Reptile Fight Club - Reptile Fight Club debates Power feeding with Nick Mutton and Casey Cannon

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

In this episode, Justin and Chuck tackle the topic of Power feeding with Nick Mutton and Casey CannonWho will win? You decide. Reptile Fight Club!Follow Justin Julander @Australian Addiction Reptiles-http://www.australianaddiction.comFollow Chuck Poland  on IG @ChuckNorriswinsFollow 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

Thank you. All right, welcome to another episode of Reptile Fight Club. My name is Justin Julander, and I'm your host for this wonderful evening. And with me, as always, is Mr. Chuck Pullen. I am going by Sweet Lady DDP today. Thank you. All right. Oh, that's conflicting, man. I just want you to like me.

That's all. Okay. I got you. Yes. Well, I like me. That's okay. I got you. Well, I've, I've heard, I've heard nothing about, you know, but how, how dedicated you are to the sweet lady DDP. And so I'm like, I gotta be, you know, I gotta get on that train. That's my, that's my field herping fuel.

And that's the guys give me a hard time cause we stop and they're all buying a bunch of ice coffee drinks or something. I'm buying sweet lady DDP, but you gotta do what you got to do, right? Whatever. Sounds like your dogs want to chime in. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, they wait, right? Right when you hit the record button, they're like, let's go.

Yeah, that's the way dogs behave themselves. I had a bird that would do that. She'd like flip out and just start squawking and screaming and then like annoy the, then the dogs would freak out and start howling and stuff. It was great. Everything in your house goes crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. All the pets go off at once, but well, um, we got a fun episode tonight. We've got, uh, a couple, uh, heavy hitters in the reptile area. We got Nick Mutton, my, uh, coauthor on a few books here. A couple heavy hitters in the reptile area. We got Nick Mutton, my co-author on a few books here, and Casey Cannon. So we're going to be chatting. They're going to be fighting about power feeding, the dreaded power feeding. More power.

More power. Got to get those things up and going. Can't wait around. No patience. I enjoyed your episode, your Hal Mehera episode. Did we already talk about that? I think it got a mention. Did we mention it?

Yeah. No. So, you know, more developments on that is Blake Bauer and Shane reached out to me. So I think we're going to sit down and start doing some brainstorming. And, you know, I'd like to see where that goes. I mean, maybe we can get something organized and get people into it and actually start delivering on some of this shit that I was talking about on the episode. So now you got to follow through. Yeah, I know. That's what running your mouth does.

No, I mean, that's, you know, that's needed to keep a project like that going strong. And I guess what really kind of got me was, you know, you said, you bought them in 2011. Yeah. They came in, they came in like beginning of 2012 i think but so i approximated them to be probably 11 animals i mean they were you know 100 and something grams like they were still really small but you know seeing what seeing what hatchlings look like versus what i got um i would I would approximate them to just be something like a year old.

And some of mine were hard to get started. I don't know. I guess the take-home message was 2011 to 2019. That's not an instant gratification project. No, it definitely isn't. Well, and the nice thing is all three of those guys, all three of us are kind of long haulers, uh, with, with Tracy. So, you know, I think that's what's necessary. And hopefully we get together and, and, uh, you know,

figure some stuff out and, and, uh, you know, can bring other people in, but I think we want to just kind of get together, talk it out a little bit and see, see, see what's what. And maybe all this talk right now is premature, but I'm, I'm a little excited about it. So it'd be cool. Yeah. Good luck, man. I'm sure rooting for you. That'd be cool. Yeah. That's the species you can't be invasion with.

Yeah, no, it is. It's totally a, you know, slow, slow go. I've got a female that was, it is probably a year or two old when I came in in 2010. It's in the same cage it's been in since 2010. I'm afraid to move it. It never misses a meal. It's never given me a moment's trouble, but I'm never changing its cage. I mean, it's going to live its whole life in there. No stress. I love the breed, but I don't have its cage. I mean, it's going to live its whole life in there. No stress. It's the breed, but I don't have a male that's mature.

Cause you know, the deal, how many hairs you, it's like, if you want a pair, you better buy two pairs. Yeah. You're not going to,

you know, last time it's like, you know, I had a male, the female wasn't ready. I loaned the male to Ryan. It crashed and died immediately. Like it just moved it.

It was doing fine. It's like it it moved 40 minutes away and crashed yeah so yeah easily stressed yeah now i just being able to keeps turning jet black every year wanting to breathe just sitting there yeah it's crazy right they get nice and dark and you're like oh my god i know what's going on here oh help me right when they turn black like that yeah yeah she looks great it's just probably not more than six and a half feet long because what's the point of feeding her out there you know yeah yeah my my male was he was pretty lean but man his head was just huge i mean just a huge head on this like skinny little body but i mean that's

i mean that's how they roll you know what i mean i don't i don't when they very very very first came in about the first batch that came in doug price imported about a dozen of them and i ended up with like four of those and one of them it never ate in captivity it lived for about a year and before it just starved to death but it never ate ever but it was huge the snake was probably 10 feet long but in a head the size of like a big berm and eyes the size of marbles it was just like a giant head and i don't know what it was eating fruit bats or whatever but it wasn't it wasn't rats that's for sure yeah but yeah that's so long ago i look back and you know at past failures with that sort of stuff and

it's it's almost certainly, at least in large measure, my own inexperience in that era. Just didn't know. Treated like everything else, and you don't really realize. You don't know until you... You know what I mean? It's tough, right?

The Scrub Python's being hard to breed. It's like people always miss the secret and that they think there is a secret and the secret is don't want to get big and fat and quit fucking with them just leave them alone just yeah leave them alone and minimize external stress and just leave them be people who fail because they're always fretting over them they're always worried about everything they're just they think that there's a magical recipe that if they just keep changing what they do every year, they'll eventually hit this magic recipe of success. And by changing what you do every single year, you never allow them to get into an annual rhythm or anything. It's like, so you're kind of, it's overthinking it.

It's just leave them alone. No, I mean, you know, like I feel this way with condros too is they do best when you just ignore them. I mean, obviously you got to. They ignore them. Yeah. And tracier are the exact same way. Exact same way.

I had a maroon condro. It was just a single male. I didn't even know how I ended up with it. And it lived for five or six years just sitting in a tub on a paper towel, the water bowl with one stick, no heat, no light, no nothing, just sitting on top of a rack in my adult room for years. And it never missed a meal, never had a bad day, never

gave me a moment's trouble ever. And I just completely left this thing alone. Never touched it. It thrived. I think I gave it to Eric Burke because he had a mate for it or something, but it was just, yeah, leave them alone. People get mad with green pythons and people are always missing them and they're weighing the mice. And it's like,

I've never weighed a rodent in my life. Even when my rodent guys are like, Oh, my, you know, ask them how big a rat is. You know, my mediums are like 150 grams. I don't know what that means. I've never weighed rodents like at all i have no frame of reference for that yeah the only reason i know weights of rodents is because we use them in the lab and weigh them on a daily basis to see if the virus is making them lose weight but a little different but yeah so you're weighing rodents heavily. Well, certainly. Like, I know what a... Habitual rodent layers, huh?

Yeah. Well, not anymore. I'm not weighing rodents anymore. Well, it's not your... I'm directing the weights of the rodents. I got you. Yeah. All right.

Sorry. Enough. No, that's good. No, that's exciting to hear. And I'm really curious to see what goes on. This is going to be a good year. I've got a blackhead that should be laying eggs here as well. And I really want those to succeed this year because having them come so close two years ago, just like.

Yeah, that's going to hurt your feelings if it doesn't. But I need to get a nest box in there soon because she if she doesn't have a nest box and she lays, she doesn't crawl. I don't know i don't know if that's common for blackhead females but mine just does not give a crap about her eggs she doesn't try to wrap them yeah yeah so my eastern pair the female's the same way it's like you got to be on it and sometimes the woman it's like you got to be right there and they're just they're just eggs rolling around under the newspaper yeah yeah well and i mean they're they're usually down a road you know some kind of animal burrow so they probably could probably just leave them and they incubate fine or whatnot so last year's 2021 blackhead clutch is like you have this nice nest box why are you underneath this paper yeah Yeah. They have a mind of their own. But that Western blackhead that somebody saw

out in the Pilbara, patternless blackhead. Do you guys see that thing had no bands or anything it was just like a couple little squiggles on it or something pretty crazy blackhead but in in australia found a wild patternless blackhead the weird thing is where they found it in that region it shouldn't it's really kind of a honey gold color which is unusual you'd think it'd be more grayish white like most westerns some kind of mutant it's a morph or a hyper I don't know if the chat showed that

yeah didn't Hyper say that the Womas in that area were also like had a similar pattern thing going on I know that was probably just a one off blackhead but he did mention something about the Woma pythons in that area having a really funky pattern too yeah it could be i mean i've i found a woma up there close a little bit further north but it looked like a nice you know typical woma but there are some populations of womas that are

kind of bluish and and have not a really well-defined pattern. Some of those Southwestern Womas maybe, but, or the South Australian Womas are pretty low pattern. But yeah, pretty interesting anyway. I mean, you know, what's really cool is they just let it on its way. They didn't try to collect it and breed it and sell a new patternless morph. But I don't know why you'd be interested in that anyway, because that's half the appeal of the Blackheads and Womas are those nice bands that they got, especially the Westerns. And this also brings it closer to our topic of conversation for the night that Aspidites morphs are a terrible idea. It's like the idea of scrub python morphs. That is the worst thing that would ever happen to that group of snakes.

Because the kind of nutritional requirements to be successful, like blackheads and womas, are just completely at odds with the general morph breeder, raise them like crazy, power feed them and breed them. You're like, an albino scrub pipe on that project would die so fast. Like there's a bunch of people like trying to pump these things up and it's like, it's not going to go well. And as for the idea of a blackhead, it's, it would be a tough, tough thing. And that seems to be the case. I mean, there, there are some, you know,

albino blackheads and you don't see a lot of those around do you think if do you think if they found like some uh like like uh like some albino barnex or something like that that that would like change the the the scrub like people like we want to start keeping them rather than just like this niche niche community of scrub keepers like if if a morph like like like a like a true out morph like that showed up i hope not me too it might change it for the for the moment like you might have somebody throwing big money at it but they're probably not going to be successful unless they grow breeding for years or something mean as shit and trying to kill them yeah yeah it's not i hope they don't ever achieve mass appeal sort of no yeah yeah well the biggest benefit would

be that the albinos would be blind so maybe they wouldn't be as mean they couldn't see or that they would just swipe at anything like yeah i'm continually amazed at this like crazy fad of like white python's being the it snake you have to get it's like as a guy that's had white lips for 30 years and has a bunch of them now like they suck yeah these people are paying five thousand dollars for a southern white lip it's like that i can't even imagine the crushing disappointment and regret once you get them it's gonna latch on to you down your arm and it's gonna hate you for your entire life generally speaking it's like yeah

they're iridescent but they're complete lunatics for the most part yeah well before i got into carpets i wanted some black phase white lips and because i just thought they were great looking and then i found i did i couldn't find any and I ended up down into carpets. After I figured stuff out, I was like, oh man, thank God I didn't do that. Not just a bullet. It was horrible. I literally just cleaned my white lip bythons 10 minutes before

I came in and logged into this. It was the last thing in the room I cleaned. Usually I have to do the cleaning feed where you, here's a little rat. Why don't you eat that rat? i can get here and change his water really fast they're just yeah it's amazing how many people had to talk out of buying ring pythons when i had those things for sale like oh they're easy to handle what's the care on these guys i'm like no they're psychotic and they pee everywhere and they're never gonna be nice and're going to die if you let them dry out.

How many do you want? They're the undisputed heavyweight champions of dropping dead for no reason. Or killing their mate. Ryan Young posts pictures of them and they look amazing. Especially his babies. Ryan's 40 minutes away. He's one of my best friends.

He can keep them things. I've never done it before. I's 40 minutes away. He's one of my best friends. He can keep them things. I've never done it. I've tried like three different times. It's like they just drop dead for no reason. You're trying to be so particular about it because they need high humidity. And they're one of those

snakes like white lips that likes wallowing in their own filth. They just like in a mucky half wet gross stinky that's what they they like and even when you get this i yeah the white lips i don't know why i put up with them it's like i don't like these snakes why do i i feel like i have to have them almost you're you're a glutton for punishment well on the book front, we counted up all the photograph suppliers, the contributors, whatever you want to call them. Yeah, I mean, it's a hefty list. Like, there's a lot of people, including Casey.

Yep. For God's sakes. I see Nick asking for more pictures for, for like months after I thought pictures were done. Usually you're trying to like plug a hole here and there. Yeah. Oh, I totally get it. I have to take some pictures. I got to take some pictures of a scarred up snake tonight.

There's like two-thirds of an empty page where you're talking about like feeding live versus frozen. I'm like, I got a snake that's got half a tail. That would be yeah tell that story and take a good picture it's you know we've got a we've got a few uh wild uh animals that have stubby tails in the book as well from getting child done it's you know it happens from a blackhead from mount carbine that has no tail it's got like a half an inch of tail and like a five foot snake and it's obviously like a very old injury because it's super well healed, but it's got nothing, like nothing at all.

It's just a snub. It's like something bit its tail off completely. It was doing fine. Yeah, it's hard out there for a snake, I think. In captivity, you've got plenty of people leaving rats in the cage overnight or something, and they just assume that it's been eaten. And then, yeah, you can have a poor outcome that way, too. Don't eat into the cloaca.

But it was a hefty list of people, so we appreciate the contributors, and we're excited to get this thing done. I just received two more pictures of the book right before this. But I think it's actually all right because alphabetically it would be the dead last thing alphabetically. So you could just like stick it on the end and not change anything because it literally uh but i think i have to include those yeah i'm i'm just i'm worried there's gonna be a huge delay from the printer and we're gonna be all excited because we sent it off and then everybody's gonna be ready and we'll be like yeah it's got a 12 month delay i'd like people to see it sooner rather than later but i'm excited to not have to. Yeah. Yeah.

You gotta wish that COVID mojo right out, bro. You gotta stop. You can't, you can't be bringing that bad energy into the car. I just got over COVID like a week ago. I got a lot of work done. Cause my unit wasn't really that sick.

Well, yeah. It didn't get you good then? No, it was absolutely the greatest non event ever. it's not even the worst cold i've had in the last couple years like if i hadn't had a test just sitting there i would have just gone to the gym that day i was that mild like it was like my back hurts more than usually and it usually hurts a little it's like just woke up with a more stiff back and a tickle in my throat

it never really got to be more than that but that's good i i had like i don't know if it was just a bad week but i had like a mild headache and and like you know i'm old so like i'm a little sore when i get out of bed and i'm like uh-oh you're not as old as me are you uh 45 oh yeah i'll be 50 this year man yes okay i'm like getting mail from aarp trying to aarp like hey don't you want to join our club of old people fucking you get discounts nick do that shit there's no there's no shame in the geriatric game like i'm that old now they're trying to recruit me yeah the big five oh yeah went to a new gym for the first day today and i'm like i am the oldest person here like went to a new gym for the first day today and I'm like I am the oldest person here

like there's a lot of people and I'm like I am now the old guy at the gym well that would be the freedom to stand naked in the locker room and apply towel to various areas you sound like you've been

Justin sounds like he was scarred by an older man in a gym bathroom there's always an old dude who's totally not ashamed of his feet strutting around old saggy balls

just hitting him in the knees they've just given up any cares that they ever had a conversation with you it's like dude you're naked what are you doing yeah that's that's what happens when you turn 50 so all right all right all right i'm gonna do this and say we probably ought to get to the fight because we could probably spend the next hour just cutting up all right all right well we's over here ready to go, dude. Look at him. He's poised.

He's focused. He looks like he's ready to pounce. Yeah, he's ready to go. Well, we'll just have you guys. I mean, if you don't know Casey Cannon and Nick Mutton, then you've lived under a rock. But, yeah, let's have you guys give a short introduction. This is the part where Nick tells everyone he's written like seven books and all that stuff. And I'm like, I am Casey.

I work with Brettles and I am trying to breed the Bolins at Canova right now. And I've been to Australia one time. Just a couple of different parts of it. How's the cage coming along? We're going to have plans for it done uh hopefully this week uh it's a pretty interesting idea yeah where they wouldn't let me like roll it out into the cold area and like roll it back in like i was telling them to so they're like no let's just get this whole like cooling system under the air under uh the top layer of it.

The bottom layer of it's going to have like nothing but hides. It's going to be like a beehive of just if this female wants to do this kind of nest box, she'll do this. If she wants anything else, she's going to have that option. You know? Yeah. So just trying to have as many visual berries in there as possible, as much cover as possible. So whatever this female decides she wants in like two or three years, she can have it. So that's kind of the plan.

She'll tell you what nest box parameters are right by if you give a bunch of options. She'll figure out which one is the one that has the properties. Yeah. But at the same time, there's a guy in Germany right now. He breeds these things in aquariums. Really? He has them in giant glass aquariums which is the perfect cage for him because they leak heat it's what you need you need something where

they can heat up and then get off and then the heat just dissipates off their body yeah there's always some dude with some aquariums doing something you just like it would never work way way way way back in the day like one of the first guys to breed white-lipped pythons, they were in big fish tanks and he never cleaned them. Like literally never. Didn't they have like panels and stuff running underneath? Yeah. There's just this layer of substrate

and eventually there'd be so much shit and shed skins and detritus on that, he'd just like sprinkle another layer of substrate on top of it, like a compost. And there were just these layers and they were just burrowing around in the filth and it's like and they were breathing yeah yeah i mean this guy's literally aquariums with newspaper ground and they have like a heat pad they don't even have bulbs wow like a dog heat pad looking thing and he's bred them three times

is this what's his name? This is Hunter Franz. I think his name is like Volker Franz in Germany. But you see a picture of his setup. It's aquariums. Really? That's interesting. It's everything they tell you not to keep a python in because it leaks heat, which is exactly what you want with a Bolin's python. It's Volker?

Yeah. Huh. That's interesting. Well, and Casey and, um, Casey's been on our show before we've had him here and we had a great debate with him, uh, a few, few months back. It's been a little while, so we're happy to have him back and, um, welcome to the show. How about you, Nick? Uh, my name is Nick. I keep a few carpets and read them sometimes.

And yeah. All right. Well, yeah. If you don't know Nick, then you've been living under the eye. And I talk too much quite frequently. Yeah. Yeah. Conversation with Nick on the phone is never a short one.

It's so bad that you know people don't answer the phone because they know they're never going to get on the phone is never a short one, but it's so bad that like people, you know, people don't answer the phone because they know they're never going to get off the phone. Like I have to like get, to get some people to answer the phone. I have to like preface it. Like, honestly, I keep it to like brief. I'll promise. It'll be like 10 minutes. It's just going to rambling on. Yeah. All right. Well today, these two titans are gonna fight about power feeding um and maybe you know that's not the best term for it maybe that's clickbaity i don't know you guys can judge but we're gonna kind of go over you know the amount you're feeding your animals and things like that so um we'll go ahead and do the customary coin toss. Who wants to call it? We got age before beauty. Heads.

Okay. There it is. He called it. And it is heads. So you get to pick the topic and pick whether you want to go first or let Nick lead you out. So I guess I'm going to be defending uh frequent feeding okay okay at least for the first part of a snake's life and i guess uh i guess we'll get started do you want to go first you want to let nick go first yeah uh yeah go ahead nick okay so you got the why power feeding or frequent feeding is not the best idea.

It's a terrible idea. All right. It is an idea and a practice that lets if we're just all at two years old and that that's a normal thing when that is so not normal. I mean, everybody here has found snakes in the wild. I mean, even pythons in the wild. And what you invariably find is an old ass snake that's not very big with a giant head because it's taken a long time to get to that size. And these things are not breeding at 18 months old. They're certainly not breeding at six months old. They're probably not breeding at four years old. And there is a cost associated with overfeeding.

And that is always shortened life expectancy. And you see time and time and time again, and there's mountains of evidence that show this, that when you burn a candle at both ends, I, in this case, the candle is your metabolism. You burn it up twice as fast. Sure. If you look at, you know, what is the, and it's all calories in calories out. If you look at like all dogs are genetically almost the same thing there's really no genetic difference between breeds of dogs it's all cosmetic but what's the longest lived dog breed chihuahua which coincidentally is the smallest has eaten the least amount of food and what is the shortest lived dog breed oh great dane which

only lives like six years because it's the tallest one of the biggest breeds that's not accidental that is not you know the faster the more you consume in terms of calories the higher metabolic rate the sooner you die uh that's why bowhead whales in the high arctic can live 200 years as a vertebrate but they live in cold water and their metabolism is super duper slow as a result and it extends life and why tortoises live 200 years can live you know 150 200 years um okay well casey what you got uh i think nick just shaved a couple years off my life because i'm a fat ass Oh, God. So I do think when it comes to raising pythons, there is a difference between the, okay, we're going to have a really frequent feeding its entire life. In other words, we keep these adult snakes on full feeding schedules.

You know, they're eating once every week, every, you know, eight days or whatever. That's clearly bad. There is no way to argue that feeding your adult python once a week to get it super fat is beneficial to them. Yeah. That being said, there have been, you know, a few studies, especially ones with Dr. Richard Schein looking at water pythons, where he's been able to track how quickly they grow in nature through capture-release studies. And he's found that during the very best years, the years that have the highest amount of rainwater falling down and the highest amount of rats growing, you can have animals reaching most of what I saw was 140 centimeters when 140 to 160 centimeters for females, when adult size, in other words, the area where growth completely slows down, which is about 170, 180 centimeters, but 80% of that's achieved in two years. So in other words, these snakes are hitting pretty darn close to small adult size in two years

on this one capture and release study. There have been other studies by Daniel Matusz where they're testing, they're checking the growth of green tree pythons out in the Iron Rages. And most of their growth estimation says they're reaching adult size for males at about two and a half females three to three and a half years yeah so i don't know if in captivity if we were to shave that down by say a year and then massively slow down on feeding if that would cause a huge amount of loss of lifespan. Yeah, that's the golden spoon hypothesis, right?

Yes, the golden spoon paper. The ones that had a better year, they actually produced more eggs when they were adults and they lived. They grew faster their entire life. Yeah. That was a big thing. The snakes that were eating the most in their first year of growth were more likely – well, they were growing faster for their entire lifespan. You literally had two-year-old snakes that were born during the very best of years that were larger than nine-year-old females. Yeah, and they tracked them successive years, right? Wasn't that like a 12-year study or something? It was ridiculous. It was a 13-year study from what I saw.

Yeah, pretty crazy. One thing that you can't really quantify is the effects on lifespan. You can easily see a scenario where in evolutionary terms, that's rewarded because nature doesn't care how long you live. What matters is how many copies of yourself you put out into the environment. That's what defines success. How much of your genes get out there. So the animal that produces four clutches in back-to-back years makes 80 copies of themselves and dies in year six when they're six years old is more successful than the snake that lives 25 years and only lays three clutches in that time. Because it was ultimately more successful than the snake that lives 25 years and only lays three clutches in that time because it it was ultimately more successful so nature doesn't really care about this other aspect longevity which we in theory i would hope care about in in a captive setting uh you know it's like what's best for i mean if we're looking at early reproduction and heavy feeding to get

reproduction going and prying up a maximum amount of animals. That's fine. If you look at these animals purely as a commodity and you don't care about anything else, if it's just turning to burn and how many babies can I, you know, breed these things like you're breeding rodents. Like, you know, I cycle my mice out after six months. Cause they're of no use to me. And it was like, they're just like, you don't care. You're just breeding them until they're,

until they're no good at breeding anymore and then you feed them to something if that mindset is applied then you can produce more animals that way but is that something we should aspire to i would argue i would argue we should not that it's there should be more to herpetoculture than just purely crank out as many snakes as you can as fast as you possibly can yeah i don't and i can agree with that but if we come down to using longevity as a you know a measuring stick a source of uh if i have success or not there's multiple studies on mice that say if you maintain an animal at basically just above starvation that mouse is going to live longer than any other mountain they're like almost double lifespan but you

have to maintain them at just above starving to death from what i understand from a lot of these papers and you see that i've got that paper pulled up in case I needed it for this argument. It's actually a Hale's 2005. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you see that in, you know, mammals and humans too.

You can be, you know, you can have a woman that's 14% body fat. She's going to stop menstruating at that point, you know? So you can say, Oh yeah, you'll live forever.

You won't ever be able to reproduce so it's almost an inverse of this where okay you can breed much faster when you're fatter or you can live forever and never reproduce that's tricky with reptiles are we comparing apples to oranges you know when you're talking about you know studies in mammals and things like that, or, you know, I maybe, uh, here's some thoughts on that, you know, if, if, cause I mean, pythons, which is, I think what this topic is kind of revolving around a little bit where we have kind of the most experience as a group, um, are, are designed to kind of sit around, they're not out there lifting weights or, you know, that kind of thing. They're, they're designed to sit and in ambush and catch food when it comes along so you know nick snake nick snakes are weight lifters yeah

i know that so you know can you is that a valid comparison i guess you know to say that a mammal that doesn't eat a lot lives longer but i don't know how that would apply to a snake i mean the whole argument the central point of argument is you know the effects of food on metabolism and that and it's all that and the reptile a cold-blooded ectothermic metabolism is a very different thing than a mammal so i think you could probably speak to in broad in the broadest of terms that you see similarities in this but it's not going to be exactly the same and man it's not going to translate exactly i wouldn't think yeah well and it's interesting

to it kind of to your point nick is like when we talk about this we talk about the extremes either you feed it excessive amounts of food or you feed it almost no food at all just to barely keep it alive and i and i don't think most people even even, you know, most snake keepers, if they're using the ad, you know, the, the advantageous, um, you know, biology of snakes are doing those two things, you know, they're, they're probably feeding less, but that snake doesn't need a whole lot. Right. Uh, or it could take more, but, And as long as you balance that out, it kind of depends on the minutiae of how you do it, right? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to it. Some of these things are feed very seasonally. And so you have kind of a boom and bust cycle with food. So

they're eating a lot, not necessarily power feeding, but they're eating a lot of food in some months of the year and then get long stretches where it's very little and very meager, uh, what they're able to get. And that annual food cycle also obviously affects the reproductive cycle because you want to, uh, those two things are also very closely linked. Casey, you have to jump in here. Are you still there? I'm still here. I don't think my camera's working for some reason. That was kind of weird. All I see is is the naked nick cover so i'm like is he there

so i guess my my thoughts with that would be uh we'll go to carpet pythons because we all know carpet pythons pretty well a male carpet python you know let females, male carpet python is a breed at 600 grams. Almost all of them, brettles pythons, maybe more like 750. That's about where mine seemed to start and where I kind of maintain them at. So I guess my question when it comes to how fast you can grow something up, you can get something to 750 grams pretty quickly. I mean I'd say you could do it in 12 to 14 months without even quote unquote power feeding that much. So that's a good point in that. And it's totally linked to an argument, you know, with power feeding and how much you should feed is that people,

the reason they feed a lot mostly these days is they want snakes to reproduce, but they miss, they completely conflate a bunch of different things with regards to their expectations of size and growth for these animals. They invariably conflate maximum size, record size with adult size when those are completely different things. You know, this is, you know, people ask me, I bred Wamina scrub pythons, which are just pretty distinct form. They're not, they're maybe a touch smaller than some of the other stuff, but maybe not. Like I, I examined in a museum hopping trip ahead of one that was, it had to have been 13, 14 foot.

It was huge. It's a giant preserved head. At any rate, people see, they read like, oh like oh well barnex scrub pythons can get 14 feet long and they think barnex scrub pythons need to be 14 feet long and they tend to feed to their expectations of size and then eventually it's like i've seen a lot of 14 foot scrub pythons you don't have never seen a 14 foot scrub python on a clutch of eggs never seen it seen a lot of big ones never seen one seen a whole lot of eight foot ones on eggs though i mean that's what you know i mean it's just like two years in a row might lay a third year in a

row and the snake is maybe seven feet long yeah does great bounces back when you get to that upper size limit they it's not a good thing necessarily you end up with less frequent reproduction and it's you know the animals that breed the best are not the super giant ones well that was that was that uh arboreal symposium where uh daniel natush kind of dropped the bomb on green tree python breeders where in you know the book said they had to be a thousand grams to breed and he's like i've i've never seen one in the wild grams yeah exactly that was an awkward i was there i was the last speaker i sat in the audience and daniel spoke last and all the chondro luminaries were all there trooper walsh was there eugene was there

great bunch of guys rico was there and and they're like just you could just see them like just looking and grasping at straws for any any plausible reason why they maybe you just weren't finding the really big ones because they were using the habitat differently it's like no they don't exist yeah it's like i finally like we all have that sort of inner bullshit detector kind of thing and it's like it was just good flashing lights were going off my head i just like stood up and blurted this out i'm like i go have any of you ever even tried to breed a female that was under 500 grams and one he's not really a factor these days in the condor community but at the time

he was you know one of those guys and he just like kind of a little bit abrasively frankly he's like have you give that we'll have you and i'm like yes as a matter of fact i did and then i went on to detail how i bred a pair of five-year-old womena chondros and the female weighed 359 grams and the male weighed 247 grams resulting in nine eggs 100 fertility and the female bounced right back, uh, ultimately died of cancer at like 13 or 14 years old after having laid five pledges of eggs.

And even at that age, after all that weight, about 500 grams on the mark, it's like, they're not, they're little tiny snakes. Yeah. And if you feed them to this expectation of them need to be a thousand grams

to breed, it's like, that's, that's more than double anything they a thousand grams to breed it's like that's that's more than double anything they should ever be it's like and you wonder why they lay 47 eggs only two hatch and the snake's dead by its eighth birthday because it was never it's the snake equivalent of like a 400 pound human it's not supposed to be that big and there's a cost associated with that and it kills them and they never seem to figure that out but it's because it's a little snake yeah it's like no snake is going to there's no snake will ever evolve that lays more eggs than it can actually wrap around and protect like you see these chondroclutches

like 50 eggs it's like there's just eggs everywhere it's like that's those eggs wouldn't hatch it's they're little you know okay yeah people too much but as a group fundamentally misunderstands or at least that's changing i wish i could have been there when daniel natush laid that down in that room god damn i bet that was amazing that's but it was like i think it was like a thousand and five it was just a smidge over a thousand animals and out of all that there were like three that were over a thousand grams just barely over yeah right it might have been a hundred years old i mean yeah that one animal that wins the lottery and it just lives in some secluded valley where there's just a weirdly abundant ecosystem

and they've got more food and they just eventually get that big after a long enough period of time but the average was invariably under 500 grams for females and males 100 grams smaller little case you got you got comment around that well no i mean he's completely right about that and i was going to bring up uh green tree pythons where you know people oh, you shouldn't breed until they're 1500 grams. And then again, you wonder why they die when they're 10 years old. It's because their heart's literally beating to a system that's five times bigger than it's supposed to be. Yeah. Or prolapse or all these other things that happens to them. But again, if you get, say, you find out they breed at 340 grams or whatever, That's actually a big one from the studies I've seen.

Does it matter if they get to be that size at two and a half years old and you just keep them there? Right. So is that a problem? That's one that I think you'd have to, no one's really actually looked at it. That's doing these sorts of studies and like, because it's a long termterm thing like it's probably hard

to get somebody to do that to invest like 15 years into some captive snakes and feeding them and breeding them and just tracking who lived you know in different groups and with different feeding regimens and who hit maturity first and who how long they lived and and and doing that i think it would be very insightful. But I don't know. I just – There was a study on children's pythons they did at University of West Sydney where they gave – they had a control group that was fed 10 percent, offered 10 percent of its body weight every week. And another group that was offered up to 30 percent of its body weight every week for a year. Which they actually did.

They were very careful to self-regulate, you know, if you want to use anthropomorphic terms like that, the, the, the researchers were, or the, no,

no, the snakes were self-regulated. Okay. So I just got to ask where they were only eating like 16 and a half percent of their body weight, but they got these snakes up to breeding size where they were actually locking up in 12 months. Just doing that. Antaresia as a rule might be an anomaly in that some of the sort of macro trends you see with keeping and breeding pythons don't seem to apply to them.

And I think it's because they're kind of a bottom of the food chain sort of thing and the lower you are in the food chain the generally the higher reproductive output because most of your babies get eaten by other stuff and whereas like you're never going to get 13 years of consecutive back-to-back clutches from a scrub python 13 years in a row with good fertility but i've done it with stimson's pythons 13 years running and it was never less than 10 and never more than 13 eggs every year i finally just retired the female i felt bad breeding her anymore it was they bounced back super fast i had a a children's python that double clutched it laid a clutch of 12 and then a clutch of 13 three and a half month or three and a half four months apart uh and bounce i mean and

bred the next year again like they seem to be they bounce back faster than anything i've ever seen whereas a lot of this other stuff uh particularly the less commonly bred species having bred a lot of that kind of stuff it it's almost depressing but the reality is if you get three or four clutches out of a female in its entire life, that's about all you can realistically hope for. You're not going to get nine clutches out of a female white lip or a scrub python. It just doesn't seem to work that way. If you get three or four, if you got five, you've done fantastic. You shouldn't expect that they're going to breed every year, every other year into perpetuity.

It doesn't ever seem to work out like that for the most part so i don't know i'd rather take a slower attack with feeding and have them be around for a while than just burn them out fast um so i have a lot of effort snakes justin i was just gonna say i mean there's there's studies on, you know, how much a snake needs to, you know, how much energy it needs, what size, you know, how many meals it needs to just perform its basic functions. And I think, didn't Gavin Bedford do some of that work with his PhD thesis or dissertation i thought i saw something in there about you know like 20 20 mice for a stimson's python just to kind of do normal functions or something yeah i mean i guess that's i you know where they're seasonal feeders i imagine they probably don't pass up a meal you know like i mean that's that's kind of an ingrained thing like you see that in green tree pythons they're always sitting out waiting for a meal.

You'll see that in the wild during, you know, times. It doesn't seem like they are very successful very often, but they'll take a meal when it comes. So, I mean, if you've got an explosion of rodent populations or whatever, and they're eating as many as they can catch or whatever, you know, can, can a wild snake get obese? You get, there are some examples with boids and stuff that are like that in the extreme to one with carpets is Isle of St. Francis where you have, there's the only thing to eat is mutton birds, ironically. And the birds nest in mass. So for like a short window of time,

there is an unfathomable number of freshly hatched mutton bird chicks. I don't know how big a mutton bird is or it's chicks. But the baby, these snakes just gorge themselves during the nesting season and then basically starve until the next nesting season. There's just nothing else on this tiny island. And it's this extreme boom or bust. And somehow that works. You have a dwarf carpet, but that works. And the similar thing happens in some of the islands off of Belize with boas. I've got some crawl key boas and things and they are, these things will reproduce it, you know, three feet long and they're only going to have like

four or five babies, but they live on an island that is basically a few mangrove trees that stick up and go underwater at high tide. There's almost nothing there. And the only thing there is, is a seasonal availability of birds. So they're just adapted to eat, to gorge themselves and then wait until the next, you know, the next season. So that, that can work. I don't know how long those populations, what their average life expectancy is, but there are those situations in the wild where you see that extreme sort of amount of food, you know, for a short window and then long periods of nothing. Yeah. According to Wikipedia, the mutton bird chicks fledge at 900 grams. So somewhere between.

It's a very big bird, right? Well, yeah, the adults are pretty, pretty huge. But yeah, when they fledge they're 900 grams so i don't know you know they grow and i guess maybe the the other part of this is is are we conflating what wild caught animals do versus what you know what what uh you know what our captive animals are doing and and is that a, is that a fair comparison or should it be the same? Should it be looked at exactly the same way? That's a, that's an excellent point. Um, in it,

not to plug this new book Justin and I have got coming out, but there's a. Plug away Nick. Well, no, I mean, I, I'd written on domestication in an earlier, you know, some years ago. And so there's a pretty robust discussion of domestication and what happens with that. And the reality basically to summarize a whole lot of pages is that the animals we have in captivity, particularly things like carpet pythons that are multiple generation after multi-generation captive bred are not the same as their wild forbearers. Like they are. We are changed them to be better at being captives so you start to see earlier reproduction you know it's smaller sizes these things are really common when you domesticate any species and so maybe the rules are not exactly the

same because we are i mean you know if you had a clutch of wild carpet pythons that came out a while your odds of any one of them as a hatchling taking a domesticated mouse as a first meal is probably pretty low. But your average jungle carpet that's like seven generations removed from that, it's pretty good because the ones that insisted on lizards didn't live to pass their genes along. They're really look at Western hognose snakes. They come out of the egg and the day they leave the egg, they eat frozen mouse pinkies, which is the most unnatural thing they could possibly do because the ones that were looking for toads and lizards didn't live to pass their genes along. So we have just steered this towards, you know, these things that we find beneficial

in a captive sense. So I guess with some of these lineages, that is a bigger, you know, and probably why we're talking about scrub pythons being difficult is because they don't have that long captive lineage. You're starting from ground zero, wild caught snakes. If you're lucky, wild caught snakes that were imported when they were babies. But that's it. That's the best you can do. They don't have any domesticated sort of properties, whereas things like things like a carpet python or are you know much further down that track and things like a ball python is is completely domesticated at this point so casey what do you think is that is that a helping helping or hurting

your point i mean i don't really know if you can say it's helping or hurting hurting either point i mean nick already brought up at one point there are ball pythons that people who have a very, very rapid, probably too rapid feeding schedule on those, you can breed them at like, what, 43 days is the current record for a male breeding? What? 43 days. 43 days? Yeah, I mean, 40 days. What these guys are doing, though, and it's become, I think, unfortunate is they have taken they have figured out that if you feed a ball python baby a rat pinky every single solitary day, seven days a week, 30 days a month, rat pinky, rat pinky, rat pinky every single day, they'll grow like at this insane rate where there's this constant influx of calories. But because the rat pinky is fairly small, it doesn't trigger frequent shed cycles because it doesn't really stretch the abdominal wall out and trigger a shed. So they just eat like crazy, grow like weeds, but don't keep going into shed, which would then take them out of commission for eating for a couple of weeks. And you end up with this ridiculous growth rate and really your onset of reproduction. However, there's a commensurate rise in ball python people complaining about rectal prolapses.

Shocker. Because if you've bred a lot of snakes, like all of us have, you've probably stumbled onto this like, huh. If you feed a lot of pinkies, your odds of the animal prolapsing is exponentially higher than if you're feeding it something with fur and we're talking about rectal prolapses in the snakes right yes yes yes i mean you see i mean what are the species there are some species obviously where you're kind of stuck feeding piggies because they're so small what are you going to feed a baby chondro other than the pinky a lizard i mean you're pretty much stuck because of their size but feeding pinkies the things that don't need to eat pinkies like i'd never understand the the carpet python people and those are my that's my community this obsession with feeding rat pinkies it's like it's nutritionally kind of a downgrade and it increases your rectal prolapse risk.

Every time you'll see somebody on Facebook or whatever group and they're complaining they have a prolapse, ask them what they'll feed it. And they will always say rat piggies. I don't know why. I have no explanation for why that's the case. But it is the case. It's not the kind of thing like you'd see if you have a clutch here or there, but if you've got hundreds of clutches and thousands and thousands, you get enough data, you start to see that it's always those ones that have that problem.

And now I'm starting to see it in ball Python people. Well, you never did because they've got this rat pinky a day philosophy going. And, um, yeah, sounds like a good project for a doctor Zach to give a student or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Compare rat pinky feeders with, you know. Crude and talking about feces and everything. But my basic rule of thumb is like if what if you feed a carpet or whatever, a rat pinky or anything, a pinky, it can't even make a proper shit. It just makes a skid mark on the side of its tub. carpet or whatever a rat pinky or anything a pinky it can't even make a proper shit it just makes a skid mark on the side of its tub and basically they get pinkies give your snake diarrhea that's just the truth of it and if you know you should basic logic would tell you like if what you're feeding your snake is giving it perpetual diarrhea maybe you shouldn't be feeding it that if you were eating something it was giving you diarrhea constantly, you'd stop eating that thing.

I don't know, Nick. I've been feeding chicks to some of my scrubs, and that is some nasty skid-marky type shit. I have to rotate between mice just to keep them. That's just because there's no hair to bind it together. It's gross. It's like, yeah, and they're not nice about it. They're it's it's gross it's like yeah they're and they're not nice about it they're all over they're just like i feed a fair amount of birds because

for some of these things nutritionally like the macronutrient profile if you will of a chicken is more closely approximate what a wild snake would eat in that birds are inherently they're reptiles. And so reptiles don't really do the intramuscular fat thing. It's all subcutaneous fat. Whereas you ever see, if you ever had a marbled piece of chicken, uh, they don't store fat that way as a reptile. And so you end up with, they're invariably always lower in fat as, and even, you know, pythons, the wild to eat eat mammals they're eating some half dead half starved scraggly looking thing and wild rodents and things don't have the luxury of excess body fat they can't so you're feeding them a leaner prey especially with things like black-headed pythons

and things that shouldn't be eating mammals at all really that's a better a better substitute that's nutritionally and so I feed my blackheads. I rotate in adult quail on a regular basis. When you have a liquor and your rat rack gets plugged up and they have a bunch of half skinny and they're all emaciated, those are great. I feed those. Casey, are you still there?

Yeah, maybe. We talk blackheads. Yeah, yeah. Because the other night in preparing for this, I had a conversation with Jason Hood, who is at this point debatably one of the most successful people with blackheads in the country. He feeds his large adult rats, and he has animals from 2004 that are breeding this year. So his question's always been, everybody says you're supposed to keep these things super skinny. You're supposed to keep them on this low fat diet.

He's more successful than just about anybody with this species. And they're eating large adult rats. I found a similar thing with the Kuligowski brothers. Denver Kuligowski had, giant black-headed pythons. And I had always heard that too. You got to keep them thin or they'll never breed. And I said, well, how's your success rate with these? And he's like, they breed every year. He gets clutches and they hatch out and they're fertile and happy. And they did very well with blackheads. So two sources that kind of come to the same conclusion. So what, what do you think is, is there Casey? What, what, what do you think?

So from what Jason said, and again, I've, I don't own blackheads. I would love to at some point, he said that a lot of the ideas about blackheads go back to the 90s where he says everything was fat everything was fed this you know insane feed response our feed uh regime his entire life they got completely obese and that's where a lot of that stuff comes from he's saying right now he's gotten animals in that have never bred from other people he looks at him he says yeah it's because they're seven foot pine snakes and it's no wonder they've never bred from other people. He looks at them, he says, yeah, it's because they're seven-foot pine snakes, and it's no wonder they've never bred.

He says, I get them, I start really getting some food to them, and then all of a sudden, they start laying eggs. You know, from what he said is, you can tell when a snake's getting fat, so you know when to start slowing down on it. You know not to feed the snakes in the winter time you know to you know basically don't let your snakes get fat so it doesn't really matter what his black kids are eating and i mean even talking about the k brothers the k brothers they broke all the rules as far as pythons go i mean i don't know if you guys have

seen their videos where they're talking about how they fed their stuff. They were feeding their carpet pythons when they were growing up every like four days. Or no, like four times a week. Four days a week. And they would do things up to adult size. It was very extreme. They do food cycling as well.

So I know with the blackheads, they'd just feed for a few months out of the year, but they would feed like every four or five days and they'd feed a smaller rat like not a huge meal but kind of multiple smaller meals in within the week and i mean listen you can do a lot of cocaine in a short period of time as long as you don't die you probably in the in the grand scheme of things you'll be okay you know what i mean like i mean a little crack cocaine never killed anybody okay i'm just saying like just i mean i you know i i i i i listen i'm mr challenge the norm uh let let's let's make sure that if we're gonna say say something is something that we've

tried other things and said like, Oh no, it works like this too. It works like that. It works like this. It works like that. None of you know exactly what you're saying, but. That was kind of the question I had for Casey is, um, do you think you can feed like a juvenile snake too much to make it unhealthy? Or do you think a juvenile can eat as much as it wants and gets to,

you know, adult size faster, kind of like the water Python example. Do you think that's kind of applicable to all Pythons or what are you? I mean, I don't know. There needs to be more studies on it. The ones on Antaresia,

which again, Antaresia are like the Python version of a garter snake. So how, like how good can it actually be as an example for everything else but my question would be you know kind of going what you're saying is frequent feeding for the first 12 to 18 months and then just massively slowing down and kind of going to a more typical we're going to feed it every three or four weeks you know i mean even with say we find out the exact weight a female carpet needs to breed

you know i know i use the bad weight world that you're not supposed to use in the carpet world but you know say they breed it 220 gram or 2200 grams or whatever and then you get them up to that size and you just massively slow them down once they're to that size. Is that a problem long-term? I don't know. Will that give them a signal? I guess you at least have to reach the threshold of what tells the female it's okay to breed. You're getting enough energy to breed, but where that is, it's kind of ill-defined. I don't know. it's hard to say and i

mean pythons they're um what was the word uh they are capital breeders income breeders where they need a store of fat to reproduce because pythons in the wild and most of the time in captivity i don't know like about you guys when my female's building follicles she doesn't want to eat for the most part. Yeah. And it has to be several months before the reproductive cycle. It needs to be like a year before. Yeah, exactly.

So they've got to have that signal before. What do you got to say, Nick? With body fat, I mean, there's also a concept called nutrient density. And so eating, there's more to it than just that. You can eat a hundred gram prey item that is considerably more calorically dense than another hundred gram prey item. Something like an anteresia, especially when they're younger, are eating almost entirely a lizard-based diet. And they are going to be way lower in fat lean lizards are not going to have as much they're going to have a higher ratio of protein and a lower considerably lower in fat

that will make a difference yeah well our n of one goes against that right that children's python we found had a rodent in it well i mean that was an adult yeah oh you're talking juveniles sure yeah it was a shockingly big rodent too. So that, that matters. And back to the thing with the blackheads and stuff like I, I mean, my own sample size, Jason thinks what he thinks I've talked to him and he's very convinced of his, you know, of his beliefs for sure. Uh, my own sample size is obviously a lot smaller, but I have never failed to breed blackheads. Uh, no, I failed last year with the Westerns, but they bred like 27 times and built follicles

and then just reabsorb them. But they might not have even been large enough because you know, how big does a Western blackhead need to be to lay eggs? I don't know. That's not a word written down. Uh, my Easterns have bred every single time I've ever put them together. And my male is so skinny. He would make a pine snake look robust. The snake is like a fricking coach whip and he's like seven feet of nothing. Uh, and he breeds like you've never seen the female. Most people

would say she looks kind of thin. It's like, really? Cause she lays eggs literally every year. Uh, this last clutch four years in a row was the biggest clutch yet not big per se but bigger than her previous effort so these snakes carry way more body fat than people think the snake that you don't think is fat that you think is lean and mean is fat as shit if you open it up i have a good friend of mine i won't mention his name he had a unfortunate thing a class telepis female young adult died just no warning no nothing it just oh look you're dead for no reason as we've all experienced with keeping snakes that like random inexplicable he opened it up because he wanted to know why and this snake even by my own estimations was lean mean in ideal body condition

wasn't overfed looked like a i mean it looked great and it had so much body fat you would not even believe the snake could possibly all the way down there was just fat it was at a shocking amount of body fat in what anybody would think might be underweight if anything yeah so when you think your snake is fat it is really fat if you think your snake is fat, it is really fat. If you think your snake is lean, it's probably still fat on the inside. So that is, you know, when you find wild snakes, it's like they managed to get along just fine and breed and everything and be thin. I've seen, I don't know that I've ever found an overweight wild python.

I've found a lot of scraggly looking, remember that one at the Dorat Road, that blackhead? Yeah. It was like a seven foot thing about as big around as a nickel. Yeah. It was so thin and it just looked so haggard, but I bet that snake was still alive. I will say to that though, the brettles that I found in central Australia was pretty hefty. I mean, it was, it looked like, the brettles that I found in central Australia was pretty hefty. I mean, it looked like a captive brettles python.

Yeah, I think there's plenty of examples of snakes that are good sized and robust and maybe even on the fat side. And I guess the question is, is that beneficial to the animal? Does it give them an advantage over their counterparts? And something like the SHINE study looking at water pythons might suggest that there could be an advantage years of climate instability, which causes an animal that has built up fat reserves in the wild just so in case it runs into, you know, a half a decade of of adverse weather that it can it can, you know, still feed sparsely. But whether that storm with its fat reserves and is that relevant to what we. Whoa, calm down down what we do today and i don't know i will say too this has i know this isn't exactly a wild python every wild berm i've seen come out of florida is like something jay brewer would have raised up like they they are not skinny when they're coming out of the epiglades i do appreciate the dig at jay brewer though points for that one a lot of us for obvious reasons but i think with birds in florida

you've got another factor involved in that they're not supposed to be there. So you have an animal that's not in the native ecosystem. So it might just work out that the selection of what's available in a place that's not supposed to be a python is pretty advantageous for being a python. So they might have it pretty good there. I wouldn't use that as an example of a – It's supposed to be there right like it's probably got a lot of food source because it's got a lot of like you know uh invasives that don't have natural yeah yeah i mean a north american raccoon or a whitetail deer has no idea what a burmese python is right yeah right there's i mean the largest population of egyptian of egyptian ibises in the world is in the everglades

also that's crazy well it's all hurricane they're not scary because they're birds so we don't talk about those yeah so you have this weird completely made-up ecosystem they're trying to restore it's like you mean remember the time the state of florida released all the peacock bass on purpose remember that like it's all choked with non-native plants it's like there's nothing natural about it left that shit that sailed how does giant grievances there's a big snake there eating it's like it's just it's crazy yeah no no introduced no introduced uh species uh uh study ever works out great it's all bad it's you know i mean we take look at all those species

that are invasive we take for granted and we don't even realize like all the european gray squirrels everywhere it's like most people the only squirrels they've ever seen in their lives are europeans and they don't realize that like it's because they just displaced all of our native squirrels and that's just what a squirrel is and you know yeah yeah but it's not it's very non-threatening so i guess we don't care about squirrels and you know you're a earthworms that have taken over well we have short attention spans now squirrel you know what i mean yeah getting shorter by the minute it seems yeah casey you there? Did we lose him?

I don't know. Maybe not. He's muted. That's all right. We'll continue. I'm on mute. Sorry. I was trying to click away at it. I can't see you anymore.

I know. I don't even know what's wrong with my camera right now. I just decided to die. I mean, I told you I got this laptop like six hours ago. I know, and I commented like how impressed I was that you just plugged everything in and it worked because that wouldn't be the way it worked for me. It just – yours failed like halfway through. I didn't know that. At least we can hear you.

At least that didn't go away. That's all right. We'll check in on you and make sure you're still – Yeah. paper on reticulated pythons out in Sumatra that I thought was kind of interesting where one they didn't find any real significant evidence of seasonal feeding at all going on in Sumatra they seem to be eating about the exact same amount but they also found something which also correlates with a study that was done on hog island boas i don't remember who did it i'm i didn't write it down i'm sorry where they talk about the growth rates in these snakes and it's interesting in that kind of like we've talked about with some other species snakes are able to reproduce way before they reach that maximum adult size but they go into kind of how you get

the giants so what it is is it does take a very long time for a snake to actually get gigantic where first off uh the retics were eating mice almost exclusively they get to the point where they're eating nothing but mice and then every once in a while you get a female that's just big enough to like take down one chicken or one small monkey and once she does that it's almost like her completely leveling up the growth rate just explodes it's like going up a stair step and that happens all the way up to pigs but it takes a long time for them to get to the point where they can take down wild pigs like what are we talking in terms of time did you do you remember

they weren't sure literally they're going out to to skin farms and they're just cutting open the snakes that are being skinned and figuring out what's inside of them. They count the rings? Yeah, they counted the rings. So, I mean, they found out even when a snake is significantly, you know, in captivity, you think too big to be eating rats. It's still eating rats because it's for lack of a better word it's trying to get to the point where it can level up and in hog island boas you see the same thing where they're eating seasonal birds kind of like the mutton birds in australia where you know the hog islands will have a huge influx of songbirds and shorebirds come down

during the winter time and they leave but the giants on the hog islands are able to eat iguanas. And once they're able to eat iguanas, which can take forever and only a very small percentage of a small percentage of females can do it. Once they hit that point though, that's all they eat is what they figured out is they switch over to, uh, basically being a specialist for the large things.

And the problem is once they get that big and they start reproducing, it's really easy to starve to death once you've hit the point where you're a large prey item specialist. So they'll say some of these monster female hog island boas, you'd find them, you'd radio track them for a few years once they eat an iguana, once they get to where they can eat iguanas. And then you just find them emaciated after maybe litter number one or litter number two of that.

Because when a snake lays eggs, it's using its fat reserves, but it's also using the amino acids out of its muscles to feed the offspring and grow up the eggs. So that's how the giants are made, and that's how the giants die. It's not a linear growth. It's almost like a stair-step leveling up growth. Is that because they can't find the large peratum and they don't go backwards? They don't go back to mice? Or that mice at that point can't keep up with what they need um i i assume it's they just don't want to go backwards for some reason it's there there was a

study uh looking at diets in jungle carpets compared with uh scrub pythons in australia and they showed that uh there was quite a bit of overlap with you know the the prey items and that a large scrub would often take you know a meal that was really you know small for that animal but it would still take it you know well yeah but but you're talking about you're talking about resource partitioning through competition right yeah what if what if there is no you know what i mean i would imagine once those you know those animals make that jump and they're eating iguanas there's probably not a lot of other animals eating those iguanas or maybe they are i don't know but but you know maybe there's not a lot of iguanas so if they

can't find an iguana right right right right One thing that always seems to be true in any ecosystem when you talk about niche partitioning is that the amount of suitable prey at different sizes varies a lot. The smaller the prey is, smaller animals are more numerous than larger animals. And the bigger the mass of the potential prey animal is, the less of them are, the thinner they are on the ground. So when you get to somewhere like Australia where you got carpets uh sharing space with scrub pythons and then further north

green pythons and scrub pythons they're eating the same things initially because there's a lot of that small stuff but eventually the scrub pythons will get big enough to where they're eating things that only they're eating and they've got this niche carved out for themselves that large apex predator where they're eating tree kangaroos and wallabies and things which is interesting because it's almost like an argument you you could find an argument for both of you guys in that in that statement yeah yeah they kind of can go either way because yeah i mean it's advantageous to stay small because there's more available food. But if you live in an ecosystem where you have that larger prey, it's advantageous for you to jump to that and try to hog that resource for yourself. There's a really good example of that within the same species in carpet biathons on Garden Island, the imbricata on garden island you have this like ridiculous level of uh sexual size dimorphism with these tiny little males that are like 300 grams and then like seven foot females

because there's only little tiny things and wallabies and there's nothing really in between so the males just stay super super tiny and live off mice and the females get huge and eat wallabies because and i think it's the largest size disparity the greatest size disparity as far as size dimorphism of any vertebrate is these pythons on that island where there's just that that much difference between them yeah it's on the mainland but it's not nearly so much. But weird things happen on islands. monster you know 10 foot male darwin carpets they're you know feeding mostly on brush-tailed possums where that wasn't a possibility you know in the in the recent past for uh for those people not familiar with australian possums this is an animal about the size of a house cat yeah and they're eating house cats too yeah it's the actual meal for a carpet python. But, I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize is that, like, adult size is, there's no such thing as a fixed adult size.

Like, that's a pretty plastic, you know, phenotypically plastic trait, you would say. And even, like, at the, you know, genetic level, I guess, if you will, that seems to be, that variable is easily changed. If you look at, with the scrub python, Clay, the two of the closest, most closely related members are King Horney and Nauta, the largest and smallest species, are very, very recently diverged from each other. And yet, in this short period of time, they have this pygmy scrub python and this monster and they share a fairly recent common ancestry. It doesn't take long to downsize or upsize. in an environment, you know, food prey size and your max size, you know, or adult size is probably better is something you would expect to see rapid, you know, be part of those rapidly changing genes or it just wouldn't, it wouldn't work out well for the animals, you know. You see that the concepts of insular gigantism and insular dwarfism, and you see it all over the place with everything.

It's like something gets an isolated island and if there's big stuff to eat they get bigger rapidly to eat the big stuff or they get shrunk down to eat the small stuff yeah you know they get like channel island mammoths and stuff it's like it didn't take very long for them to be you know from the one of the largest proboscideans ever known to be like this six foot tall pygmy mammoth. It didn't take very long because there wasn't enough food. So it just downsized quickly. And that's probably very much an epigenetic,

you know, mechanism for, for, for environmental, you know, it does. Yeah. It doesn't seem to be like a major amount of pretty easy change to make.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what they say is that uh size color and pattern and to a lesser extent uh the number of babies produced are things that change very quickly in any population yeah way faster than like bone structure or digestion which is which is why animals look you know why carpet subspecies look so different but really aren't that you know they're really not that different when you start looking genetically

at them so yeah that makes sense with with these things this is kind of the both you guys do you think uh reproduction and and i guess maturity, I guess I would qualify that as, as adult size is once they can start successfully reproducing, you know, if they're building, producing follicles that can be fertilized, they're adults, right? And so I guess I would define adulthood as that. So do you think that size or age probably has a greater impact in that regard? Size in terms of reproductive output is, seems to be more important than age for most things. There are exceptions where things like brettles pythons that just, they just don't breed until they get older. You can get them up to size

and they'll just sit there for a couple years until they're old enough where size is more of a factor not necessarily more of a factor than age but a bigger factor than it is with related species whereas the other carpet pythons mostly when they get big enough they'll do it or are capable of doing it the definitely the size seems to be more important than age. But, you know, I don't know. With feeding and any of this whole discussion, it's like, how are we defining? A lot of it, I guess, comes down to how do you define success? Are you successful if you cranked out a ton of animals and the snake died when it was seven years old,

but it left 100 offspring behind is that is that better and more desirable of an outcome or is the snake that made maybe less offspring but lived to be 25 years old because what it seems like is you get one or the other but you can't have both you don't get the snake that cranks out year after year and lives a long time you get and i will admit you know we've all done this and a lot of one bad thing I think about reptile keeping in the age of social media is that people are so worried about appearances and whatnot because there's that lynch mob with pitchforks and torches. Oh, my God, that wants to correct you on everything. And it's usually a bunch of ding-a-lings don't know much. Yeah, fuck those people. There are some mistakes we have all made.

There are common experiences that we all have had that we don't really talk about. Well, in the beginning, it was talking about that snake that dropped dead grew out of the blue for no reason. It's like we've all had that happen probably multiple times. That's a thing that goes along with snake keeping. We tend to talk endlessly about our successes successes and we tend to minimize or ignore and not mention failures. And I will admit right now, I have killed a number of adult carpet python females by overbreeding them. This idea that you can feed them a lot, breed them year after year after year, and they'll drop dead by their 10th birthday. I have done that several times. Not,

that was not obviously my intention but i've noticed this in my own collection you know sometimes it's like you just i had the it's like the greatest looking jungle carpet i think i've ever owned in my life great snake it threw twins like every multiple sets of twins at every clutch big clutches and the thing wanted to breed every year and she bred every year for five years and dropped dead like the last time it just like she left a lot of offspring i mean there's a lot of her offspring out there i've you know i'm still breeding her offspring descendants but that snake i can't help but think that snake would probably have lived substantially longer than it's nine years or

whatever had i not bred it five years in a row and fed it so much even earlier going back you know 15 20 years i had a you know when i was starting the ivory jungle thing i had some of those early ones i fed them way too much way got they got way too big and they quit breeding and didn't live that long because ultimately you know you shouldn't be feeding your carpet pythons guinea pigs but you know i was a hobbyist at one point 20 or 20, 25 years ago, too. And I got a hell of a good deal on some guinea pigs. I'm like, feed these guinea pigs. And these females got huge.

And then they you got a few clutches and they didn't get any clutches. And the snakes dead at eight years old because it was never supposed to be eight feet long. And so some of these like concepts i'm talking about i've unfortunately i've lived that experience and made those mistakes with had those bad bad outcomes and so so i just i don't know the older i get i was like i like these things to be around for live a decent life expectancy at least more than a decade i define that at least 12 or 14 years at least and you know you're talking about animals that have, you know, their agenda and our agenda may not be the same thing. Right. You know, to them, lots of offspring and not living long by their bio, their their their most basic biological drive.

They won. They succeeded. They did. they did what they were supposed to do, but, but we failed them in our personal ethic of, of living that, you know, giving them the most longevity that we can give. And, and, you know, is that the most important thing or like that, that becomes like such a, a between us, you know, uh, what's the right thing to do. And, and for God's sakes, we're all snake breeders here. Like, you know, I mean, so it's kind of, it's, it's not even, you know, you, you could, you could say somebody's not doing their snake right by breeding the shit out of it and getting lots of eggs and the snake lives a shortened life because of that. But I mean, you're a snake breeder. That's what you're, that's what,

you know, that's what the animal wants to do that's what you're there to do so you know like at some level it's kind of like i i feel people when they say you know hey you're you're not acting ethically but you know at some level too it's like yeah check that shit are there are there ethics in evolution yeah casey what do you what do you got? You got any thoughts? That is the difference between a hobbyist and a snake farmer. At the end of the day, a farmer is going to say, let's get them cranked up and going as fast as possible. Get as many eggs as early on so we can get the next generation going, stuff like that. I mean, I don't really agree with that personally, but you can look at going back to the Kay brothers feeding their baby jungle carpet pythons every three days until they're ready to breed at 18 months for a female and probably nine months for a male. I don't even know how as fast as a male can breed.

I think, Chuck, you really hit the nail on the head you said what the snake wants and what we want and i think to the extent that the snake is really capable of wanting anything it would be to eat a lot breed a lot and make a lot of babies that is their biological imperative eat grow breed that's what they're programmed to do. It's what we're all programmed to do. So it is kind of a – are we just projecting our own sort of herpetological morality onto that? Snakes don't worry about families or mortgages or getting their kids to college. Snakes don't know what 10 years means. Yeah. kids to college like that's next i don't know what 10 years means yeah it is like the animals that you know bred like crazy and dropped dead by eight years old were more successful if they

passed more genes along yeah it is that simple but is that i guess my concern is more that mindset if you keep going down that road you eventually just look at animals purely as a commodity and at that point point, I don't know that that is a healthy thing for us. It's like, it's, if it's just a commodity, it's just a thing. It's like, not, I don't know. I don't know that that's healthy in my opinion. Um, it's, it's hard to check the ethics of it. Once you've accepted the, the, the biological truth of the whole thing, right? Like you can take that biological truth of the whole thing right like you can take that biological truth way too far and then it's just like you know a thing like any other thing and these aren't just things they're live animals right so there could be there could be an argument that um nature does regulate things by having seasonality you know and and in captivity we can ignore that seasonality

and just pump them full of food all year long you know and keep captivity we can ignore that seasonality and just pump them full of food all year long you know and keep them hot enough maybe drop the temp for a couple months and then back up and start feeding them again you know like casey was saying though there is some self-regulation but you know we can we can kind of override species too i mean ball pythons are very good at self-regulation i don't think carpet pythons are like i really don't think carpet trees either right any self-control but if you look at a green python or a carpet python versus some of these other things they have different lifestyles carpets and green pythons are extreme ambush predators they sit around virtually their whole

life doing nothing waiting for something to get close enough to eat. They're not actively searching for it nearly so much as something like a black headed Python that's on the move, you know, more actively pursuing. So they're expending more energy to find a prey, whereas a carpet can get fat real easy because they're really good at sitting around and waiting. Yeah not doing a lot so i yeah speaking of body fat was that um was it matt somerville that had that uh species of brown snake that only ate like two mice a year and and one of them died and it had just fat bodies throughout the whole you know you'd just be like what is going on um yeah they're they're very efficient some of these

well and it's it's interesting too is like the the less you feed something if it's really an efficient if it has a really efficient metabolism the less you feed something does more of that try to get stored as fat and and they're trying to reduce their their energy output so that they can store more as fat because they're not getting fed as much. Is there is I mean, is that does that happen at significant enough levels to impact the animal? Is I mean, question. No, no expectation of an answer. But, you know, it's one of those things like you kind of got to wonder, like, I mean, you know. Is that a thing? I don't know. I don't know.

So in the short-term anteresia study, which again anteresia are very different than any other pythons, they didn't find a correlation in efficiency of digestion between the ones that were fed basically the bare minimum and the ones that were fed

as much as they wanted. Again, they were babies and they were baby anteresia. So is that going to translate well over to a baby ball python or a baby Burmese python? I don't know. Because there is definitely a point in a snake's life, you know, the first two, three years, especially, where most of the food brought in is going directly to growth. It's not going to fat. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't think you could hold that argument with, with, with adult anteresia. No, no, definitely not. Yeah. It's pretty fat adult anteresia.

Yeah. Yeah. They'll do it for sure. I saw a five foot spotted python at a reptile expo one time. And it was like, I was simultaneously just disgusted and amazed. And I thought it was like I was simultaneously just disgusted and amazed. And I thought it was like horrible, but also awesome because I'd never seen something that big. I saw a pretty big DOR Western Stimson's python.

I think we even had Steve Sharpley next to it on the ground to show how big this thing was. It was an impressive, wild, you know, Stimson's Python. So there are, yeah, there are, there are exceptions to the rule and that probably was one of them, but yeah. It leveled up. Yeah. Leveled up. I like that. I do like that.

Start using that. Yeah. Well, any closing thoughts, any, any topics you didn't get to bring up that you wanted to make before we were going on an hour and a half, we usually wrap it up about an hour, but I figured this one might go a little longer than usual, but what do you got Casey? You got anything that, uh, you weren't able to bring up? Uh, I don't think so right now. Okay. Nick? I don't think so, but I'll think of it the second I turn this on. Yeah, right at 3 o'clock in the morning, I'm going to text you, like, oh, there's this other paper I completely forgot about. I'm going to come up with the greatest point ever, and I'm not – because that's always how it is.

I don't know. I guess ultimately it's kind of a always how it is i don't know i guess ultimately it's kind of a parting sort of you know i don't know i there's but we all are kind of riding this line aren't we with the how much we feed and we're all nobody's totally innocent either it's like have i had things that were more important more than things that were less important to me what i deemed important yeah do i still do that? Yeah. So am I kind of a hypocrite? Probably. Like I'm not I don't think I'm feeding something a ton, but there we tend to favor things, don't we?

When it comes time to the the hierarchy, the food totem pole of who's who's on top, who's on bottom and everything. And we do sort of favor with the food, the things that the projects and the particular individuals that we wish to grow so even those of us like me here i am on my soapbox talking about not doing this i'm probably guilty maybe not as much as some other people but i probably am doing that i know i'm doing that i mean i've i've got an amazing exanthic granite poplin carpet breeding up a storm at 18 months old right now. Now he weighs 550 grams soaking wet, but he's not very big, but he's, he got into it. It's like, well, that's, you know, I probably made sure I got him up to that minimum size at that time. So I shouldn't be casting stones, I guess, too many. And on the flip side of that, I have a female 2018 Brettles Het Stonewash that she just got to the point where she could eat rats.

So she's still super tiny at four years old. Oh, I've got some 2018 Brettles that are nowhere near breeding, and they're like super important ones. Like I have 2018 Hypo Stonewash that are a hundred percent hit for stripe. And I have two pairs of them. They're not even going to be close to big enough to breed when they're old enough. I'll be four years old and I'll be waiting another year. They're not tiny, but they're not, you know,

Well, this has been a, it's been a good, good discussion all around. I think I've learned some cool stuff, and I appreciate you guys coming on and discussing this topic. Hopefully, our listener has gotten something out of it as well. Let the people know where they can find you guys. Where are you at in social media and such? I'm everywhere. I'm easy to find. I find myself not posting on social media as much as I used to. Cause I, well, you guys know why it's kind of like, you're just kind of like,

I'm this is a, I don't know. It's like, it's too frustrating these days. The mindset. Yeah. I will only answer a question if it's something really, really interesting at this point. Like, I just, because the sort of zeitgeist on social media is getting to a kind of an unhealthy place. But I'm around. I'm easy to find on social media. And by social media, I mean Facebook, because I'm too old for Instagram and these other. I think when you get close to 50, I don't think you're allowed to

be on some of these other platforms. You're one of the few people that really keeps their website nicely updated. So tell us your website. It's not a good, it does me. It's like, everybody's like, is this still available? It's like, man, I update this every single day. And then I still have to answer the questions because no one believes that I update. Yeah. That's because nobody else does. Does, right. When they ask me, I'm like, nope, it's not. I've updated it four times this week.

Like, it is something else. Honestly, I'm changing pictures and updating. It's like so much work and no one believes it. Yeah. I had somebody this morning. It was like, are you going to update the pictures of this snake? It's like, are you kidding me? The picture's like nine days old.

This is nine days ago. Like, no. I need a live stream video of the tub that it's in. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Get a live stream. I've had that kind of request where they're like,

are you just, do you think I'm going to rip you off? So you want like some proof that it's a real snake and that like this is a real thing? But my website's inlandre, inland reptile.com. Super easy to find. I'm, I'm always around. So a lot of good stuff. And it's always updated folks. Stop looking at Nick for dumb shit.

I'm trying to work on the rest of the website and trying to update some of the species pages and stuff. You can't get to it, right? You're answering questions. I know it's, it's just, well now with a new book coming out the taxonomic arrangement's different so it's like i gotta make my own website yeah you gotta make it consistent work for yourself right ultimately that kind of stuff it's like the evidence is what the evidence is and whether it's inconvenient or makes more work or whether it, you know, you can't have sacred knowledge. You have to just, it just is. So I've had to make some peace with some things I didn't like as a result of all this. But yeah.

Yeah. Definitely an interesting, uh, uh, problem or, or, uh, conundrum here. Casey, how can we get ahold of you? Uh, you can find me on Facebook, Casey Cannon. I'm sure if you're a reptile person, we have to have at least one or two mutual friends. I am on Instagram, Cannon Fire Reptiles. I'm actually on that a lot more than I am on anything else because apparently that's everybody's favorite messaging app right now is Instagram Messenger. I do have a personal Facebook page, but please stop messaging it because I don't check

it. So, yeah, if you go Cannon Fire Reptiles on Facebook and message me, I'm going to be a little bit upset with you because every time you do it and I don't reply to your thumbs up, I get multiple emails that say, hey, you haven't responded to this person.

And it's literally just a thumbs up. So I'm like, I don't, I don't want to respond to that. Stop reminding it. Do you ever get the ones where you get a message and it just says, hi, like complete thought. Like, what do you, what's a, it's like, now you're going to ask me a question, but you make me ask you a question as to what your question is like added a whole extra step. What do you want to know? That's the thing too, is Facebook gets so mad at you're quite you just like added a whole extra step what do you want to know that's the thing too is facebook gets so mad at you if you don't answer every single message or if you're not the last one to say something so yeah i'm getting a little tired of getting notifications every single morning of you have four unanswered messages on facebook messenger

it's yeah just somebody gave me a thumbs up after i said yes yeah well we we again we appreciate you guys coming on this was a fun discussion yeah um check out morelli python radio.com for uh info on the the radio or morelli python radio network. I can't talk. Anyway, follow him on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, all at NPR Network. So thanks for listening, and we will catch you next week for another episode of Reptile Fight Club. Keep fighting, folks. Fight Club. Thanks, folks. Thank you. Outro Music