Reptile Fight Club - Reptile Temperature Regimens w/ Lisa Farinha

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

In this episode, Justin and Chuck tackle the topic of Reptile Temperature Regimens w/ Lisa Farinha       Who 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

Welcome to the MDR Network. All right, welcome to another episode of Reptile Fight Club. I'm your host, Justin Julander, and with me is, well, lately not as always, but today, as always, is Mr. Chuck Poland. Welcome back. Thank you, man. Yeah, it's good to be back. You survived. They didn't kill you, huh?

Barely. Oh, dude, it's not over yet. So, yeah, the inspectors are on the base. They just went through and tore up the F-18 program yesterday, and they started into components. I guess they found some uncontrolled tech data right there on the floor. Oh, boy. Yep, there goes our Central Technical Publications Library program. So, yeah, good times.

We are still scratching and fetching um but all those hours hopefully paid off we'll see i'm i'm uh i'm over it so yeah looking to get back what happens will happen yes exactly it's i mean i've done the work and now it's just time to see how it goes so i'm glad you're back yeah man yeah a lot of a lot happened since i since I feel like you had the episode of all episodes I missed. That was crazy, huh? Yeah, you missed a good one. Yeah. But, you know, it's good to have you back.

I'm sure everybody's sick of hearing from me. So, yeah, it'll be good to get the chuck back in here come now come now well anything going on in your world in the reptile spear yeah no just um just run by geckos yet yes overrun by geckos and um trying not to strangle some coastal carpets that are giving me a hard time. They don't want to feed, and I tried to start assist feeding them, and they were just resisting the assist feed, and it was just like, okay, I'm over it. I'm not going to try to force this. I just have been trying to throw live at him and

and uh you know see but uh about about like six of them are real stubborn out of the 15 so i don't know man we'll just see i i'm you know in my old age i feel like uh i do i i'm gonna do less of that like helping the stuff that makes life hard along and just see who wants to carry on their genes and who doesn't. Yeah, it's frustrating. I get that for sure. I just started with the carpets. So most of the jungles fed pretty well on their first try,

and I just have, I think, one standout that's uh you know out of the no i think that one actually took but so yeah things are going good with the jungles the inlands about half of them took on their first try so that's yeah i'm off to a good start i guess a good start they like the new room maybe or something i don't know so this is the first first time i've had carpets in the new room so and then i've got uh brettles just about ready to clutch the eggs are sinking in a bit so i'll have some hypo brettles here hatching so not sure where i'm gonna put them but they're they're coming oh yeah i didn't expect her to go this year but yeah she she took so surprise yeah they're all all good eggs and all look like they've gone the distance

so we'll see what hatches out of them you're gonna have the problem of the mackin wookie yeah i'll figure something out i've got a show this weekend so hopefully i can move some animals and free up some space salt lake or yeah yeah salt lake was that the what show is that reptilian nation so it's a kind of a newer show and they're coming in and like having their show earlier than the other show that's in utah and so i know the the other show is the wasatch reptile expo and they've been doing this for long time so man that's crazy so it's like battle of the reptile show on sunday sunday sunday yep yep yeah it's uh so we'll see how it goes but yeah it should be fun. It's always good to see the local vendors and breeders and stuff around here. They're good people.

Cool. Good stuff. Nice. I just looked in the incubator, and there's a little baby Neferus wheeler eye, a little banded knobtail gecko in there. That's cool. Yeah, second one of those. Second one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, hopefully a third one's on its heels. The first clutch, only one egg hatched. And then this one, they look good, but I only see one out. So hopefully the other one comes out soon. Are you just holding on to those? I don't know. I'm kind of torn.

But, yeah, I'll probably see how they do. But this one's got kind of a reduced pattern. It's got five bands like a synctus, but it's a weeder eye. That's cool. Yeah. Interesting. A little barren stuff going on already here so yeah yeah but yeah everybody's uh doing pretty well family's family's doing good so nice i like heidi's outro that was yeah yeah that was that was good if anybody anybody didn't check out the Chuck List in RFCville episode, Heidi did the diligent duty of the outro and did a great job. So way to go, Heidi.

Way to go. Yeah, she's a great girl. Yeah, she's good. I might be a little biased, but yeah. Versatile. Versatile. Versatile. Versatile.

All right. Well, tonight we are joined by a special guest, Lisa Farina. Am I pronouncing your last name correctly? Yes. Is that right? That's right. Lisa Farina. All right.

Well, thank you for being on the show tonight. Lisa wrote in with a nice idea for the podcast. So we said, hey, come on and debate it. Come on and fight it. So she was maybe a little reluctant, but we're happy she agreed to do that. So we'll have a good discussion tonight. Why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us where you fit in in herpetoculture and some stuff that's going on for you lately.

Well, I got my first snake in 2016. So I haven't been doing this for very long. I consider myself a novice. I don't know. I'm jumping in the deep end trying to fight someone like Justin Juhlander. Oh, no, no, no. But I'm still learning, and I think that tonight I'm probably, I look at it less as a fight with you and more as just, like, training with my coach.

Oh, God. Well, I mean, for somebody that's new, you've done some really amazing things so far, so I wouldn't uh yeah discount your your point of view yeah we like the the fresh look at things yeah sometimes we get set in our ways and we have maybe uh not the best ideas so it's always good to look at it with fresh eyes so yeah yeah i i've been thinking about the how in the hobby there's a real trend. When I first got my snake and I started listening to podcasts and doing research online, there's been a real push to lower the temperatures and not have as much of a varied temp.

We aren't stressing our snakes. we don't want to stress our snakes anymore and i just thought well what were we doing before and i don't i don't know what pushed like what pushed the hobby to do that um so that's i was like interested to hear about that so i thought maybe you and chuck could fight about it. And lo and behold, here I am. So what's going on with me is I just got eggs for the second year in a row with my from my southern white-lipped python. Um, I wasn't, yeah, I wasn't, um, gonna do it because I've seen some things go wrong when you breed your snake back to back. But I talked to a few people that I trust and, um, they just said, do what you did last year. And if she wants to go, she'll go. So I pretty much just tried to do exactly what i did

and it worked and um i actually i was like i'm one of the things i'm excited about one of the reasons why i'm excited to be here and talking to you guys is because i noticed something kind of unusual is um both times she laid her eggs, she didn't mound them. And she just kind of laid them flat, almost like one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. They weren't m them in a tight mass to keep them warmer. The one thing that I did notice is that I had problems with desiccation and the eggs got pretty flat. And I know that I've read that one of the reasons why snakes brood their eggs is to keep humidity in.

But I don't know if it's just that I didn't offer her the right nest box or if it really meant something that she was just trying to keep them cooler. She did wrap them, but she wasn't able to totally beehive them. She just wrapped her tail around them and kind of laid on top of them. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there is some precedent for that. There was some research done on water pythons up in the Northern Territory where they lay their eggs in monitor burrows. And a lot of times the temperatures are good enough just to incubate the eggs on their own. And so they'll just leave them and let the clutch finish out. I think they kind of start wrapped around the eggs.

And if the temperatures are stable, then they take off and get an earlier start know regaining their fat reserves and things like that so yeah it's possible that that could be due to temperature so yeah that could be an interesting topic for the discussion today so yeah yeah that's that's awesome so two years in a row with the the southern white lips i'm sure you're making the the Mackinwookie a little jealous. I was just going to say, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I really enjoyed your interview on Morale of Pythons Radio, so if you guys haven't heard Lisa's interview, you ought to check that out, because I really liked your enthusiasm, and it's just fun. It's almost infectious, where you, where you can, uh,

just really pick up how excited you are and how much fun you're having with the, with this whole thing. So that's awesome. Well, it worked out. She, she's totally fine. She's had two meals and she wants more. And, um, all the eggs were good. They were smaller. They're smaller eggs though. I noticed that I didn't weigh them, smaller they're smaller eggs though i noticed that i didn't weigh them but they're just you can just look at them and tell that they're smaller there's more of them but they're smaller um i did um when i was feeding her i did supplement it and put a little calcium D3 on her rats. Just not on all of them, just a few of them I did because I was worried about that. Yeah, I mean, you know, successive years of reproduction can take a little bit of a toll on it,

especially some of the larger pythons. I mean, even the smaller pythons. I know in the wild the green tree pythons only go every maybe third or fourth year, but you know, in captivity, we can give them kind of almost unlimited resources. They, they probably eat a lot more in captivity than they do in the wild, but yeah. So how, how often do you, uh, what do you do like, uh, food cycling or temperature cycling? What do you do for your That's what I did. I did total food cycling nothing to do with the temperatures

both times she went in the middle of summer so my room gets really warm in the summer everyday the ambience get up into the upper 80s and then they drop back down into the upper 70s at night and then the winter

time it's it's similar but lower like the mid 80s to the mid 70s but both times she went in the middle of summer in the middle of the heat wave um she they were when they were um breeding they were mostly on the cool side of the enclosure the whole time and um oh that's the other cool thing about doing it back to back the first year you're totally like second guessing yourself telling yourself you're just imagining you're like i just i'm just seeing what i want to see i'm projecting what i want and then so the next year you can be like okay this is exact she's doing the same thing she did and you the next year you can be like, okay, this is exact. She's doing the same thing she did and you feel confident. So you can see the different behaviors. I, um, Keith had

asked me to check to see if I saw any, um, blood, blood scenting. Like he, he noticed some blood marking from the female of the bullens. I't notice anything like that um i i just started feeding in the spring after having a a long fast through the winter and um after by mid-april i started pairing and and at first they weren't into each other at all i would come in the morning and that the enclosure would just be covered in urates like they were wrestling and smearing urates everywhere and the male would be totally pristine but pearl might the female she would be covered in urates too so i think maybe he was just chasing her around peeing on her or something i don't know was, like, wiping down the walls.

That sounds fun. Yeah, it was. It was fun. It was exciting. And then probably about a week and a half of that, they started breeding, and they just kept breeding the whole time, almost all the way until she ovulated and um i did notice something different this time the male was guarding her he's a he's a really placid snake usually he doesn't strike or he does hiss but he doesn't strike or anything um but he was like laying on top of her and anytime i would try to get into the cage he would strike out at me um i don't know if they were bluff strikes but it was unusual it was new behavior so it was pretty neat because it was obvious that he was guarding her and um yeah since they aren't known to um do

male combat i wonder if that's what they do instead is just get with the female and then guard her rather than, you know, this is the male that like stays with her until she ovulates. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. So do the males typically stay smaller than the females in this species? Daniel Natush says he never noticed anything like that in the white-lipped pythons. They're very similar in size okay but no scars and things like that on the males from obvious combat bouts or anything like that um i i don't think so because

everything i've read has been that they aren't known for male combat. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Yeah, I don't know. You're reading The Shine book right now, aren't you? Oh, yes. I've been enjoying it so much. Isn't it a great book?

Yeah, I was a little frustrated because I was like, oh, I need to do some research on these temperatures. And I was like, I really just want to read that other book. Yeah. It kind of sucks you in and gets you wanting to read it all the time. Yeah. I'm about a little further than halfway. So I had, well, I didn't have to, but I took my two youngest daughters school shopping last weekend.

And so while they were trying on clothes and looking for clothes, I was reading the book and sitting around in the, in the clothes shop. So yeah, I got a little bit more reading done this week. Uh, I'm going to try this shirt on. I need that. Use that booth over there. You've been in there for an hour, sir. Come out. Uh, yep. Yeah yep yeah it's a it's a fun one i i'd uh recommend that to anybody that's uh interested in science of snakes and and that kind of thing but he just tells some great stories and kind of puts his learning process in there over the years so it's really uh entertaining read for sure so yeah he seems like a really humble guy too yeah yeah he admits his failures and successes in the same token

so it's really cool yeah I'm excited to finish it out but there's some cool ties in there so he did his post doc in Utah down in the Lake Salt Lake area so that's really cool yeah I totally thought about you when I did that part I

was like oh I bet Justin is getting a kick out of this he's yeah he's not only talking about that and he's talking about St. George and I've heard you bring up St. George more than a few times yeah it's a it's a great spot and and I'm pretty sure I know what spot he's talking about when he talks about looking for Gila monsters and stuff. So, yeah, cool stuff. And then the guy that kind of got him into the or, you know, helped him get in at the postdoc in Utah was Dr. Legler. And he was a guy that I'd met in high school. So I was really excited. Oh, that's really cool.

Yeah, really cool guy. Had some amazing stories about looking for turtles and stuff in Australia. So just had me enthralled. I'm like, this is what I want to do. But I failed him. I wimped out and went into virology instead of herpetology. Now you're reading about what you could have been in the men's dressing room while your daughters were school shopping. Exactly.

Jack. while your daughter's in school shopping. Exactly. Have you gotten to the part where he gets stuck on the cliff? Where he's sliding up? I'm pretty much right at the part when he's going to just start talking about, oh, no, I did read that part, and he was in the really bad accident with his girlfriend. That one? No, he was flipping rocks really bad accident with his girlfriend that one no it was he was he was

flipping rocks on on this kind of slippery slope and he got too close to the edge and he started to slide off the edge and he kind of grabbed on and his belt buckle stopped him from sliding and he was like you know there's a cliff below him like he says it felt like 100 feet but it was probably more like 50 feet but still you know 50 or 100 you're gonna get hurt so he's like grabbing on and clawing to the rock and trying to get himself up and and uh yelling to the people that were with him to come help him and i think they just kind of laughed at him but he eventually got back up and and uh kept flipping rocks but he said he found a lot of good snakes that day so maybe it was worth it but yeah he

came close to having a bad accident that way too yeah yeah great book but i'm really enjoying it yeah well um let's see we're gonna talk about temperatures today so uh um as as lisa mentioned she's been kind of thinking about that and different temperature regimes that are used in herpetoculture. So we're going to kind of talk about the, I guess, pros and cons or benefits and drawbacks of having kind of a steady state, you know, like higher temp. Just kind of not really varying your temps much and then more varied or uh i guess maybe natural uh ups and downs and things like that so um yeah let's uh let's get into it so first off we'll have uh chuck and myself flip to see who gets to debate you so chuck you want to give it a call? That's tails. It is tails. You got it.

So you want to debate Lisa? Or would you like me to? I will let you. I will let you do it. You'll let me? I told you, man, the people are sick of hearing from me. That's not true. I'll go for it.

That's not true. All right. I'm back, but I'm still going to have a free ride. Okay. Sounds good. You'll moderate for us. That's right. All right, Lisa, go ahead and call it and see what you can pick your side.

All right, you got it. I'm a double loser today. Two-time loser! Hang my head in shame. All right, well, what side would you like to defend? I will defend a varied thermal temperature regimen with highs and lows. Okay. With, you know, more extreme highs and lows. Okay.

Sounds good. I'll just go ahead and go, I guess. Okay. All right. She knows the deal. I like it. I like it. It's like all just starts.

It's fine. Yeah. She's coming in, coming in prepared. So that's good. Well, kind of like how you insinuated earlier, you called it a more natural regime so um that's kind of the angle i'm gonna take is um even though it's probably harder and more of an expert like level um way to go it is um probably more natural because snakes in the wild aren't always just going to find the most perfect temperature that they want to be. Sometimes they're going to get a little hotter or a little

cooler. And, um, and sometimes it actually might be good for them to get a little hotter or cooler than that steady 84, 82. There might be things that are beneficial. And we're just mainly talking about pythons, right? Sure, yeah, that works. We all like pythons, so yeah, we can kind of center it around pythons. So I was thinking about, because i read your green tree python book and um you strongly recommend a more moderate temperature regime in there for them because um there's a lot of overheating dehydration problems and um what i was thinking about is the baby pythons, when they hatch out, they haven't found a lot of nests in the wild, but when they do, they're usually on the edge of the forest where more sun comes in.

So that way the mother can thermoregulate, keep the eggs warm, and then when the babies hatch, that's where they stay because they feed mostly on skinks. So I was thinking maybe the baby pythons sitting in the dappled sun, they're probably getting a lot warmer than the adults would. They might get warmer and they'll get warm faster also and then cool off faster. Yeah. Um, so maybe we were just keeping the little baby, um, green tree pythons too cold. So they aren't getting like stimulated in the morning to feed until hunt. So,

um, that's what I was thinking anyways. I don't know. Yeah. No, that's a good start i you know i agree that uh you know giving giving uh animals access to you know a variety of temperatures so you know of course i i like your side as well but i'm here to defend the you know kind of that

um to the line exactly i can't be agreeing with you. No, I'm just kidding. We is, is anybody who's listened to this has figured out it's, it's more reptile Kumbaya than reptile fight club. So, but, uh, we won't, we won't tell them what we like to keep that hard, you know? Well, I want you to bring it because I really want to know why everyone's so against these high temperatures when I've seen anecdotal evidence that maybe they like it and they actually do it, do seek it. book he was talking about and this was you know not not necessarily pythons but i think i know that some pythons utilize this strategy but they'll go under um rocks right they kind of shelter under rock so rock on rock and they'll be underneath the rock and um that'll give them kind of uh almost a perfect ideal place where they can hit the temperatures they need to hit right so it'll get really hot on top of the rock so temperatures they need to hit right so it'll

get really hot on top of the rock so if they need more heat they just press their body up on up you know to the to the rock and when it gets too warm they kind of hunker down and stay by the cool bed rock that doesn't heat up as quickly so this thin rock above them can kind of let them get to that steady state temperature that they need to do the job they need to do. Now, I'm not arguing that, you know, they don't need cold sometimes and heat other times, but I think for the most part, most of their activity, and this is kind of, you know, along the thinking lines of Terry Phillip maybe, but like where most of their duties can be done at kind of a stable 82 degrees. You know, they can do all the things they need to do.

And so that's kind of the median, I guess you'd say. So, yeah, they can use higher temperatures and they can use lower temperatures, but that steady state kind of works for them. And then if you saw Eric and Owen's show last night, I got to watch it on my ride home on the bus last night, but they talked about Timorensis, Malayo python Timorensis, the lesser Sundan python,

as they said a couple of times, but the lesser Sunda python, which also called the Timor python, but they don't occur on the island of Timor. So it's kind of a misnomer. But they they showed, you know, temperature graphs and similar with the green tree pythons. Like when I was in the forest in the Iron Range, like it was not hot. It was, you know, a nice even kind of 75, 80 degrees. It was pretty cool. And, uh, and I, you know, I, I've looked at lots of different temperature graphs and a lot of those,

especially tropical pythons, they, especially if they live in forests or whatever, they only get about like, you know, 75 to 80 degrees. They stay in that kind of five degree increments so i think especially for for pythons that come from those areas that stable temperature is probably what they're evolved to to be kept at you know so uh and and um yeah i guess i could counter with that so you know i think a lot of them are designed to be in that kind of sweet spot of 75 to 82 or something like that and mostly kind of hang out at 80. I don't think that there's any argument that both those kind of steady climate equatorial pythons and then the more southern ranging, which experience higher or lower temperatures, don't experience fluctuations in temperatures. You're just talking about a spread that's much different. Stuff that's more towards the hemispheres experiences a much greater swing than things that tend to stay more equatorial, maybe get less.

More stable. Right. Yeah. And those for those species that are more equatorial, the temperatures become less of a powerful, you know, stimulant for things like reproduction or feeding cycles and things. Then it becomes more about rainfall, you know, moisture and things like that so um at least for those things that are kind of equatorial it's it's not as big of a deal you know to keep them at kind of that steady state i've heard that the green tree pythons when they're um they're harder to find in the dry season um people will say oh they're rare because they go up there in the dry season when it's easier to get up there. And it's because they're all hiding up in the tops of the trees where it might be a little hotter up there.

But, yeah, what I think is that, like, 82, 84 is the homeostasis. But during the day, their temperatures could elevate and drop down. But 84 would still be their median temperature or 88. Because I've noticed that I've been keeping my green tree pythons in my bathroom just with ambient temperature and pretty much keeping them in that low 80 range. And so I have some wild cuts that I got from Dan Mallary, and they'll be eating just fine and then um they'll just stop eating and um one of these are adults they i got them when they're adults and they're adults so um what i did um after them not eating for about a month and a half i took him and put him in my snake room, which is a lot warmer, and put him up on top of one of the enclosures and let him sit in there for about a week and then offered him a rat and he ate it. So, I mean, this is anecdotal, but I just, so he ate the rat and then I just moved him back into the bathroom and he was fine.

But then he did it again and I just did the same thing and it happened again. So I don't know what's going on there. And then there's also, so just recently I moved all of them into my snake room. So now they're feeling like the hot summers and the cooler winters. So we're going to see what's happening because I'm trying to breed one. I got a green tree python from Lucas and she looked like she was gonna go and then um she just didn't go at all and I was kind of thinking maybe she didn't go because she didn't feel like she had enough heat available to her to keep the eggs warm enough in that room and we'll see what happens um right now she's looking pretty

big so my fingers are crossed but i'm not holding my breath um so there's that and then um so three of the enclosures that i have set up for them have um lights with plants and um because of the lights i i don't have them the lights come on for very long because they get the enclosures really really warm and one of the snakes with the lights when I first put him in there for the first two weeks he kept perching right under the light and I would temp him and he would be 92 degrees and so I what I did was I moved so the plant was kind of next to the light and I thought maybe he was interested in the plant and so I moved the plant over and now he's staying next to the plant so I think he wanted the plant more than the heat of

the light but the 92 degrees wasn't bothering him it was bothering me more than it was bothering him yeah yeah and um i don't know if you guys um listen to the colubrids and colubroid um podcast but they had a guest on there jennifer joseph she's has a lot of experience um breeding pichuophis and um she has a bunch of um import hog um giant hognose or the hognose snakes from madagascar and she was um dealing with um a parasite that they had um an anamoeba do you know what that i'm sure you know what that is justin yeah but um she was talking about doing research and on the that um particular parasite and they found out that they don't do as well with um low like low temperatures like under 50 or higher temperatures over 90 and um it wouldn't it wouldn't kill that it wouldn't kill it but it would definitely stifle it

make it so that the snake maybe its immune system and the medicine can do its job um so when they cooled it that winter she said it really helped the snakes so i wonder if um the same token could be said about pythons that um do things like like we're always talking about micro climates and um that oh snakes even though the air temperature says 88 degrees, it doesn't mean the snake is getting 88 degrees. And I would argue that some of those microclimates those snakes are seeking out actually might be higher than 88 degrees because they talk about finding snakes inside compost piles.

And if it's the same thing that I'm thinking of that's in my garden, compost piles get extremely hot and so do garbage piles and so do um raft attics with raft snakes that live up in their rafters um i saw a video of a guy that was a snake catcher in australia and he went up in these people's attic and they had snake sheds and snake poop all over this attic so the snakes must have been living in that attic and I don't know how hot they were getting in there but it must have been a lot hotter than the air temperature how they say like in in every third house in Darwin there's a Darwin carpet python up in there

so yeah they they commonly use yeah all Yeah. All right. And I, and I, I agree, you know, I think, uh, snakes when they need to do different jobs, they, they probably need to select, or they need to select different temperatures. Now, um, I, I imagine it's probably more dramatic with, uh, with, you know, temperate species and, and, um, you know, they're, they tend to be a little tougher because they can handle a much wider range of temperatures and they're used to kind of those fluctuations in temperature. So, but, but I think overall, like a lot of their behavior is to try to get them to a temperature that they need. So they'll actively thermoregulate to reach that

desired temperature. You know, sometimes it's higher for things like feeding, you know, or digestion or reproduction. They need to increase their temperatures if they've got eggs or if they've got a meal. Whereas other times they might need lower temperatures. And so they'll actively, you know, kind of get their target temperature and sit at that temperature for the time they need. So when they're sick, you know, kind of get their target temperature and sit at that temperature for the time they need. So when they're sick, you know, they might elevate their temperature or perhaps lower it. You know, it's hard to say. So, you know, I've always kind of been a proponent of giving them, you know, higher and lower than they need.

So then they can kind of choose where they go. But, you know, to some degree, they're, they're, you know, especially in the wild, they're actively moving to different places, so they can maintain that kind of constant temperature, if that makes sense. So even though the the area around them is fluctuating wildly, they're seeking a place where they can hit the the preferred body temperature. So with diamond pythons, you know, they showed they come out in the morning and bask on the rocks where it gets hot fast, and they're darker, so they probably heat up pretty quickly. And then as they hit that preferred body temperature, they go into kind of the dappled sunlight to maintain that temperature without overheating or underheating and then at night they'll cool you know they'll coil up so they can retain you know that have a have a smaller surface area so they can retain that heat or if they're too hot they can stretch out and move around and dissipate the heat so but but i

guess overall they're trying to hit that kind of level constant preferred body temperature so what you're basically saying is that that even though the environment may be peaks and valleys of temperature and and and things that aren't stable if you would look at what they're doing yeah they're trying to you know kind of linear graph that that that peak in that valley to try to stay within a much tighter range of thermal homeostasis. Yeah, they have done studies on that where they've tracked the temperature of the snake and compared it with the environment. Even with reproductive females, that's how we discovered what they're doing

when they're shivering on their eggs. They're raising that body temperature. So, you know, they're kind of facultative endotherms at that time when they're using their body's energy to generate heat and to keep those eggs warm when they might dip down a little too cold. So, you know, but those are only seen in kind of the more temperate animals that experience those wider fluctuations. So they have to do things to stay in that sweet spot facultative endotherms i i think that's what you call it when they when they shiver to is that is that a big enough word that's a good word yeah that was well done well well done but uh i guess even though they they they have those wild fluctuations, they try to maintain kind of that homeostasis or that flat line.

But I mean at the same time – To average out. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah. But I mean to your point, my coastals really didn't do a whole lot indoors when my temperatures are fairly stable. And the minute I put them outside and they really hit that real cool, you know, that cool winter and that warm summer. Boom. They just great looking clutch, big clutch of eggs like just just like that.

So, I mean, clearly, I think, you know know that i think there's that those extreme swings are something the snake needs to manage maybe it gives them some benefit on the on the margins being able to heat up quicker or or to cool down when they need to but it's definitely unarguably a signal for them and and their body gets very clear signals from those like very very obvious differences in temperature seasonally to me to me anyway where they say ah i know exactly where i am as you know the sun or as the as the as we're changing you know the solar position throughout the year. Got it, got it. I know where I'm at. Yeah. Are those, like you were saying, Justin, those temperate species,

because they have such high valleys and, I mean, low valleys and high peaks, after they've been down in that valley and it starts to warm up, their body says, go now, because they don't have the whole season to wait to lay their eggs so that they'll be, um, survive. Because if they lay them too late, the, it, maybe the temperatures will drop too much for them to be able to, um, keep them warm enough. So, and I think that's why a lot of those species you know the more temperate species uh tend you tend to have a higher incidence of of you know live birth versus

egg laying because they it's it's the female can control it better if she can move and shuttle and go to different areas to warm up more um so so you know, that's kind of how those kind of things evolve and develop because it just makes more sense to be able to retain the eggs and move around with the offspring in the female to keep them at that desired range. But I mean, obviously, you know, they need different temperatures at different times. And, you, and that's one of the benefits of ectothermy is that you don't burn a lot of energy when you maintain your body at a lower temperature. I mean, if we drop three or four degrees or raise three or four degrees, we're in serious trouble. You've got a fever of four or five degrees higher than your normal body temperature, and you're headed to the hospital. So with them, they can fluctuate their body temperatures quite a bit.

So obviously, you've got a very strong argument in that regard for having that access to a wide variety of temperatures. And I'm not suggesting that they necessarily need that 80 degrees all year round but you know when they do need 80 degrees they'll they'll do the things to get them to 80 degrees either go to shade or go to sun you know to move up and down to where they hit that sweet spot yeah or loosen their coil when they're yeah just yeah eggs yeah yeah or or even just when they're trying to conserve like if they're hiding out in the shade after warming up, but then the day is just too hot. Doesn't a tightly coiled snake preserve their heat a lot longer than a sprawled out snake? So that's how you know when you go into your reptile room and all your snakes are just like sprawled out snake. So that's how you know when you go into your reptile room and all your snakes are just sprawled out.

It's like when you see the crows on a really hot day and they're standing around with their wings open, they're trying to cool off. Or they seek the water or something to really cool down. Then you know it's really hot out um one argument that i did have for the um for more of a steady thermal um was that um if you're a snake breeder and you're gonna sell a snake to a new keeper it's a lot easier to tell them a really narrow regime that you know that the snake will survive in and it's easier for easier to tell them a really narrow regime that you know that the snake will survive in.

And it's easier for them to understand and get it done rather than telling them, well, at this time of the year, you need to let it drop down this low. And then because, you know, that's just too much to tell a new keeper. And that's what I did with my green tree pythons um harlan wall i bought a snake from him and he told me what to do and i did exactly what he said and it worked i had great success i haven't lost one so nice yeah he's a good person to listen to yeah i was gonna say he taught me why not steering you wrong yeah yeah yeah he taught me i actually. I'm not steering you wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He taught me a lot. I actually, I sent him, he told me what to do. And then I sent him a picture of, I said, okay, I did it.

And I sent a picture and he's all, oh my God, you did exactly what I told you. Like no one ever does that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And you know, I mean, it, it, it might, might vary from place to place. You know, if you're doing what somebody is doing, say in Florida and you're, you know, I mean, it might vary from place to place. You know, if you're doing what somebody's doing, say, in Florida, and you're out in the desert like me in Utah, the high deserts where it gets really cold and really hot, and the humidity is about, you know, 10 to 20 percent, versus Florida where it's very warm and very humid, you know, you might have to alter those, uh, you know, recommendations. And I think, um, you know, when, when Terry Phillip, uh, was on Morelia Python Radio, um, you know, I,

I think where, where his situation is, where he's working with a wide variety of species from a varied, um, climates and, and, you know, places on earth where they're coming from. So they have a wide variety of needs. So he's trying to shoot for the least common denominator. Trying to keep as many species as possible at the same kind of thermal regimen that they can all benefit from. Maybe not necessarily optimal. And again, it's about the goal, right? Yeah, exactly. His goal is to keep the most diverse collection of reptiles happy, and that's very difficult when you're trying to keep a lot of things in kind of a limited thermal or regulated area. So, yeah. And I think it's really, it's good because you really can talk about both sides of this argument

kind of under the Terry Phillip umbrella and the idea of a varied, you know, varied thermal regime as, you know, snakes have a preferred body temperature as kind of Justin was alluding to that there are use those peaks and valleys to kind of stay within that temperature. And that's a safe place for you to put that snake and keep it there. And for new keepers, it's nice and safe, but maybe not the most effective way to breed a snake. Or if you want to, you know, reproduce snakes, you know,

that then you have to kind of look at all those other factors that go into them making behavioral decisions. And clearly, you know, just, and, and, and, you know, I'm not to say that you can't do that. I think I had pretty good success with that flat temp, steady state with the Tracy. So, you know again it's it's the situation that you're talking about it really is situational and i think i mean especially for like if you're trying to breed animals and you know like if you're a commercial breeder a lot of them tend to specialize in one or two species that have very similar requirements and then they they kind of

balance everything around that. So if you're a colubrid keeper, you keep a lot of North American colubrids, you're going to have that very cold winter. You're going to stick them all in a cold room for a few months and then warm them up and do the whole thing. But if you're a ball python breeder, you probably have a pretty steady, fairly high temperature compared to what you might use for other python species that are more temperate. But I was really interested to see Dave Kaufman's movie that he filmed in Africa about ball pythons. I thought it was really interesting. And I do like his series of showing animals in the wild

and kind of measuring temperatures where they're at and in their burrows and looking at humidity and things. And, I mean, those ball pythons on eggs in burrows, it was pretty warm in there and very humid. So they're seeking those areas. Look at Owen now. He can breed colubrids like a maniac, but he can't breed a carpet to save his life anymore, right? Like his rhythm of the room.

His rhythm of the room is around colubrids now. Yeah, he switched up his mojo. Although he did get his white lip eggs this year. See? Yeah, he changed it up. So maybe the white lips are more like a colubrid in their needs. I don't know. But yeah, it's definitely little differences in where the animals come from.

I think I kind of like to specialize in Australian animals that kind of have very similar requirements you know there's a little bit of variation there but for the most part they're all pretty tough and have a fairly varied requirements so what about um when you're incubating your eggs because when i got the white lip eggs um this is probably i think think I mentioned it in the NPR episode. But when I first got them, I thought, oh, I'm going to try something different. And after reading, because the carpet python book, when you guys did the, put the temperature recorder in the Python clutches, and you saw how the eggs just went up and down. They were at a steady temp,

and they were reaching temperatures into the 90s at a few points. So I thought, well, I'm going to do a varied temperature where at night I was going to let the temperature drop down like a couple degrees and then back up. I was like, I think I was doing 87 at night, 89 during the day. Because what happened was I asked one person and they told me, oh, incubated them at 87. Then someone else told me incubate them at 89. So I thought, thought oh i'm just gonna combine the two and then i i told ryan young and he's like why did why would you do that don't

do that and um he was absolutely right because um i was getting so much condensation in the egg box yeah and so it was creating a problem but i just i just um i just thought well if that if it happens when the mother incubates like because it wasn't in the wild so we can't really say for sure that it happens if that's what would have happened in the wild situation but i just thought it was cool and I just thought I would try it. But I'm not trying that this time. I'm just trying to stay at a steady 88. Yeah. And I think that's kind of part of the difficulty of providing a very thermal regimen is you need much larger enclosures and you need, you know, maybe much larger incubation boxes or, or something because, you know, in the wild they have that almost

unlimited area where they can go and, and, and they have unlimited, you know, temperatures that they can seek. They can hit 150 if they want in the sun or go into the shade and get down in the seventies or go deep into a crevice and get down in the 60s or you know lower so um they they have those options and and to try to replicate that in captivity is very difficult and so i think a lot of times you know like and you know we we've kind of come from the mindset of the maybe the check method of having, you know, a million racks and all these little tubs everywhere. And with that kind of a setup, you have to have a pretty stable, you don't have much variation, right?

You're setting everything on a thermostat. You don't have, you know, lights coming on and off you don't have much of a swing in your temperatures because your whole room is probably heated up by those uh you know all the heat tape or heat cable that you've got in all those racks and so you know you're just shooting for as stable as you can get and so yeah they have the proportional thermostats to keep everything at a certain you know level and so i think as we've tried you know hopefully kind of come out of that a little bit where we're trying to give larger enclosures and give more choices and things like that, I kind of like that. But again, it's very difficult to do that in a box because we talk about arboreal enclosures, and I've never seen an enclosure that's you know more than 10 feet tall you know that that wasn't in a zoo in somebody's house you know I actually I did see one in in a guy in Australia's house he had like his whole basement there was a tree coming up all the the length of the basement

it went into his coffee table in like his living room or something and so you could look down through the glass of the coffee table and see down into like at the top of this tree it was pretty cool like i know what you're talking about yeah dave kaufman made a video about his place that's right yeah it was it was pretty cool he was pretty ingenious with his little second name something jungle uh it's like camo. Camo, yeah, Camo, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. I was there in 2010, visiting there. Is it a zoo? Do you have to pay a fee to go in there? No, it's his house. It's his house, yeah.

It's a zoo, but it's his house. Yeah. I don't know if he usually takes people into his house or not, but I was with a mutual friend, and so I got to go into the house and see all that stuff but he does have kind of a building out back so he may do like tours or birthday parties or things like that out back but for the most part you know so aside from that you know when people say i have an arboreal enclosure they usually mean it's like three foot tall and two

feet wide and you know it's like i i have never seen a tree that would fit into that enclosure. The box is a little taller than it is wider. Exactly. That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I always thought that would be.

And I think I'm looking at some of the videos that Ari and Ryu are putting up about the new the new Reptilandia in Texas. I'm really excited to check that out. And they have those really, you know, tall enclosures with giant trees in them and stuff. So that's going to be pretty sweet. So yeah. Yeah.

I'm curious to see how the, they do in there. Yeah. All of those enclosures, the Bolin's Python enclosure. I was like, wow, this is probably, if I, you know, going to see

those enclosures or those exhibits, it's probably the closest I'd ever get to actual Papua. So yeah, a lot safer too. I'd get naked in and out. Yeah. But i always thought that would be really fun to have like a you know a two-story enclosure where you had like a spiral staircase that went around like a tree and you had a bunch of you know green tree pythons in there and you could kind of follow them and see what they see where they laid their eggs or whatever but even that's limited to you know one or two trees you know you don't have a a forest for them or you know and you know reading their natural history uh studies that they they talk about how they move you know 50 feet you know from to a to set up in an ambush position you know they they go up and down the tree every day

and night so unless they catch something and they kind of sit up and digest but yeah and then his last five like five or six years of me keeping um snakes i've um i've started to think like that snakes as species are like really um varied and um they're really good at um changing when they need to and adapting but it seems like as individuals they're not good at it at all um when you hear about um like snakes being relocated not very far from where they were and just suffering and dying because they don't know those special like like um uh like uh rick shine was talking about in his book how the water pythons he would all you could go to a certain clump of grass and know that a certain snake would be under that grass at a certain time of day because that was that snake's clump of grass. And he said that even after the area had flooded and all the scent trails had been wiped away, the next year after it had dried, he could find that snake in that same clump of grass.

Because that was the niche. It's a personalized niche that that snake knew. So when you think about the life history of a snake, it hatches out. And say it's a green tree python and there's a couple different types. There's the brave ones that eat or there's the ones that just tuck their head and hide and so i always think that those brave ones are probably the ones that are have like a 50 50 chance because um either they're going to catch the food right away and start growing or something's going to catch it right away yeah and then the ones that hide it seems like they just like want to find a hot a

hiding spot and then if they get lucky something will happen to walk by so maybe it depends on if that year the skinks just had a bumper crop and there's just skinks everywhere that's little chicken babies maybe you would have a better chance yeah or picking the right right place like um again in the shine book he was talking about the the snakes that pick those perfect rocks you know the broad-headed snakes and then the geckos would tend to come under those rocks and when they're a little cooler the snakes have been kind of facultatively thermoregulating and moving their bodies up and down to kind of retain heat so they were alert and ready for a kind of a cold dumb gecko to wander into their rock you know crevice or whatever so um picking

the right hiding spot could be very effective as well or setting up the right ambush site for for a baby green tree or something could be the difference between life or death, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like when they talk about the rhythm of the room, that's what it is. The rhythm of the room is that snake's little clump of grass or its favorite ambush or its favorite waterhole where it always finds really fat rats to eat because the rats go to that waterhole or you know it's that's the rhythm of that snake's life i think i think the other the other the other part is is that humans who relocate snakes aren't making good decisions for where that snake needs to go and they relocate it to you know a subprime area where the that you know that the the conditions are such that the snake just can't find what it needs and it doesn't do well you know well and there's a reason that carpets do really well in the human disturbed areas because there's lots of rodents

and there's lots of roofs you know with warm temperatures to to hide out in and and pretty undisturbed with rodents crawling through every once in a while. And I would say that carpets are more of a generalist species rather than – and so it's – again, it's nuanced because you're talking about a difference in a very specialized species versus a very generalized species. You definitely get some of the snakes that Marco Shea was talking about in his book who were just like frog eaters or just very specialized versus – You move them away from where the prey is. Yeah, the broad-headed snakes, if a tree grew up and shaded the rock, they wouldn't go in that rock anymore.

It had to have access to sun at the right time. And they showed that by cutting away some of the limbs and letting the sun back in, they could bring the snakes back to those sites. And that became a used habitat for them. They made up fake uh rock sites so they could wasn't that cool yeah yeah they were actually able to make fake rocks and it worked yeah and they had like a little seal that they put so it would retain the moisture to the to the appropriate level and things so pretty cool stuff so you know we we uh there's a lot we don't know

about uh what these snakes are doing but you know the things we do know kind of point to i guess both our sides you know they they uh they do they do need a varied temperature but they also need to have have a specific temperature to do different jobs and so yeah yeah yeah i think it's hard i think it's hard you know i think it's hard when any animal has to i don't think people do very well in a chaotic society right where where they can't they're like oh the economy sucks and gas is crazy and i don't know how to make decisions right now. And this is stressing me out in much in the same way. I think when environmental factors go real crazy, animals have a hard time like, okay, where am I at?

What's going on? Like, what am I doing here? And, you know, it makes sense. Like you move a snake in a room, you know, like, like all your, all your carpets took, took the year off after you moved,in like yeah probably in direct response to like whoa whoa whoa what's happening here you know so this is i mean it makes sense it makes a lot of sense years or whatever yeah it's pretty crazy yeah any other uh any other burning topics i think that um maybe um this is not really it's more of a question than a point or whatever.

So as we're trying to breed these snakes and you have sensitive snakes like the Tracy A, and we're trying to make it so that they're easier to keep in captivity, right? Like, we don't them to a little bit of a higher or lower temps kind of making them a little uncomfortable um as they're growing when we're keeping them before we sell them or give them away um i wonder if that would make them a little stronger so that when they do go to their new home, they'll be ready for more. Do you know what I'm, am I making sense? Yeah, I get what you're saying.

I think, like, I've thought about that a bit because it seems like when you get, well, I think baby, you know, juvenile animals are a little more adaptable anyway. You know, if you, usually if you get an adult into your collection, they don't acclimate as well as, you know, say a baby. You know, you get a baby and it eats the next day, you know, and it's fine. But sometimes it messes up an adult and they are stressed out and freaked out because they got moved, you know. And they kind of know, wait, this is bad. But when a baby's born, it's looking to kind of move and find its own place and get out and find a food source and things like that. Everything's kind of new. So it's not maybe it doesn't have those expectations of, no, my keeper comes in every Wednesday and gives me a rat,

you know, like they're a little more adaptable because they don't necessarily have a rhythm or they don't know what to expect maybe. I don't know. That's kind of what came to my mind with that question. That's a good question, though. I like that. Yeah. What made me think about it is that the, is it the golden spoon? Well, when Shine was talking about how the water pythons are so adaptive that when there's a bumper crop for the rats, the snakes can go from being just a smaller snake that stores fat and lays small clutches to being a humongous snake that just grows, you know, to gigantuan sizes and lays huge clutches to being a humongous snake that just grows you know to gigantuan sizes and lays

huge clutches and the babies come out trying to eat big food right away and i was wondering if you expose the babies to certain types of temperatures if you'd get something if they would be adaptable that way too but i mean mean, I don't know. And it's hard to test because I don't know. Yeah, that seemed to correlate with good feeding. So I think, you know, if you're, I don't know if you can overfeed a juvenile python if you're keeping it at proper temperatures. They're designed to kind of grow quickly,

at least the Australian pythons, I don't, you know, that I have experience with, you can feed them a couple times a week and they'll grow fast and long, you know, but, um, once they hit adulthood, then they can start getting obese. But like, if they, if they've got the proper temperatures to digest, you can feed them up pretty, pretty easily. And I think that corresponds with what Shine was observing, you know, that during when pythons hatched during bumper crop years, they did a lot better overall, you know, over their lifespan, they laid more eggs, they lived longer, all those kind of, they grew larger, all those things. And so it just depends on what, what year you're lucky enough to be born in, you know, or unlucky enough to be born in.

So they kind of, the temperature and the bumper crops coincide with each other, is what you're saying? Or at least moisture, yeah. Like, if the conditions are good for the rodents and they're breeding very well, then that's going to be better for the snakes. I don't know that it i it seemed like maybe temperature plays a role in that but like also extreme temperatures can be very bad for snakes you know and it can be much too warm and

drought and yeah and he he was talking about some of his early studies were were thwarted because it was a bad year and the snakes just weren't doing anything and they were dying off and things. And he's like, oh man, no wonder nobody studies snakes. This is hard. You know, Australian snakes have it very rough. Like it's really hard to make it in the Australian outback and things like that. So yeah, it's, it's a tricky out there for, for a wild snake. And I think maybe that's part of it you know they're used to that kind of being i don't know paranoid or or stressed out so they they're like ready like hey anything changes and i could be dead so i need to make sure that i head for cover if there's some kind of and

if i don't if i don't recognize the area i'm just probably going to die out because i don't have those the benefit of knowing where to go during extreme heat or cool or whatever you know i think that i think that by nature they have to have plasticity you know like the the to me in in my head, and I don't, you know, I mean, I'm not, you know, anybody to say this, but it doesn't make sense that the golden spoon hypothesis could only apply. You know, you either are a feast or a famine snake. You know, you get put into one club and that's the club you're in for the rest of your life. It should be able to go both directions, right? You get put into one club and that's the club you're in for the rest of your life. It should be able to go both directions, right? It would have to.

Potentially. It would have to. Yeah. That seems to make sense. In that, he said that what happened to the snakes that grew really large is they really struggled during the time of drought and famine and they weren't able to recover because it's kind of like a huge size it reminds me of what goes on with the embricada on that one island where the females struggle to get to that bigger size because there's no median size food there's just the really small food and then the really large food and if they don't eat a mouse or a wallaby yeah they can't make it over that hump they could you know not make it but but in

the it but in the but but in the the ones that you know feasted during the famine, they created more offspring, which increased the likelihood that more of them would make it than the ones who maybe did a little bit better but produced way less offspring. So to me, it's all just reproductive strategy and action, right? Yeah, totally. reproductive strategy in action, right? Like, um, you know, and, and so looked at, looked at over, you know, um, over the long haul, um, probably as a generally about a wash, um, uh, you know, well, yeah, both, both serve their purposes. And I think that's kind of what you were driving at there, uh, Lisa, with the, uh, you know, idea that exposing the babies to a diverse temperature or different experiences makes them maybe stronger to withstand hard times down the road. If their keeper loses interest or something and they kind of have meager meals for a little while

and then all of a sudden they're feeding them up again, those kind of things where they can handle those changes a little better than, say, a pampered snake that just had a steady state temperature and all the food it wanted and then all of a sudden times are lean and they die off because they can't handle those rough times. Maybe that kind of goes along with what you were thinking well i was thinking more it's probably a stupid question anyways because snakes need to you can't just make a snake be able to handle cold like a python stay cold for a really long time without getting sick but kind of what i was thinking is because in the um reproductive husbandry um the blue bible um uh he was ross was

talking about how when his white lips hatched out, they were prone to respiratory infections. So he was recommending keeping them really warm. And so I kind of kept mine pretty warm. And so sometimes I worry that if they're really used to always having really nice warm temperatures, when I send them out to someone else, maybe that would be setting them up for failure. But, I mean, I haven't heard of any of them having any problems. But it was just an idea, you know, thinking about the temperatures and also that reading that book was just inspiring different thoughts.

Yeah. No, I think it's a very valid question, really important one to think of, because, you know, if we can be improving the offspring that we're sending out that, you know, that's a good thing, right? I do think a lot of people pin respiratory infections to temperatures, and I'm not so sure that that's very correct. I think that temperatures can exacerbate respiratory infections, but the root cause of respiratory infections is, you know. The pathogen. Pathogenic, yes, 100%.

Or, you know, obstruction or some kind of disease state. Yeah, I mean, I just think, like, if that was the case, if it was solely a thermal issue, then snakes would be kicking off left and right out during the cold season out in nature. And to be quite frank, like I keep my snakes at a steady temperature. I keep snakes at varied temperatures, and I don't really see RIs in my collection. So does that mean that – like I just – I think that there's something else going on there. And when I kept – I used to keep more snakes when I was much newer of a keeper, and there for a while I did see RIs. And then I kept back on all the snakes that i keep and now i keep them in very you know

all different types of and i don't see our eyes anymore so to me it's just like i think our eyes have uh other underlying causes that they get exacerbated by temperature yeah yeah that's my two cents sorry all right well any final thoughts or you got uh got anything else or you want to wrap it up what do you think i mean i i feel i feel good if you guys do if we missed i i don't think we missed anything we talked about eggs babies adults yeah i i think it was a great discussion and you know i appreciate your preparedness and the good topics you brought that was a really fun fun discussion so well i'm no casey cannon oh casey's fun yeah he's he does a good job as well but yeah you that was great thank you for

coming on yeah thanks guys it's been really nice talking to you guys. Awesome. I look up to both of you. Oh, well, I look up to you as well. I was going to say, I am not to be looked up to. That's for sure. I haven't read black,

white lips. So you're one up on me there. Yeah. They're easy. That's awesome. Yeah. Tell that to Owen. He's right around the corner.

He's almost there. Yeah. I hear he wasn't too happy about how much we talk about him on the podcast. He was a little upset about that. Yeah. He says he's always sometimes listening. So we better pay homage to Owen one of these days. But I did notice last night when they were talking about the Timors, his little name badge said Mackinwookie on it. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. That's pretty common these days. He's taking that on. That's all right. We know you're out there Mackin-spying. All right. Well, thanks for coming on and and uh we'll thank uh the the podfather uh for letting us uh record this fun stuff and and appreciate the the npr network uh any good shows you guys have listened to lately um i thought i mean obviously they're uh i haven't

even been on my own show for crying out loud you're not listening to any shows yeah they had a little crossover with uh lucas over on uh on snakes and stogies oh i did see i did catch a little bit of lucas yeah lucas's little baby face on there. Yeah, he did a good job from what I've heard so far. Dang, Lucas and his red Ackies are, dude, I'm just like, I don't need Ackies. I do need Ackies. I'm excited for Lucas's research. He said he was doing thermal research for the black-headed pythons. Yeah.

He's analyzing the data that was collected by, I can't remember, he said her name, but I can't remember her name, but he's going to figure some stuff out. He's going to make Daddy Lofman proud. Dr. Bruton,

yeah, she's amazing. She's done some really cool research. I was lucky enough to be on a call with her, with Lucas and her and Nick. Uh, and I think Zach was on there as well. Yeah. It was really cool to, to, to calling it for us. The fat lady has sung. Your dog was pretty well behaved. Just a little whining, but what's your dog's name? His name's Cal. All right. Like he's a little, yeah, he's a little cowboy.

What kind of dog is he? He's a standard schnauzer. Okay. So they're known for being yappy and talkative. Yep. I have a little schnauzer mutt upstairs. I'm not sure. He's like schnauzer.

Some kind of schnauzer. Terrier. Some kind of terrier. I don't know. He's a cross of a couple different dogs, but he's a yappy little thing. Yeah. Fun stuff. That's their job.

That's their job. Yep. That's right. They got to let us know that somebody's at the door that we're talking to. Yelling out the window, my yard, my yard, my yard, my yard. Who are you talking to, Mom? Who's on the computer? Exactly.

All right. Well, check out NPR and all their stuff, all their socials. Great stuff, great content. And we will catch you again next week for another episode of Reptile Fight Club. Facultative Fight Club is out. Thank you.