uh tiny or small and micro is potentially relevant right like if you're gonna keep a rankin's or a dragon instead of a bearded dragon you can go to your pet store and get standard food right um crickets yeah but you're gonna need if you're gonna breed them you're gonna probably need i don't know i don't breed rankins dragons or

genie gamma but you're gonna probably need pinheads or something small, right? And they probably, some of them might love fruit flies. And so, yeah, if you're going to breed these animals, it's a definite con that they're absolutely minuscule when they're first born.

So that escape risk is way higher through mesh um yeah they uh and also also things like desiccation and things like that are also a bigger risk when you have a small so i guess the the physics of it or whatever you want to say yeah surface area to volume surface area to volume the smaller the animal the more surface area has and the easier it is to kind of dry out or to have issues that way. And stuck sheds. I mean, I, I've got, uh, some binos geckos in my office at work and, and I had one that had like kind of a bad shed. And so I tried to help it, you know, and it's really hard

to help shed out a, a small little binos gecko hatchling, um, compared to an adult binos gecko. And, and, um, I think I got most of it off, but I, it still looks like there's maybe some of the toes are stuck. And so you might, you know, it's really difficult thing. And I tried to soak it, but they're, they don't really like the water doesn't soak into such a small area you know a drop of water is is about as big as its whole arm or something so you know that's kind of a a tricky thing to to do yeah let alone trying to take it to a vet for uh any type of care or getting meds other than maybe something I can give orally. I follow

I should look up. We'll keep talking and I'll find it. It's a hurt vet that he recently did an endoscopy on a leopard gecko that had a fecal lift,

an impacted stool burden that that was able to clear out with endoscopy i mean there's no way you're doing and within that that's impressive in and of itself right but there's no way you're doing an endoscopy on a micro gecko or like the alternatives i think of to like you know leopard gecko which i would say is not a big animal but you know you could get stenodactyls you could get uh paradura like the like the ocelot ground ge, but you could get Stenodactylus, you could get Paradura, like the ocelot ground geckos. You could get viper geckos. Yeah, those viper gecko hatchlings

are pretty tiny too. Yeah, but as an adult, if you get a sub-adult or adult viper gecko, that will eat crickets easy. Same with Stenodactylus, like mealworms or crickets. But the babies won't. The babies need fruit flies or pinheads.

You know, something very specific. And then, or like something really small, like I guess Sanadactylus are really small, but Tropiocollodes, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, but like really tiny sand geckos um uh yeah there's no way you're you might not even be able to catch them out of their enclosure let alone uh get adequate you know vet care in that same way

that you put for a large ramble for sure yeah there's uh that's the the challenge i had i think with um some of these small geckos is once something goes wrong you're kind of in trouble you know in this this uh the one that had the shed issues the little binos gecko he's still kicking he's still doing all right and actually when i was trying to help him shed out his his tail fell off. And so he's now he's having to regrow his tail and, uh, you know, um, overcome the other issues, but he's like half the size of his siblings, uh, that hatched out around the same time. And it, you know, it just kind of continue a continual struggle. And I, you know, he just feel bad. Like I feel like part of it's my responsibility. And, and I think it was just, uh,

a period of cold where I didn't have the, the heat, like the bulb burned out and I didn't replace it quick enough. And it was like at the wrong time when he was shedding, that one was, she was shedding cause they're all females. But, um, yeah, that was just kind of the bad timing, you know, bad luck type thing, but, you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the, the bigger, uh, challenges, the small margin of error that you have with those species, but, but also, you know, smaller, smaller species typically tend to be more

fecund and maybe breed at a smaller or younger age smaller size you know they're they they produce fairly rapidly because they're kind of more like one or two eggs yeah exactly yeah like several like an old yeah yeah they just like an egg week or whatever eggs yep exactly so they they've developed these strategies to overcome that small size when you're food for everybody. You know, you've got to make a lot of yourself just be just to counteract that. And so, yeah, there may be a little easier. Now I'm getting into your side, I guess, given given points to you. But, you know, the that there may be a little easier to breed. And so you may lose some, but you have more chances to

get it right or to figure it out and to, to eventually do well with, with all the babies. Hopefully, I guess that's the goal, but the challenge is to, you know, you're, you're going to feel bad because you're probably going to lose some of the babies to silly things like your stupid things like that yeah um shout out to her vet Harris so Clement um that's the that's the uh uh guy that did the endoscopy on the he is a remarkable um account Paris so Clement and i'm not going to try to say his last name is french um he's in paris um but uh really amazing stuff that that he posts that's cool some is pretty tragic but like the the interventions that he's doing are really cool i learned a lot i see that. That's cool. Yeah.

Another thing that is of particular interest to me and is not intrinsic to... Well, no. It's not... You can take it or leave it. You can see it as a pro or a con, potentially. But I see it as a pro is the ability to, if you're in this place into a previous debate

you've had recently, whether or not cohabiting is okay. If you're going to ever cohab, you want to do with lots of space and lots of complexity. And so going smaller species

is potentially the best way to optimize that. And so, you know, you think about if something, if you're going to say the reasonable minimum for something is 20 gallons or 40 gallons or something, you probably don't want to double that for two species. You probably want to triple or quadruple that to be able to give the adequate amount of complexity. So if you have a tiny microgecko or some people where you're saying the minimum is a few gallons, now all of a sudden you can make a 60, 100, 200- gallon closure, custom closure or something,

and you could make an awesome environment with multiple of the animals or potentially even a mixed habitat because a lot of these animals aren't, you know, apex predators and they're small. And so you could potentially mix a gecko with with tree frog or that type of thing. I'm not saying, again, that that's a beginner thing and people should go back and listen to the awesome co-edit episode

because I think you touch on all the appropriate points, but if you're going to do it, I think these micro-animals are small or micro-animals are micro animals are the prime. Yeah. You want to pull that microphone a little closer again?

Sorry. Yeah, that's better. I, I, yeah, I think, I think we did, but it was just getting a little bit to the muffled side. I saw a cool exhibit at the National Zoo. It had the Madagascan leaf-tailed geckos and a Felsuma species. I think it was Clemurai. Clemurai.

Yeah. Yeah, I was there last year, and that exhibit was awesome. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was pretty fun. Of course, the leaf-tailed geckos are just kind of sitting there motionless because they're nocturnal and whereas the felsuma are diurnal so you see them running around and climbing and stuff and they're brightly colored and fun to watch so you kind of get the best of both worlds when you have and it was a it's a bigger leaf-tailed gecko too is it sakurai or something yeah right yeah one of the larger species yeah uh

filled up you know most of the bamboo length yeah their body length so yeah it's pretty cool yeah but that was fun to see you know i i guess some you know i was with some of my co-workers who are not reptile people and i don't the big ones eat the little ones like they're not looking at them as food i don't think so yeah yeah if you really mix match the size big enough uh you know like you make a big enclosure for like a bigger snake and then you put a tiny little frog or something uh in there that the snakes not you know like uh umallis and dark frogs, you know, it happens all the time. You can make it like a biotope type situation.

You know, an adult Corallis is going to not, you know, tree boas are not going to get a frog or a lizard. They're going to look for warm-blooded avian or mammals

so that's a like a fairly safe cohab to do so you make a big enclosure for your snake and then fitting in a few dart frogs is like a bonus yeah yeah for sure i had a friend that bred um dart frogs for a long time. Then he kind of moved over to towards green tree pythons and got a bunch of those. And, and he had a picky feeder, uh, neonate, uh, green tree. And, uh, so he thought, Oh, maybe he'll take a dart frog. And so he put a few, you know, smaller frogs in there that would be a meal size for the, for the baby, uh, or the hatchling green tree and it paid no attention to them had no interest in the frogs and I mean obviously they're from

different continents and maybe that played a part in it but they didn't recognize that kind of frog movement and shape as food potentially and there's not I don't know that there's many records of frogs in green none that i could find where yeah i don't know green tree i'm interested in making like a big like choco uh mixed species um habitat this is years down the line and want experience with all these animals individually. But potentially Phyllobates

terabilis, orange-black with the darkrod, and then some glass frogs that would be higher up in the vivarium, and then an annulated tree boa. Or if I wanted to break the biotope,

I could go for a more easy to acquire Amazon tree boa. Looking at their dietary preferences, and there's not much available for annulated ones, but for Amazons, they, as babies, will eat like a knolls and tree frogs,

but I haven't found anything other than dark frogs. Potentially tree frogs. And then, but once they get bigger, it's like exclusively birds, bats, rodents.

Yeah. Yeah. They did have a display in the Henry Dorley zoo. And is that in Wichita? No. Where is that? Omaha. Omaha. Yeah.

And they, they had green tree pythons, but they had the Kimberly, um, uh, splendid tree frogs in there with them, which are, you know, they're not from the same area, but they're, it was, it was a cool kind of mixed species display. And when we were there, there was a Kimberly tree frog sitting right on top of the green tree python. Kind of, I think it was in, they had in kind of a nocturnal setup. So you see them, you know, and then, so they were active and moving around, but that's pretty cool. I've definitely seen, I forget where it was, but they had, I think it was just a boa constrictor.

It was some type of more land dwelling. I think it was a bushmaster or a viper. I'm not sure, but it was something. It was a South American enclosure, and they had poison frogs in there. And the poison frogs were, like, jumping across the length of the animal. And it was terrible. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That would be a fun kind of mixed species with the very large and very small in the

same space. I think at Denver Zoo they had something like that with, uh, dart frogs in with the Bushmasters. Cool. That actually sounds familiar. Yeah. Certainly they have big Bushmasters and I think they're,

yeah. Whether I'm trying to tanks or something in there with them. Cool. Yeah. I think the caution there is just make sure you get stuff from the same area. I guess you don't have to, but, you know, I guess it's, it's always nicer when there's well thought out,

you got the right plants and the right species, the, you know, that would be found sympatrically in the same environment. There's a lot of dart frogs with Balsuma in, you know, going on. It works like it works fine. You know, as long as it's big enough that you can get a hot on the top, There's a lot of dart frogs with balsuma going on. It works. It works fine. As long as it's big enough that you can get it hot on the top, because the dart frogs don't want it that warm.

But if you make it vertically oriented so the balsuma have a good place in that, you can separate some a little bit. But yeah, the Madagascar and South America mixture makes me feel a certain way that I'm not sure it is you know people can do what they want to do so I think it's fine the animals are well taken care of and the animals are fine but it does make me go a little bit one of my favorite

exhibits at the local zoo the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake they had a big desert enclosure I mean it was an open air so it was The Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake, they had a big desert enclosure. I mean, it was an open air, so it was just like a wall. And then they had like chuckwallas and spiny lizards and leopard, you know, collared lizards, I think, were in there. And then they had free-flying birds in there. So they had like a cardinal and, you you know some other brightly colored birds and a desert

tortoise and stuff like that it was really a cool mixed species naturalistic type set they had big rock boulders and cliff faces where the animals could climb around it was really a cool display but it kind of went downhill and now i think there's just like a desert tortoise and a chuck wall in there or something. You don't want to dedicate a whole room to it, but instead just like six foot by two feet by three feet or something, you can have smaller animals and have that in your room. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. That's the, the beauty of the small things. Yeah. Well, that'd be a fun project to find a bunch of overlapping species and set them up all together. I guess you could do that fairly easily. And a lot of those are...

Some of them are both. Yeah, that's cool. Well, any other, uh, burning thoughts or, or topics that we didn't go in? I did. I got through mine. I think I, I'm looking at my, I had a list of animals that I think would be fine alternatives. Oh, we didn't talk about salamanders, but I think salamanders are underrepresented, and salamanders are so small.

So I think they would be a cool animal for people to keep. And then urodecaloides, the chameleon geckos, those should be as popular as the crescent geckos,

I think. I mean, they don't have the colors, they don't have quite that like characteristic look, like that head shape, but they're so cool and they're easy to keep and they're not red like super fast the way a lot of the other group of small geckos are. And they're from that exact same area. I mean, I think light-pressed geckos, they benefit from insects, but people keep them on troughs. Powder dive. Really small chameleons, too.

Those urodactyloides have some great patterns, too. Oh, yeah. that like surprisingly large scalation for how little they are is is pretty remarkable almost makes them look um reticulated or netted yeah netted pattern looks really cool almost like a mini parenti or something no they're they're cool and they move so deliberately like almost chameleon like yeah yeah that's i guess that's where they get their common yeah chameleon gecko but yeah they're they're fun looking so yeah more people should have them and and judging by the last tinley that i went to they are you know pretty popular like more people are keeping them on the table yeah for sure yeah

and then lots of really cool small chameleons too that i think are really interesting like carpet chameleons are definitely on the rise really uh popular but then also like rickiesia and some cooling species that are um you know some of them are big but some of them can be um really small compared to yeah i mean candy chameleons i think people can take care of them are big, but some of them can be really small compared to, I mean, panicked chameleons. I think people can take care of them perfectly fine. I'm not concerned about their, you know, people being able to take care of them in a normal-sized enclosure, in a normal-sized room, but they're big. They're big lizards.

Yeah. Or, you know, medium- sized lizards. I think, too, once once we kind of get that the more appropriate care for chameleon species, including, you know, fogging to get them their moisture and their liquid. And also, you know, the maybe solid enclosures anywhere but Florida, you know that kind of idea of keeping them you know i think frank pain is again is doing a great job at kind of revolutionizing or or bringing the market to the animal rather than you know trying to fit the square peg in a round hole or whatever but yeah yeah and i think um bill with chameleon academy did some cool stuff with that he has big and small chameleons um there's another account uh tiny dragons i'm sure i'm saying that right tiny tree tiny tree dragons um uh i've had a great time getting to know him online.

And he does a lot of Brukesia, but he has other small species too. And so just like the tiniest of little chameleons, they're so cool to see. Yeah. Yeah, they're tempting. Have we had a very good track record with the Brukesia? It seems like a lot of Brukesiaia are imported but yeah but he's very successful with them or oh i think people are people doing all right with them i don't i mean i think i think now that people have a general understanding i don't keep them so big caveat

there but i think people um after we kind of learned about their natural history and how to actually like have a successful strategy and how to get the right equipment, I think people are being successful. But I think the problem is the interest in the market aspect of it. They have pretty short lifespans and they have the insect of the reptile world kind of mentality of, like, breeding really fast. Some of these, I'm not sure if it's Brachycea or a different type of small chameleon, where their natural history in the wild is that they essentially go extinct every year. Where they, you know, the adults all don't make it through the seasons. And it's their eggs in the ground that become the next generation.

Right, it's cicada chameleons, basically. Yeah. For the most part, or for 90% of them or whatever. Yeah. And so, yeah, so there's some aspect of that. But I think some of the bigger Brachygia, Helii, and Supceliatus, I think, if I remember correctly, are fairly well established. People are reading them.

You can definitely get captive red ones. But I think if you go off to the chameleon forums, you can find the list of people that are like, oh, I used to have this, I used to have this, I used to have this, and none of them get close to establish. Yeah. Like, oh, I used to have this, I used to have this, I used to have this. And none of them get close to a stat lesion.

Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, again, hopefully the more we learn, the better we'll do with these species. Yeah. And I do think it's true. Like, a decade or two ago, like, keeping really small things, we didn't have the equipment to do it appropriately. But I do think we do now. The infrastructure wasn't there in the same way.

Yeah, I think we do have that now. We have the ability to find out their natural history. We have the access to that type of knowledge. We have, for not everything, but for a lot of things. And now we have the type of equipment that we can make small enclosures for the babies. And now is the time to do that we can, we can make small enclosures for the babies and can, um, now's the time. Yeah.

I, I, I agree. I think, uh, you had some really, really good points that are hard to argue with for sure. Um, but you know, there's, there's, uh, definitely some fun to have to be had with larger species, but I think, uh, more and more. And I mean, where it's increasingly difficult to afford a house. And so people might be, you know, we might see more people living in apartments and, you know, condos or whatever. And they're not going to have the room to have a dedicated herp room or, or things like that. So, you know, keeping smaller species in,

in more limited space, uh, will allow you to be able to enjoy a reptile and in a, um, you know, in the space that you have. And so, and I think European keepers definitely are well onto that and well ahead of us in that regard. And, um, maybe just because they've been forced to consider that. And I think they appreciate a wider range or at least used to. I hope they still do because Americans are kind of monoculture mindset a lot of times, you know, kind of follow the trends. But I like the idea of having a large diversity of cool species because there are just so many cool reptiles out there. And if we can establish more and more and give people different options and they can learn about other cool species that are available in the hobby, I think that knew I'm looking at my list of cons in case I got stuck with the other side of the argument. And you really hit them all.

Obscure animals without established markets, hard to handle, escape tiny food, more sensitive, especially to babies, hard to breathe. So, yeah, I mean, there's some hurdles. But I think, again, if you shift smaller instead of micro, a lot of those hurdles are easier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great discussion. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for, uh, for bringing that, bringing that on and fighting the good fight. You presented your side very well. So, um, any, uh, any cool herpetological discoveries or observations you guys have seen over the last week or two?

I haven't really been focused on anything other than my presentations to the NIH. And so I'm preoccupied with that. But, yeah. preoccupied with that but uh yeah um anything i was i was looking at the uh international anthropological symposium coming up in in june and saw some a cool name on there of yours um is that accurate what's that i saw your name on there oh you did oh from the ihs that's cool is it it's probably some collaborative work i did with on snake viruses maybe or oh are you you're not presenting i hadn't i i wasn't able to go this year but they oh they did approach me to go so did they put my name up oh yeah your name's on the website. Oh shoot. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They'd approach me.

I just don't have enough time off right now. And you can cut this out. Yeah, no, that's fine. I, I would, that's, that's interesting to learn. Okay. Yeah. I felt bad. I couldn't, couldn't make it, but yeah, it would have been interesting to be presenting there. Yeah. I'm, I'm going and talking at that. Oh, cool. I think they mentioned that. I was hoping to get to see you again there. Yeah, shoot. That was my one announcement. Roy Blodgett told me

to rep it as much as we could. I was under something that you were also coming. When is it again? End of June, June. Yeah. Like the 20th, something like that.

Okay. 21st. Right. Yeah. I, I feel really bad. I wasn't able to make it, but yeah, you'll have to represent the, the, uh, what, what are you speaking on? Um,

I wrote a paper. I'm still trying to go publish on trying to define, uh, at least a philosophical concept of a minimum care standard for animals. Cool. Oh yeah. So that's the philosophy I was talking about earlier that I really enjoyed. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. So it's not like an objective scale that you can grade yourself or something, but how do you conceptualize the network standard? After it gets published, hopefully, and presented and stuff, we could argue about it. Yeah, cool. And where have you submitted it yet? and presented and stuff, we could argue about it. Yeah. Cool. And where have you, have you submitted it yet? Or are you working on it? Yeah. Okay.

So I have a, I have a master's in bioethics and health policy. And so I did a little bit of animal welfare in the context of like lab animals for the most part. And so I have some background in the very, like very basics, but have read up about it quite a bit more in the context of exotic animal keeping, um, in the last couple of years. And so, um, and potentially moving a little bit more academically in that way as like a

little bit of an academic side hustle. And so, yeah, I don't know the animal ethics and animal welfare branch very well. And there's a big division between the people that are, you know, animal rights based and animal welfare focused. And so I've mislanded a few trying to go. Some of the bigger, higher-impact journals are that more animal rights focus. And my argument is definitely a welfare utility argument. And so they didn't appreciate it very much. So I'm on try three right now. Hopefully it's a better.

I don't want to drop things that are still pecking, but hopefully, hopefully try and real work. Yeah. That's cool. The other, uh, the other one that's, uh, that I was hoping to make was the biology, the lizards, uh, I guess it's biology, the lizards to, um, conference in, in in Rodeo, Bob Ashley's place. Yeah.

Steve Sharp is speaking at that. And so he invited me to go out and, you know, he said, I've got a place to stay and, you know, I could pick you up from the airport and that kind of thing. But my parents decided to book a cruise and take all me and my siblings and our spouses. And so I'm going to be in the time. So yeah, I was like half because it was kind of when the, we were trying to plan the trip and it was very difficult to get all the, everybody's schedules aligned. And so I was like, there might be a chance we're not going to do the cruise, but then they,

they went through with it. And so we booked it. So I had to tell Steve, sorry, but that, that cool, too. That's in July 24th through 27th there, and a great spot for herping. I mean, and it's probably during the monsoons, depending on the year, I guess. The monsoons are becoming less. Maybe a little early, but we'll see. Yeah. So July 24th to 27th in the Chiricahua Desert Museum in Rodeo. So that should be a cool thing.

I know Steve speaking on his work with the blunt-nosed leopard lizards, which are endangered in California. Not to be confused with a leopard gecko. These are leopardopards. Yeah. Yeah. That was a mistake made on the website for the conference. And he's like, it looks good, except I'm not talking on leopard geckos.

I'm talking about leopard lizards. Kind of funny. Yeah. Lizards are cool. So I wouldn't mind attending that for sure, but unfortunately not this year. Yeah. Cool lizard thing lately was the Animals at Home podcast. Talked to a German breeder of Phrynosoma, who basically his entire obsession is with horned lizards.

And that episode was really good just hearing i mean talk about unsurprisingly a german guy you know just said i'm going to make it work with horned lizards from the time he's 17 18 whatever and just the level of commitment what he's doing and how he's continually tweaking and all this stuff but having success uh really cool episode the couple cool snake talks the my buddy dustin smith was on there talking about virgin Island boas and a variety of his career and stuff. Maybe we'll get him to come on to fight. Maybe we'll have him on boas, boas, boas. NPR, we'll figure something out.

I reached out to him and said, oh, here you go. You go on this. You won't come on mine. And it's like, well, that's not really fair since I haven't asked yet. But nevertheless. Um, and then he talked to Dr. Harry Green. He just talked about Ashley again, about the snake bite book, snake bite

treatment book, you know, all that stuff. So, uh, there's been really good. And the snakes and so he's 200 was, uh, was really fun. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah. Who, who was, uh, so Harry Green Harry Green's, one of his former grad students, or I think she did a graduate work in his lab, but she mentioned him. She was on a California magazine doing an interview on rattlesnakes and she had some. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. What's now? I shouldn't have mentioned it without remembering her name but always names it's always a problem for you it's always a problem for me i'm getting old um but yeah she did a really great job there um i think it was uh lucas i can remember his name barely but uh but I think he alerted us to that I know who you're talking about, unfortunately I can't help you, but I do follow her on Instagram

and she just read a book on California snakes the same person, definitely a ton of cool research that she's putting out there yeah I apologize for not remembering that name, but anyway that she's putting out there. Yeah. Oh, man. I apologize for not remembering that name. But anyway, yeah, it was some cool talk on rattlesnakes. And that's always kind of a hard thing is to tell the public on the shy and non-confrontational nature of the rattlesnake.

What was it? Somebody said that their rattle was more like they're screaming you know out of fear rather than you know an aggressive i'm gonna get you rattle you know it's like leave me alone don't hurt me i'm just i'm just hanging out here you know i don't know kind of cool i was talking to a co-worker who had gone on a vacation down in arizona described like going on the run. And then I don't remember if they saw a rattlesnake or someone else saw a rattlesnake and described it on the path.

I'm like, oh, I'm never running on that path again. The rest of the vacation went a different way. I was like, think about how many you ran past and never saw. And it was like they hadn't even considered that aspect of it. And they had some terror in their eyes. I was like, that's their nature they want to hide like they don't they're not trying to bite you they're not trying to rattle you they're just trying to exist without bothering you because they're scared of you and she i don't think it completely convinced her but it made her terrified i think to go back

to arizona i was like you ran by probably 10 that you didn't see. Yeah. Yeah. For everyone you see. Yeah. There's probably at least that many that you didn't see. And, and even when you're, I mean, specifically out there looking for them, you still miss a lot and, you know, luckily they do rattle. And that's kind of, I love that sound. Cause it means we just found one, you know, that was kind of the, the thrill of that sound is I just sit and wait for that, you know, to hear it. Yep.

And when you don't hear it, you just kind of get bummed out. At least strange people like us. Absolutely. All right. Well, yeah. I really appreciate you coming on again, Billy. This has been a lot of fun. So good luck with your publication and your talk at the IHS and sad that I won't make it,

but you'll do a great job out there. We'll thank a Morelia Python radio for hosting us and for all that they do and go check out all their stuff on social media. And we'll catch you again next time for Reptile Fight Club. See ya.