Reptile Fight Club - Ron St. Pierre fights about do Reptiles make the best choices?

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

In this episode, Justin and Chuck tackle the topic of do reptiles make the best choices? with Ron St. Pierre 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 MGR Network. All right, welcome to another edition of Reptile Fight Club. We've got a great episode today. I'm very excited. We've got Ron St. Pierre on. I put your name in the first out the gay right there. But excited to have Ron on. I've known him for quite a while and he's done some amazing things in herpetoculture. So I'm your host, Justin Julander. And with me, as always, is Mr. Chuck Poland. Ron's so awesome. He's the first one introduced, right? He's like, he's main bill on the show tonight.

We don't wait to introduce the big dogs. Yeah, no, up front, front row seats, VIP, Ron. Exactly, yeah. Well, I mean, I was really- Yeah, thanks for coming on, dude. Yeah, really humbled. I was listening to one of Ronon's interviews and and uh he he mentioned our podcast i'm like oh man that's that's high praise for sure so we had to get him on we had to practice a little bit on other people before

we bring on yeah mr saint pierre i mean you guys named it after the of a movie that is very near and dear to me, that is very, uh, I mean, that movie pretty much espouses my worldview almost to a T. So when I heard you guys were doing this, I was like, that's fucking awesome. It is, it is a great, one of the, one of the great movies. Yeah. Yeah. But it's been fun. We enjoy hitting these topics and seeing kind of both sides of different issues and things like that. So, yeah. So, I don't know. This week's been kind of crazy with work. Reports going out and stuff. But reptile-wise, man, my female blackhead is swelling up nice and huge. Nicely? up nice and hugely yeah i think she may either she's ovulating now or she's ovulated and the eggs are getting close to being laid she usually lays kind of earlier in the season so i'm really hoping i can get them to go the distance this year because man they've been a thorn in my side for a while so i'm excited to see her progressing in the right direction anyway so yeah see how it

goes i had a pair of inlands locked up this year or this week as well so nice is that the uh so that's the uh the unrelated the the unrelated scofield line yeah we'll call them the aar line right there you go yeah yeah yeah sorry man sorry man no you can do that you should be able to do that. Yeah, these are offspring from that original pairing of the Scofield line and an unrelated male. Nice. They should be really nice-looking animals. Remind me and forgive me. Have you gotten eggs from that pairing previously and hatched out?

Yeah, yeah. Was it lopsided? Is that what it was? Um, originally, yeah. It had quite a few females. The first, the first one. Yeah. I've got a bunch of females, only like one or two males. So I still have that original male as well, but yeah. So. The harem problem is not, not the worst one to have. Yeah, that's for sure. You could have a lot worse problems, but I probably got to find a, another male here down the road so yeah yeah yeah yeah how about how about you what's

going on with you um not much i'm in that typical like where i'm looking at my animals and i'm like ah this whole year's a bust nothing's gonna looks great i don't know what's going on ah so that's pretty much where i'm at i've got i, yeah, I've got a day geckos that are starting to, to build and lay. So, um, looks like, looks like their season starting to kind of start up again. So, um, still got William side that are, that are, that are laying and hatching. And so, you know, kind of a little bit of everything going on here. And so we'll see, we'll see what i really

end up what we what we really end up doing but i feel like i'm i'm right on track for how i feel like oh it looks good it looks good oh it's horrible it's awful it's a total bust no not quite so we'll see you know i've got the panic with a couple of my projects as well really right some stuff to go and it's like yeah they don't always play play along but no and i feel like they like to mess with you like you know i was looking at the female tracy like last week and she looked really promising and i was like oh great and now i'm looking at her and i'm like wait what's going on no was that an obvious that doesn't look like that didn't look like an ovulation oh no what's going on so you, I just that's why and that's why I'm like so like hands off with stuff where it's just like put it together.

When I know it generally breeds and just whatever happens happens, man, because I can't be so emotionally invested in that stuff anymore. I'm too old. You know, I've got health problems on the horizon for me. I don't need to add to that. You know me. I don't need to add to that. You know what I mean? I just don't need to add to that. Yeah. Speaking of being vested, we need to respond to some proposed legislation that's passed the House and is getting into the Senate here for them to evaluate and pass or, you know, reject it. So, um, this is a proposed legislation that could negatively impact pretty much all pet keeping except for puppies and kitties. So if you like to keep anything other than dogs and cats, you need to write your senators today,

right now, when you're listening to this, or hopefully you've already done it and let them know this, this could damage businesses. This can damage, um, our rights as Americans. A lot, a lot of different things are at stake here. So definitely, um, um, write your senators, uh, right now, if you have time to be heard, time to be heard time to be heard and uh there's there's a lot of useful and helpful things uh on the us arc site usarc.org um and also if you don't support them it'd be a great opportunity to um you know donate to to us arc and to have them help us with our legal issues and to uh combat things like this so important, very critical right now. So we need to make sure this doesn't pass. I know that's probably, you USARC and USARC Florida and Heather's been all over the internet promoting, letting people know, ringing the bell, but potentially catastrophic. I mean, I've been at this for four years and I've never, I mean, I know that this is similar to the bill that was proposed in 2009 that was shot down.

But the way this one came through, I think, is significantly more concerning, even though that one was pretty scary when that one came through yeah well hopefully that will work against it you know kind of sneaking it in a big bill you know I guess that's how the most legislation passes these days so but hopefully we don't have to fight it on the other end you know hopefully we can nip it in the bud and get it pulled out of there before it gets passed yeah it's actually a stunning indictment of our process that they pass these massive bills that these people sign off on that they've never even read. Yeah. It's ridiculous.

I mean, what the hell are we paying them for? Yeah. That should, I mean, and just the fact that they're just, just conglomerate this huge, you know,

mishmash of different nothing to do with any of the the quote uh whatever it was i forget the name of it it's uh america competes act yeah has an inside of it it has a giant sword that would essentially you know destroy an entire industry and force and i mean take out billions of dollars out of the economy and wreck people's lives and all kinds of stuff so yeah it's just it's ridiculous how off track um you know we're letting legislation get where it's it's just like i mean it just doesn't it's it's like it's like these these just homewrecking things that come through under the guise of like positive regulation of something. I don't know. I just it's it's so sick, you know, as somebody who kind of believes in the the free enterprise and and the the spirit of America.

And, you know, I'm a veteran and I'm all these things. It's just like, get your head out of your collective asses, you know, politicians. And like, it's just, it's just ridiculous. It makes me sick. Yeah. Well, and I mean, they've done a good job at convincing people that that they're essentially powerless against this. And really the reality of it. And the truth of it is, is that the individuals, all of us, we hold all of the power. We are the base of that pyramid.

And if you kick the base out from under that pyramid, the shit at the top is going to crash. Yeah. For that to happen, all you have to do is stop participating. Yeah. Just stop endorsing all of this crap and say no more, you know, and force them. But I mean, if you look at the way everything's all divided up right now and people are, people don't trust their neighbors.

The one guy hates the other guy because of all these things. Yeah. The, the, the dumb divisions and meanwhile, lobbyists and big money or, you know, running it all in a back room. Yeah. Yeah. Laughing all the way to the end. Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. They want to sow that separation and fighting amongst ourselves.

Yeah. The paralysis of people is a hundred percent in their interest to, you know. Yeah. This isn't a Democrat or Republican issue. This is an american issue if you want to have the rights to keep exactly how people need to look at everything and i think you know the one thing that i'm i guess i'm heartened by that even at our level of division i i hear people who maybe politically are so far away from you know the way I view things and you start to talk to them and they

feel exactly the same way you do about politicians and about politics and about the bullshit. So we just, we're getting closer and closer to all agreeing that this is crap, that nobody's going to take it anymore. And you may be way on the other side of the fence for me politically, but we both agree that this is bullshit and nobody's going to stand for it. And I think, you know, once we get there and everybody's rowing in the same boat, things will change. But, you know, as long as they're trying to throw us all into different boats and have us row different directions, it's never going to work. It's just not going to work. That's exactly it, man.

Yeah. That is exactly it. Well said, Mr. Chuck. Yep. All right. yeah it's never gonna work it's just exactly it man yeah that is exactly well said mr chuck all right well um again i mean if you know how to copy and paste you can write a letter to your senator just use the the stuff that the u.s arc has provided for us uh or write your own stuff i i kind of tried to personalize a little bit to maybe feed into the politician's ego, you know, like, Hey, I really like what you've been doing lately, or, you know, I'm really proud of you for this or that, you know, now, now do this for me, stop this, stop this bill. So, but yeah, together we

can, we can get this nipped in the bud. So don't, don't hesitate. Don't wait, get it done. And I mean, not to say that they don't read your mail, Justin, but I think just the volume speaks to them. So the more you do, the more often you do. Yeah, and they don't. Certainly they're not reading it. Maybe a staffer might. You might catch a hearer there,

but I honestly really doubt that if they're not even reading the bill, they're not reading the hate mail that comes from the bill. You know what I mean? Like, so, so flood them with tons of it, give them more than they can handle so that the volume speaks, you know, the word. That's what it will do it. Yeah. If they see there's enough of their constituents that are clamoring for this, then they're going to listen. So we only have power in numbers guys. So let's get that out there. Teamwork makes the dream work. That's what we say at work. There you go. Yeah. All right. Well, let's be a team. All right. Well, we're really thrilled, like we said before, to have you on here on and thanks for doing this. And why don't you introduce yourself for anybody who's living in a hole in the ground and doesn't know who you are i'm sure everybody

knows who you are but how do you fit into herpetoculture and that kind of thing yeah i mean i've been a professional herpetoculturist for since the 1980s or so now i started when i was a kid i was like 17 18 when i really started breeding stuff. And I don't know. I've worked with a lot of stuff. I'm responsible. However, you, whether, whether, whether you look at this negatively or positively, but I'm responsible for blue tagus and albino blue tagus and blood boas and just a motley motley boas.

Motley boas. Yeah. Yeah. So today we work on, we're still trying to break new ground. We're working out husbandry and commercial systems for giant anola species. And we're working on parsons, chameleons, and monkey tail skinks and all kinds of stuff. Monitors. Some killer monitors, man man i drool every

time i think about the monitors you have over there yeah i know those spats right that's cool stuff i'm hoping you're gonna have a lot of luck with those and gets yeah so far not so much but we'll see supposedly right now is the time of the year where they do something like you guys i'm in that part of the year where i'm like fuck nothing's gonna do anything yeah everything sucks and you know just waiting for a comet to fall on me kind of deal but yeah no it usually i learned a long time ago you just gotta leave shit alone and let it go yeah yeah that's right to be it's to be and if it's not then it's not but most of the time more often than not you know you end up you end up in pretty good shape yeah yeah well that's uh i i uh enjoyed your interviews on some of the other part of me on npr

uh interview a while back and just listening to your stories from back in your collecting days so there's some good stuff go go check out those if you haven't heard them but they're yeah he's got some really hilarious stories and uh some some uh pretty uh sketchy near misses or or not so near misses right yeah i've lost a nut i've had my injuries man turns out you don't grab giant nile softshell turtles unless you know which way their head is. Yeah, those things have some jobs. No one can argue your commitment, Ron. Yeah. No one can argue your commitment. Yep.

All right. Well, we've got you on here to talk about reptile choices. Do reptiles make the best choices for themselves? So we're going, we're gonna fight about that topic today. Uh, if they, if they, uh, are given, you know, unlimited, uh, choices or whatnot. So, um, so we're gonna go ahead and flip the coin, see who gets to debate you out of my co-host checking or myself. So you want to call it check sure you got a pretty uh confident uh title there i figured i figured i would goad you with my title no matter which way the uh the coin toss goes so okay call

it tails oh it is tails because it's always tails has anybody noticed this heads the last time and i think i lost so i like, I'm going tails. All right. Well, you want to debate him or you want to let me? I'm going to let you do it. All right. Are you cool with that, Justin? Oh, definitely.

Is that okay? Ron, you good with that? Yeah, I'm good. All right. I've known this fucker since he was a kid. Yeah, there you go. Dad's going to whoop your ass, Justin. Oh, definitely, definitely. in so yeah there you go dad's gonna whoop your ass justin no definitely definitely all right

ron you can call it for which side of the topic you get what's your call oh what side yeah heads or tails heads or tails heads it's tails check this right wow that's crazy. He swears that – so I think he might, and I'm just saying this. He's got a two-tailed coin. Exactly. But he's got a two-sided coin. Yeah, see, that's what he shows everybody else. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just faking everybody out.

He's a doctor and apparently a magician as well. All right. Well, I think I'm going to take the con the, uh, con side. The reptiles don't really make good choices. Um, and, uh, and so I'll give you the, yes, they, they do great if they're given the opportunities, they'll make good choices. So I appreciate that work. All right. Okay. That's what I figured. You, you know, you have a lot of good insights. That's another thing that I really got out of your podcast was the use of desert reptiles, of the dew, the morning dew and stuff, the dew point.

I've been thinking a lot about that lately. So thank you for putting that in my brain. I appreciate that, man. It was just an observation I made collecting whale chameleons. That's how the good stuff comes out, right? Is watching these things, seeing what they do in the wild. And if you don't really know what they do in the wild, it's probably a little harder to keep them in captivity.

So, all right, well, I'm going to let you lead out, have you lead us out and we'll start the debate there. Does that sound all right? Yeah. Okay. I mean, um, I'm kind of agnostic actually to this. This is something that I do. I'm somewhat in the middle, I suppose, but I'm pretty much that way in everything. I really don't have, you know, like a very hard, fast rule system for what I do or, or what I've noticed. I,

matter of fact, when I think I know something, I usually have something standing in the face and prove that I don't know shit. Yeah. But, um, primarily the way I do things is, I mean, it's basically kind of like the God, God and the Garden of Eden kind of thing. I build a setup and I try to supply them with everything that I possibly think they could need and give them multiple levels and layers so they can make their own choices depending on the species. And what I feel is appropriate for that species based on where it's from, what its habits are, at least what I believe is appropriate, you know, for that species based on, you know, where it's from, what its habits are, at least what I believe its habits are. It's hard to really know for sure, unless you're actually go and see these things in the wild, but sure. Yeah. And then I just leave, I step back.

I set everything up in pairs for the most part. I'm the opposite of Phil who we had on last couple of weeks ago. Yeah. Me and Phil give each other shit about that all the time but um yeah i kind of then i stand back and i leave it alone and then i only intervene if there's a problem but i do you know we do monitor things pretty well and actually when heather and i got together she was pretty much the opposite she was more like phil she kept everything separate and did a lot of control stuff. And over time, we've kind of fused the two systems together. Like I've adopted some of the things she does and she's adopted a lot of the things I do.

And that makes for a good partnership, right? Yeah, it actually I've made broke more ground in the last four or five years with her than I did the previous 30 years. Yeah, that's cool. We made a lot of like serious advancements here that I'm pretty happy with. So that's awesome. That's what works is that by building the system and letting them do their thing, they know better than I'm going to know, in my opinion, what they need. And then I let them choose it. But there are caveats to that. And that's kind of what this is all about is kind of things that you should watch out for.

Be careful. So that would lead me to my first point of animals that aren't used to cold. And you probably I mean, you're seeing this in your backyard, probably with the invasive iguanas. That would lead me to my first point of animals that aren't used to cold. And you probably, I mean, you're seeing this in your backyard probably with the invasive iguanas. They don't come from a very cold area. So when it gets cold, they start falling out of trees and, you know, they don't know how to behave. And there's some animals that, you know, more tropical that don't experience that kind of cold. And so they don't really know what to do. They don't know to seek, you know, uh, cover or, or thermal stable areas to, to weather out the cold, you know, the really cold times. And so they can, you know, die out in the elements if it,

cause they don't know what to do. So, you know, giving them or keeping them outside, I imagine that's probably a concern for you. If you have a cold snap and you have stuff outside that maybe doesn't know what to do when it gets cold um they they need to be brought inside or or taken care of in some way to so they can figure it out i've even heard of i can't remember who was telling me this but they they had an you know a species outdoor and they even had like a a hide area with like a bulb that would warm them up you know so it'd keep them at a certain temperature and they even had like a hide area with like a bulb that would warm them up you know so it'd keep them at a certain temperature and they didn't even go inside that you know they didn't know to seek that warm hideout when it started getting cold so so i think maybe if they're

raised in the environment and they kind of experience from a young age and see oh i go here and it's warm then maybe they're okay okay. But yeah, something to, you know, that'd be probably my first point of when reptiles, if they have those, you know, all sorts of options, they may not know what to do with certain conditions. Yeah, that's actually absolutely the case. I just went through this myself two weeks ago. Last week it was, it rained here for five days and it was in the 50s during the day and in the upper 30s at night which for florida is fairly unusual to be that cold and pouring down rain for multiple days it was actually one of the worst things that i've ever personally gone through

and it was i more or less knew how to manage it but we have so much stuff that we couldn't possibly bring all this stuff in. Yeah. And it's all set up in a way with, um, that they have sub floors that are warm because they're, you know, they're, they're buried under a couple inches of mulch and they're below the ground,

but you always get these dumb asses that don't want to go in them. And I went out there at, uh uh like nine o'clock at night and i shined the light up on one of the things and there's a big monitor just laying out in the freaking cold and that would have froze to death i had to go out there and get it and it was eight feet in the air on a on a basking platform and i had to grab it stick in a box bring it inside so yeah i mean that's why i said there's caveats and yeah and i do have to intervene on occasion with the stuff like that that said though probably a good 80 to 90 percent of the stuff here was in its either super tropical stuff we do give some heat but almost here, we don't use any

heat at all. Basically the sub floor is warm enough. If it's 35 degrees at night, it'll still be in the fifties underneath that floor. And in the morning, the sun comes up and hits it and the cages rocket up to 90 degrees. So they, uh, they don't experience, uh, uh, super cold temperatures for longer than a few hours at night. So most of them know to go underneath the floor. And like I said, about 80 to 90% of them choose it on their own and I don't have to do anything. So, I mean, if you look at it that way, then the preponderance is that, uh, they do tend to make the right decisions,

but obviously everything's an individual and they're not little clones so yeah yeah well and i mean if yeah if they're if they've never experienced it or don't have kind of that genetic programming to escape cold then you know that that's understandable you know the one that i had to pull in he knows all about it you should know better yeah yeah They come from pretty cool clients. Sure. Sure. This wasn't his first rodeo, but he decided, you know, I've found heat here before I'm going to sit here and wait until the heat comes

again or yeah. Yeah. That's a, well, um, you mentioned the, the keeping in pairs and I, and I really, I, I really like to keep my stuff in pairs together because they'll catch each other's cues, you know, reproductive cues. And, like, I think Chuck and I were talking about this last week with his, you know, home hairs. He doesn't really see locks between his home hairs. And they breed and everything's good. Oh, Tracy, that's home hairs, right? Yeah.

I don't know why I spaced on that. Okay. Sometimes I get those scrubs mixed up in my head, but okay. So, you know, when I find the same thing, when I keep a species together, they usually don't have a lot of, you know, obvious courtship or breeding behavior. And so they just get the job done when the female's ready. So if you're keeping them separate, though, introducing a male into a female's cage or something, he can just kind of go nuts with the pheromones and not being around a female for a long time. And they'll just breed even if it's not really a productive mating, you know. And so that'll stress out the female and wear him out and use up his energy. Whereas if you're keeping them together, that doesn't really happen.

They kind of leave each other alone or at least hang out or something, but he's not always trying to mate with the female. And it's also helpful, too, if you're keeping them together because you might, if you start seeing breeding behavior, you know it's on and you can kind of make notes and record from there but yeah that would be another thing where they're not making the best choice they're wasting their energy they're not really uh sensitive to cues maybe as much as they would be if they were kept together if they're housed individually it is interesting though that that that they do seem to have hard triggers like barometric changes seem to be hard triggers for breeding. And it's like, you know, you don't necessarily see it like this.

But, you know, I still see, like, I don't know when my animals breed, but I know they disappear when I suspect that they're breeding. And, oh, by the way, it's correlated to a barometric, you know, a drop in barometric pressure. So I'm kind of like, all right, that's probably what that is. So I don't, you know, I don't know't know but that's just i think that's interesting too that there's just certain certain environmental triggers that that will cause them to breed but certainly i agree that whole like uh put them in the cage and they go right at it thing definitely just disappears when

you when you go have you keep them together and and um oh um, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Yeah. Um, just, you know, the, the idea that, uh, they're, they, they know better than I do. I'm kind of with you where you said, you know, I let them, let them do their thing, you know, put them together and they do their, their thing. And I try not to get in the way, you know, I really identify with that as well because I don't, I can't smell their hormonal, you know, pheromonal cues or whatever. So, um, I'm sure they can though.onal, you know, pheromonal cues or whatever. So, um, I'm sure they can though. So, you know, that's, I leave it to them and that, you know, that has other challenges, of course, you know, you gotta have a bigger cage and at feeding time,

it might be tricky to separate them for, for feeding or, you know, get them to not be beat up on each other for, to steal food or whatnot. I don't know how many times I've had to separate, uh, two big pythons that have been on the same rat or, or, or on each other because there was movement and they smell rat in the room. So, yeah, but usually I haven't had, I think I've had one fatality where a female mistook a male for prey and ended up eating him or killing him or whatever. So, but it doesn't happen often. Usually it's, it's just fine. Even if they bite each other, you know, it's not really, it doesn't really last or have lasting damage. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually had one snake swallow another snake's head and I caught it and then I pulled it and got it out. The one that had its head halfway shoved down the what was uh broke just i wobbled for a couple seconds was covered in like slime yeah but it was fine after that that's fine that's that was one of the original uh rough scale pythons that john weigel collected it was being consumed by an olive python and they found found it while it was consuming and they rescued the the this male uh rough scale python and it went on to produce the majority of rough scales in you know captain in australia at the time yeah that's a cool story yeah right that's a that's a double lottery winner rough scale right there yeah he was happy they came

along yeah for sure but yeah i mean i i feel the same way that's kind of why i started doing the cohabiting thing a long time ago is that i just felt like there's no possible way that i could catch everything when it was at the right time i mean it's so it's just too easy to miss stuff. Yeah. And in some, I think, I think it does work in a lot of cases. Some cases it's that the person doing it is so sensitive to it. Like in Phil's case, I think, I think Phil Litz, um, he's kind of on a different level with those uromastics than almost everybody. And he's, that dude is like hyper dedicated yeah that's yeah i'm just not that

fucking dedicated i don't want to fucking play world of warcraft i want to watch movies and yeah yeah you know and i like my five months off in the winter time where i just hardly have any interaction with any other animals i like the hibernation thing, you know, but Phil is like hardcore all the time. Yeah. So hardcore. He wears me out. Yeah. He catches that stuff.

And I think I think if you're a Phil, you know, and you're really hyper focused, I think you can probably pull it off more often than not. But I think for most of us, we're busy with other shit. Yeah. Don't give a fuck and i think just i get like to write about here in the season and i'm like i have no fucking idea what's going on that right there lets me know that i have no business being the introducer of of pairings right like i'm just like take me out of this totally for sure absolutely yeah i'm the same way i just uh so i think for most of us i think it's just a better strategy. As long as you can, you know, make sure that, you know, you don't have, you do have to monitor them, you know, and make sure nobody's beating each other up. And we always have, we have enough extra enclosures that if there is a problem, we can separate and then reintroduce later on. And most of the time that works. I've actually while I'm talking to you, I can't recall a death related to that.

Not certainly not in the last decade or so. Yeah. So, yeah, I saw an interesting post this week. Apologies. I can't remember who it was, but they talked about one uh, I believe it was a Tristis monitor had gotten the female had a, you know, busted up arm. She had bled a little, you know, so they, they figured, you know, tried to see what was going on. And then the male was actually breeding the female and the female looked okay. Like he wasn't trying to hurt her or anything. And so they kind of just

kind of let it ride and to see what would happen. And, um, a couple of days later she was using her arm fine and, you know, the, the bites or whatever were healing. And I mean, they usually kind of figure things out. Yeah. Once in a while you'll get an antisocial animal that'll just, you know, won't, we'll try to rip apart anything that gets near it. You know, it's not going to be the best animal for you to keep. You might want to rehouse that one with somebody who, who just wants a pet. But, um, but for the

most part, I think they, they know how to kind of work things out or, or, uh, you see that with the blue tongues quite a bit. Like I, you know, I, I keep my blue tongues individually just cause I don't have the space in my room. But when I put them outside, I'll put them out together and kind of let them work out. But you'll know when the female is done with the male and when she's ready to have him gone because they sometimes will beat each other up. But again, that's probably a little antisocial behavior because I'm keeping them singly. Do you keep pairs or do you keep groups? Yeah, we have around 50 blue tongues here comprised of five or six species all in pairs

year round. I never separate. But in most cases, they were raised together as pairs and they've never been separate. So they have a big tube and we use probably much larger caging than what most people use yeah because i can get away with that because i have the luxury of doing them outside if i had to do them inside it'd be a i would probably still do them in pairs but but i would definitely not have as many and it would be much more difficult to pull off yeah um because for them also i mean i i feel like i would totally miss them especially since i don't know about yours

but ours i rarely see ours i mean we have a ton of them and it's really hard to get a glimpse of them because um they dart into their tubes as soon as you walk by so they're you know you you just never know yeah yeah i go out there that's what we do basically is in the spring we start walking them on a daily basis the enclosures looking for babies and oh hey there's 19 babies in here yeah that's always fun to find a case like especially when you're not really like you don't know if they're gonna have them or not and all of a sudden you see yeah a bunch of Dude, I can tell you a story about those blue tongues that I haven't really talked about. But when I set those up, we bought these Wayne Hill sold me these huge black tubs

right there, like six feet long. Um, and I ripped the bottoms out of them so that when it rains, you know, the water drains out. And I usually replace that water water i mean the bottoms with a quarter inch wire right yeah but i was fucking lazy and i had all this this inch one inch lattice laying around this pvc lattice stuff so i was like you know what that's super easy i can just cut that screw it under the bottom and because they can't they're not going to get out of it's too big and you know it'll be buried under a foot or so of substrate so i cut them all i slapped that shit on the bottom and then i set up all these these huge rows of these tubs for them things then i backfilled them with dirt buried a pipe and backfilled that on top with uh leaf litter okay yeah so i so a year goes by you know i'm

feeding them they're eating everybody's doing good and all of a sudden they stop eating what i'm putting in there right and i'm like maybe they're they're going off feed for some reason it's weird but whatever so a month goes by every time we see them they're fat as hell they're like what the hell's going on i'm like they're not and heather's like what what are you feeding these i'm like i'm not they're not. And Heather's like, what do you feed me? So I'm like, I'm not. They're not eating anything. It turns out that when I set this up, apparently I created the perfect environment for a giant burrowing roach that naturally lives in Florida. Really? And those enclosures were so full of them that these skinks have been gorging themselves. Our skinks and our ackeys.

Our ackeys are doing this, too. That's all they eat really i put in food they don't give a shit what i put in there because they're getting all these wild roaches and man the stuff looks great wow that's very cool yeah it's weird yeah it's just a weird uh i don't think i could ever replicate this again but right now we have blue tongues that 50 blue tongues that don't have to be fed they're getting all wild witches and it doesn't seem to stop huh so they so there's kind of an equilibrium there they're not eating them yeah into extinction or whatever that's really cool that's that's what you want right that's like yeah it reminds me of a bioactive thing

yeah like burt langoworf would have killed for a cage like that right i know yeah i know i couldn't believe it and i wouldn't have i didn't realize it was happening with the ackeys until i pulled the adult ackeys the other day and they were all huge and they haven't eaten in four months wow so i was like and then i started taking their their hiding areas apart and all the roaches were in there so they're eating those too really so are they a native like yeah it's a big native it's a where i live is on the thing called the lake whales ridge it's the driest part of florida basically it's one of the only parts that was above you know the water the ocean at one point it's pretty much all that's why there's lots of fossil mammoths and stuff here but cool um so we have this unusual basically uh habitat here and there's a native

large burrowing roach that i didn't even know existed um so you need to discover it right yeah but uh it's kind of weird man i thought it was doing good i i threw a bunch of uh um mealworm beetles in my roach colony and then they started like breeding. And so I've got a mixed colony of insect feeders. And so I don't really have to buy feeders for my insectivorous lizards. And it's been really nice. Yeah, I love doing stuff like that. There's all kind of little things you can do to tweak it so that you get, you know, you're a little more efficient, and that's definitely one of the ways.

It's a whole lot better than some of the alternatives. Well, that's interesting. So I guess I'm curious. So this can fall in really well with the conversation. So they had the choice. You were giving them other food items. Yeah. What were you offering, like the Ackies or the blue tongue?

Well, I mean, in the Ackies case, they get offered a variety of insects. And I noticed the crickets were building up. They were just ignoring them. They weren't really gorging on super worms like they had done in the past. But I really didn't realize there were that many in the yaki's until until a couple days ago like i had taken them off food back in november because we keep them outside they're in a large group and they're in a big enclosure and the enclosure has an entire case of cork bark all stacked up so it's got all these crevices and that's cool so when they're in there you don't really you know i never see them unless they're out basking and they, they act wild. They dive in, but you know, it's winter. So they're hibernating. Um, and then, uh, she, Heather wanted to check on them. So we went out there on a warm day and I started taking everything apart and I'm like, look at these fat bastards. They haven't lost any weight at all. And when I got to the last, uh, you know,

layers, I started peeling back and there were the same roaches that are in the blue tongues were in there. So I was like, wow, this is, this is really, uh, this is really working. So I wish I could get them. I mean, I'm sure they're in with the bearded dragons and probably the, you know, the Spencer's are, are not really losing weight either, like I thought. So they may be getting into. Yeah. But they're enclosures. Do you have like decomposition going on there, Ron?

Like like so this reminds me. So I do. I used to do a lot of composting. And so you use like an open bottom container and you put all your your greens and your browns in there and all of like i call them the fbi this fungus bacteria invertebrates they all come right up into there and you can find grubs and all kinds of stuff in there and i'm just wondering if there's some kind of a a bioactive churn going on there at the surface that are kind of bringing them up in so what it is is we have we live on a five acre property that is covered in oak trees and and we

have probably a foot deep oak leaf yeah that's awesome and i've been using those oak leaves for everything yeah i put them in that's what i use to kind of you know hibernate proof them and stuff like that because i have and actually i never even thought to use that man i was watching some youtube video that had uh the guys from josh's frogs where they were like oh yeah we buy all these things and i was like holy crap i've got some millions of dollars yeah yeah so uh so anyway so i started screwing around with them and and it turns out that uh it is probably the composition caused by the leaves that brings the roaches in and then yeah and then they just whatever maybe having the water bowls in there gives them a water source and then they start breeding in the enclosures and

it's just this crazy uh accidental thing that that happened yeah and so it's saving us a lot a lot of money that's what you want yeah that's a win that's a win food pyramid right there man yeah i mean the hackies and blue cones aren't really costing us anything to produce right now so as long as this holds up pretty cool yeah obviously adding a lot more hackies and sure yeah do you do you uh use the subfloor with your ackeys or is it just the cork bark okay um well does that prove a challenge when you're collecting eggs or how do you know no that i have no so for the ackeys we have basically no the substrate that's there is not deep enough for them to lay eggs. And then they have a, they have a, you know,

a little fake termite mounds with the plastic boxes and they use that a hundred percent of the time. Oh, nice. Okay. So, um, that's cool. Yeah. With anything that, uh, that we have the sub floor and we, I keep the substrate very, very sparing until winter time. And then I'll actually stack un on opened bags of cypress mulch on top of them so okay that that's like an extra insulator yeah yeah there's a guy in salt lake up here that that keeps russian tortoises outdoors year round and he'll just put some like straw bales or something and then like a tarp to keep the snow out and he'll find babies crawling

around in the spring, you know, a little hatch. That's a good, that's a good idea. I mean, that's like, I don't know. That's kind of my dream someday is to have like a self. I don't know. I remember, I think it was Frank Reedy's that had like some eggs that he missed in one of his cages and they hatched out in the cage and he had these little moms. Yeah. That's, that's, these little monsters yeah that's that's that's the that's the coolest i guess but i mean back when i was breeding australian water dragons

one day i went out i didn't know that anything was going on with those and one day i went out there and there's baby australian water dragons staring at me you know the hell is that i thought it was a brown anole at first and i looked and i was like oh shit that's a water dragon i started looking around there was a lot more water dragons than that encloser so that's cool i was like man i'm glad that the wire was quarter inch on that one yeah right right so after that anything that's basically we build our enclosures based around the size of the hatchlings that's the wire setups we use just in case you miss stuff yeah because it happens so um maybe i'll switch up the topics a little bit so you're a you're a

boa guy or i've worked with a lot of boas and so um i'm more of a python fellow myself but so i've i've heard that boas sometimes will seek heat at the wrong times, like when they're gravid, and that can kind of ruin litters of boas. Is there any truth to that? If a female seeks heat at the wrong time, they could potentially ruin their litters? I mean, that's entirely possible. Back when I was working with boas, I was living in Miami at the time. I lived in a little, little un-aired. It had no air. The house I lived in had no AC or anything. It was just kind of, it was basically like a beach house that they had built in the, in the fifties. It was concrete and they were really smartly designed. So even if you lived in Miami, they were still reasonably cool even in the summer. Yeah. So what I did with the Boas was I had them in a room that I just left the windows open all the time.

And it was more or less the Terry Phillip method. You control the room temperature and you don't really give any kind of supplemental heat. I think that's where that idea came from. Actually, now that I think about it, as I was talking to Terry and, and we were talking about kind of this topic of, you know, giving them choices and stuff. And he said they were, I think it was a boa species, some Island boa species that they were struggling to produce or get to breed in captivity or somebody, you know, like a research station had set up a colony of them. And so they went to the island to kind of see what was going on. And I guess like for a certain type of the year, time of the year, they would live on this, you know, part of the island

where it never got any sun and they were always kind of colder and, and that kind of thing. And then during, you know, after they'd ovulated and we're offspring, they'd move to this warmer area. I'm probably butchering the story, but that's what stuck in my mind. The people keeping them in captivity just gave them a basking light year-round kind of thing. They didn't have them be colder at certain times of the year during the breeding season and stuff. They just weren't weren't. And the females would go bask. So they're thinking, oh, they want the heat.

You know, they need that heat. And so they leave the basking light in there. But in reality, it was what was preventing them from having success. So I think, you know, reptiles especially may may may make poor Again, if they don't, you know, if it's not in their wheelhouse or they're not used to this, might make poor choices of seeking heat when they probably shouldn't. Yeah. I mean, for sure. I'm sure there are probably as many cases. Well, I shouldn't say that. There are probably outliers and that's probably an outlier, an aberration of the rule. And, and it's also, there's a case where, you know, not all species are created equal.

Some are not as smart as others. So, I mean, if you're working with more intelligent species, which, you know, lizards in my, and my and i and i i may be totally wrong but from my experience i've always felt like lizards were an order of magnitude more intelligent than snakes but it could just be let me let me let me before i get all the hate mail from the snake guys it could very well just be that lizards just display it in a way and snakes just don't display it. But they actually, you know, in a way that humans can easily or or we think we're reading it. Yeah. Yeah. But but I mean, you know, I love snakes.

Snakes are just they're very, you know, they're very one. They're they're all about, you know, eating, procreating and, and that's it. And I've just never seen them do anything like you see the stuff that some of the monitors do that verges on what would, and I'm probably anthropomorphizing here, but, you know, it looks like they're there. It looks like puppies playing or, or, or cats engaging in that kind of behavior. So, I mean, like I said, I don't know. I'm agnostic to the whole thing. But that's just an observation that I made. Yeah, lizards do seem much more complex in their behaviors and the range of behaviors and things.

So I would agree with you there. Yeah. Yeah. Although I appreciate snakes for the cold heartless solitary predators that they they get the job done don't they yeah for sure yeah i think that um another another funny uh post i saw this week was uh brandon shifflett uh rare earth reptiles he had one of his agurnia one of the spiny-tailtailed skinks that had gotten stuck in a hole. It was trying to emerge out of a cork bark tube, and it went through a hole, and it got stuck.

He said he saw it when the lights were going out. And then he saw it there in the morning again, so he's like, oh, he's probably stuck. And he had to break apart the cork bark to get him out of there. So I yeah say that they're not all lizards are genius yeah you might make some stupid moves uh trying to get into crevices or spaces that are too small for them and i i had a pet bow when i was growing up that always do that he'd always try to go through the the crack on the door so the door would be open and he'd try to get he'd wedge his head in there and start trying to crawl through and he couldn't move forward or backwards.

And I'd have to, you know, work him out of there. But yeah, it was always a frustrating snake to, anytime you let it cruise around or something, it would get itself into a jam. Yeah, for sure. I've probably seen plenty of that. There's that famous picture of the monitor lizard with its head in a beer can. Somebody fell dead in the outback, tried to go into a beer can. Not the best choice there. I think sometimes they'll have some stupid moves there in the wild. In all fairness,

I don't know to what level monitors experience beer cans on a regular basis. You know, it's kind of, you know. I think Chuck is trying to justify it because he used to get his head stuck in the banister, you know. Hasn't everybody? Hasn't everybody?

Is that not a common problem when i was a little kid i stuck a fork in a socket so oh nice yeah nice i tried to separate an extension cord from a regular cord and i used my teeth to pry it and that's a good one too a big hole in my mouth so I've got this nice little scarred up mouth. I got one for you. Is that where that little scar came from? That's where it came from. When I was a kid, we had a little swimming pool in the backyard, one of those aluminum ones. My mom used to have chlorine that she put in a thing that floated around there. Well, I liked the smell of that chlorine.

One day, I opened the fucking jar of of chlorine and i stuck my nose in it and inhaled it and that was the last thing i remember yeah i woke up on my back on the floor in the kitchen i was like seven years old or something looking up going what the hell yeah yeah i was a dumbass how did i get here yeah yeah i think we all all had the luck to survive that one yeah i think i think all men have had experiences that that you know like we all have those experiences that we can say we live through yeah they were all they were all dumb ass experiences yeah like i was driving through the desert with my cousin and i was getting car sick and so i'm like hey i'm gonna sit on the hood of your car you know while you drive the hood of the truck. And, and so I was just kind of holding on leaning against

the windshield. And so he, you know, he's going really slow at first and he got a little faster and a little faster. And then all of a sudden he kind of took a blind corner and there was this big boulder in the road. So he hit the brakes and I'm supermanning along the dirt road and the car is getting faster than I'm, you know, skidding. And it ran over my foot, flipped my shoe across the desert. I broke one of my toes and then, and then we went, uh, and, and we're, you know, backpacking into this place. So we're hiking over slick rock for a mile or two and he couldn't find the entrance to the Canyon. I'm like, I think I should probably just go home my foot's

not doing great he's like yeah your parents might kill me if you know if i don't take you home now so kind of cut the trip a little short but it was kind of at the tail end anyway but yeah and that folks is exactly what i was talking about exactly yeah i like that's a good one though justin that's a good one yeah i've got a few like that yeah so i guess uh humans are not immune to making stupid choices yeah for sure for sure um yeah go ahead no i was gonna agree with you i I mean, everything is – I don't know, man. I just – the older I get, the less I find that there's any real hard truth to a lot of things. It's really if A is true, then go to B, and then if B is true, then go to step C kind of thing. There's so many variables, and everything is a little different and depends

on where you're at, what you're doing. I'm curious, which, so, um, you know, living in Florida and being able to keep things outdoors, uh, you know, you, you've probably worked with a ton of different species. I know you've worked with a bunch of different species and all from all different walks of reptilian life um do you find that you you have more success with like say more tropical types that like kind of the rain or you know the humidity of florida or do you struggle with like desert types that maybe more dry environment or you know that kind of thing is is there anything to that yeah i mean, we definitely do. So it's actually both of those things are actually a struggle. Rainforest species that are equatorial are tough here because of the where our weather is not very stable.

I mean, we do get cold relatively in the wintertime. And then and we get pretty damn relatively in the wintertime. Yeah. Um, and then, um, and we get pretty damn hot in the summer. So we have, uh, and both, neither one of those things tend to lend themselves well to rainforest species. Sure.

No, but yeah, that are, that are used to being in like the mid eighties all the time. So that's a little difficult. Um, and desert stuff obviously has issues with, uh,

the water. There's a lot of misunderstanding. People think that relative air humidity is the problem, but it's actually not the problem at all. Relative humidity is largely, and actually, if anything, I think it works to our advantage because desert species, they're not living in the driest sections of the desert they're seeking out humid areas in the desert they're not out just in bare sand you know being barbecued in the Sun so that's a little easier but yeah the problems that we run into primarily around um winter time where we get basically like we just went through where we'll get a front that'll come down that'll drop the temperatures you know anywhere from 70 ish

during the day to the 40s at night but it'll be overcast and or raining for multiple days in a row. Yeah. That's a problem. Yeah. Because without the sun to heat the enclosures up, they can't ever get to an operating temperature and they're kind of kept at the state of limbo because we keep everything covered in plastic, greenhouse plastic. So as long as we get sun, it can get as cold as it wants and everything will be just fine yeah yeah but when you don't have sun so that's a that's a big problem and we're

actually kind of transitioning what we do we're moving away from desert species altogether um she's got more of an interest in chameleons now and so we're kind of lowering the bearded dragons and a lot of the desert stuff um and we're we're kind of more the bearded dragons and a lot of the desert stuff. And we're kind of more heading towards a more anole, chameleon-centered thing with the side projects that we do, you know, the monitors and the skinks. The skinks actually work really well here. Those things just, they love it here. This is like perfect for them. They take the cold. They take the heat.

Obviously, they eat wild brooches yeah um but uh but yeah i mean i've been i i know that i've been working against myself for a long i mean 30 years ago burt langerworth slapped me in the head and said you know what are you doing boy you're you're working on all this desert stuff. You live in Florida. You should go get a bunch of chameleons and frogs and work on stuff that likes the rain. You know, you're killing yourself for nothing. And I was like, yeah, but, you know, I really like this stuff. I like the other stuff. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. So it took me 54 years or whatever, 54 now to finally take his advice. But we were looking around here and I'm like, why are we banging our heads against the wall trying to, you know, when we don't need to and we can do just as well. It'll be more fun. Chameleons are actually pretty cool. And there's a lot of, it's not, there's not really a lot of chameleon breeders. Right. A lot of them kind of come and go. It's, I think it's, yeah. Yeah.

It's brutal. Yeah. It can be a challenge for sure. Yeah. But I mean, that's kind of where, you know, a lot of work is needed because they're, they're, they're tricky. I mean, they're, they're kind of like the insects of the reptile world in a lot of ways where they just pump out eggs, breed really early, you know, and then they, yeah, and then they die. And if you, if you don't have a plan for that, you know, you're not keeping back a certain amount. They can, they can kind of burn themselves out like a wildfire or something. I guess the monitors, some of the smaller monitors may, may be a little

like that too. You have a few really good years and then they kind of slow down and, you know, I don't know, but yeah, I was, I was, uh, remembering a similar conversation I had with Bert, you know, about what species I could keep outdoors in, in Utah. Cause I was thinking, you know, terrible climate for reptiles, but he's like, Oh no, you could keep this one in this, you know, they do just fine. As long as you make sure this or that or the other, you know. So, yeah, there's ways to do this. And I'm actually, you know, planning on this year to try to do some outdoor pits and try to get some things, at least for the majority of the year, outdoors. And, yeah, that'd be a nice way to do it.

So, I think. Yeah, I mean, I would think Australian stuff would be relatively good there. Not necessarily, you you know in the winter yeah but the southern stuff especially aernia there's a whole bunch of them that come from places that are get cold and yeah a lot of the monitors do you know there's there's a lot of stuff you could probably get away with pretty well yeah and if you if i was i mean i've actually thought about this a lot because i consider well what, what would happen if I had to leave Florida? How would I port this system that's got, you know, 30, 40 years worth of iteration into something else?

So I actually have a lot of thoughts about it and plans and stuff if it ever happens. Yeah. But one of the things, like the area that you live in is one of those places that i looked at and i'm like that's actually a pretty good spot because you know i know you get snow and you get some you can get some brutal winters where you're at but you know you could just pull them for that or or give them underground heated uh boxes that are heated just pray the power doesn't go out yeah or make them insulated enough that if it does they have a couple days yeah yeah thermal gradients or something yeah exactly so but i but i would

stay the hell away from anything that's tropical tropical equatorial stuff is just tough in general usually very specific in its requirements and because it's it comes from a place that just you know doesn't vary yeah that was the biggest uh surprise you know i was always thinking you know rainforest it's hot and humid and you know it's just miserable but you go and it's like oh it's 70 degrees 75 degrees in here it's it's not that hot and it's you know it's dark and kind of kind of easy going so yeah that's and then you look at like temperature graphs from like new guinea and they pretty much just have a flat line you know their whole year is just the same temperature and you know day in and day out for the most part it's just the the moisture that varies you know

the amount of rainfall doesn't get cold in the winter though maybe in some place like high up on the mountains and stuff but yeah down like in the in the valleys it's pretty much just yeah same temperature year round explains why those all those veranids from indonesia are pretty hard to breed for yeah except for the water monitor right that's because the water monitor has that stupid range where it's clearly adaptable to all sorts of, you know, throw whatever at it. And it's just going to be like, all right, I'm still going to breed and produce anyway because, you know. Yeah. It's like a generalist veranid right there, you know. Yeah.

And generalist species tend to be the best in captivity. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So ones that can live close to human habitation they can pretty much survive anywhere you know that was uh i think it was dave kaufman put out a video on puerto rico he was herping in puerto rico and they had a they caught a wild retic in puerto rico there's like a population retics that had gotten gotten out and i think it was like a drug dealer had a big you know retake the female or something

and he got busted and ran away and let his animals go so yeah good times but yeah puerto rico is a problem that could easily be a real problem yeah yeah any island is just yeah uh has those endemic you know endemic birds that a lot of them have, you know, become flightless because they don't need to escape predators because they're out in the middle of the ocean on an island, but yeah, the introduction of predators, but then again, most islands have been spoiled long time ago by. Yeah. I mean, well, we, we, we, you know, we globally trade now. So I mean, it's just like, I mean, the the the idea of, you know, not letting wildlife move between borders. But yet all this trade happens. Right. Like, how do you think how do you think muscles of foreign muscles got into the Great Lakes?

Great Lakes. Yeah. Come on, man. Like, yeah. Use your you know, it's exactly. And then and then they're like, well, God, we couldn't we couldn't possibly export any reptiles or anything out of this country. What would happen if it got loose? Yeah. Right. Never mind. Yeah. And we are the greatest invasive species we are currently aware of.

That's true. And that has got to be the butt of the greatest joke since the dawn of time, right? We're worried about these invasive species. time i hear somebody i mean honestly there are a lot of animals in south florida that aren't supposed to be there but yeah i helped uh one of the biologists in the 90s i'm not going to name him because i don't know if he wants to be involved in that, but the FWC biologist asked for my assistance on locating a bunch of species. He knew I was commercially collecting them for years. And so I took him out, spent some time and he was a friend of mine. And after he was done with the study, they concluded that the vast majority of them, and it was like 40 or 50 of them at the time, were not invasive.

And as a matter of fact, what they were doing was they were filling niches that were where the native species were wiped out by human development. Yeah. Because they were all living in the city. They weren't out in the Everglades. And I couldn't, I mean, you could go out in the Everglades outside of Miami and not find a damn thing other than brown anoles. That was the only non-native species that was really prevalent. Now the Burmese are there now. But they can't get out of there either.

I'm sure they took a hell of a beating two weeks ago. Oh, yeah. The cold snap. I wonder, too, if they're adapting to that and successive generations will be less and less susceptible to those cold temperatures, if they'll adapt. That's possible. Yeah. Yeah, that is possible. I think they're there to stay.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's proven itself. You know, they're still around. uh, uh, research, uh, scientist that was, I think he was doing his PhD on the Burmese issue in, in South Florida and, and was, uh, had kind of shown some data that made it look like there was, I mean, they were all kind of related early on and they, it looked like they were rating out, radiating out from a central point and kind of led to the hypothesis that like one gravid female that was probably mean or something you know and the owner's like i can't handle this so we went and released it

in the 70s in the everglades and that one event you know may have resulted in that radiation and emergence of all these different uh invasive burmese spike yeah Yeah, I mean, it's entirely possible. That is a problem. No one should have ever released large constrictors. That was going to kick our ass anyway. And who was preaching this stuff in the 70s? You know, we barely knew how to keep a reptile alive in the 70s. So, yeah, it's hard to fault somebody back then.

But then there's, you know, there's also, there's natural disasters. We get hit by shit all the time. There's accidents. There's, you know, there's a number of things. Accidents happen. That's just it. Yeah. Yeah. I had a buddy that was breeding chameleons in the southwestern, you knowern part of the state in St. George.

And he got a shipment of roaches or something. And he got home and the corner of the box was all broken open. And there were all these roaches crawling around. And you can still find that species just out cruising in St. George. And they're completely introduced. But it was probably just an accident. The box got dropped wrong. And now you got roaches. So, you know, it's kind of, we gotta be careful. And I mean, it is interesting. Like, so, you know, like you said, like, like the introduction of,

of large invasive pythons happened that that's out of the box. Like that happened long ago. Right. So now we're reacting to, you know know legislatively to something that's already happened and so so what so so we banned scrub pythons so so do you think if scrub pythons got loose in the everglades so now you have two large constrictors competing for the same food source like somebody's gonna win that and whether it's the scrub python or or the retake or the berm or whatever you still have a neat you know a large constrictor filling a niche a nipper i'm sorry you know in the everglades so it's like it's you know to me it's kind of like i i understand biologists concern i get that but we're so far out of the box that that this whole like thing just reeks of of, you know, it's so it's so politically anti pet driven that, you know, and and the fact that you that that you see a lot know, you know, maybe I mean, maybe this is an unfair thing, but you see a lot of fish and wildlife buying into this.

And it's like, well, yeah, it gives us legislative, you know, regulatory power in order to make decisions that we want to. So it's like, you know, and yeah, I'm sure I'm sure funding is a thing. I'm sure, you know, there's a lot of of factors that have absolutely nothing to do with really actually regulating wildlife. Um, if, if just the hypocrisy just drives me nuts, if, if you really want to make an impact on an invasive or a threat, you know, some kind of species that's not good anywhere, it's cats. I mean, until you're willing to say hey we're gonna ban cats you gotta ban cats before you ban just about anything else because that's because it's not about that yeah exactly it's about facing a problem it's it's it's a it's it's

about getting funding funding agencies yeah absolutely yeah it's never let a crisis go to waste. And, and, and it's about funding. Well, and, and yeah, and the face of it can't be a furry mammal. Correct. That's not going. Yeah. You get too much shit from the grandmas and everybody else out there that would crawl up your ass and, and, and you get a, you get a black eye in the public. But if you convince them that these these these irresponsible reptile owners are dumping shit everywhere and it's causing a catastrophe yeah i can promise you that i mean you can just look at what's done in florida they banned green iguanas that have been here the almost the entire it's far back you can find photos from the 1900s before there was a fucking

pet trade here of green iguanas when they were building the railroad down the flagler railroad so they were already here now as now when i grew up in miami when i was a little kid they were all over the place yeah now that that was the 70s and the the pet trade was in full force by then, but they were always there. They go back forever, right? Yeah. So they banned them, and the commercial collectors that were actually taking them out of the environment can now no longer collect them. So you have to ask yourself, if the goal here was to get rid of an invasive species, why would you stop all of the people that are removing them? And the reason is, well, you'll be hearing about it more as time goes on. That is what's going on

here is a lot more than what's been told. It's not conspiracy theory. You can, if you look at what some of the, basically there's environmental damage being caused here from something else. And it was it appears to have been driven by our government that oversees it has been spraying enormous amounts of pesticide into the waterways, causing these huge algae bloomsoms these red tides on both coasts they've been killing manatees and everything else well guess who does that that is completely done by florida florida fish and game that's what they do that's their primary job is they have all they spray these waterways well when all the sea life started to die a few years ago, it caught the attention of the environmental groups. And they've been putting pressure on them to cut this out. And if you look at the timeline, right at the time that they're getting hammered by plants, and you know that the time is coming where you're no longer going to be able to spray enormous amounts of toxic chemicals into the waterways, well, you've got to find some job security somewhere.

Yeah. And you just transition from invasive plants to invasive reptiles. Yeah. Because they're all over the place. Yeah. I'm sure that's why they went after the green iguana i know that yeah it sounds like a conspiracy theory but if you dig into this little topic enough you'll find all sorts of interesting things with enormous amounts of money yeah um being funneled into into this stuff and it sounds exactly like an environmental case study to me it

sounds like you know a bad you know the the the story that you would figure out like from you know uh how how an agency behaved uh when when we were dealing with environmental pollution before the start of the epa it's it's very like redirect redirect you know blame um it's so frustrating get it get it legal entanglements. You can't do it because you can't fight us because we have more money than you that we got from raping and pillaging the land or whatever. They made a boogeyman out of an industry. Nobody's really looking at them while they transition over.

Now they're going to get, I don't even know what the budget is for something like that. But they'll get probably the same amount of money they were getting from the feds to take care of the plant problem. They'll just get it now to be they'll just transition to being iguana removers. Yeah. I can't think of any other reason that you would stop that, that you would ban that animal. I mean, it just, there's no sense in it except for, yeah, maybe make,

and it primarily feeds on non-native plants. All of Florida is all non-native plants. Yeah. Yeah. So it doesn't, I mean, yeah, that,

that, that doesn't sound as much like a conspiracy theory as a truth theory. No, I know. But in this day and age, you know, anything you say gets – but I think as time moves forward, more of this will start to come out, especially once they really start hammering the environmental groups get their lawsuits up. There was another great example that there was an invasive water plant that was in choking waterways and stuff. I guess it was people originally from Southeast Asia, they enjoyed eating that plant and so they would go in and collect it and use it for a meal. And, uh, the,

apparently the, a lot of these waterways were in a national park. And so they said, nope, you gotta stop. You can't, you can't collect that because you're taking something out of a national park. And they're like, well, it's an invasive weed. You know, what's the, what's the harm in that? And I mean, they were basically removing it for free for the government and they didn't have to pay a cent, but they stopped it. And now, you know, the waterways are choked and there's nobody removing that plant unless they going in and spraying it or something like this. Yeah, I hate to tell you know, has exacerbated that. So, you know, in the management industry, mismanagement has been commonplace, unfortunately.

Well, we've we've gotten a little far filled of our of our topic, but I think that was really a useful discussion for sure. I mean, I think it all plays into it. But I think overall, reptiles understand their conditions that they don't quite understand or haven't been evolutionarily programmed to understand where you start getting problems. So, you know, I, like you, like you said, you know, keeping things that come from an environment that, you know, you're from can be really helpful, especially if you're keeping them outdoors. You know, that's definitely something to think about. But I think overall, you know, reptiles definitely do make good decisions for the most part. There's certainly some small

instances or smaller number of instances where they don't make the best decisions. But so, yeah, I think reptiles in their environment are really smart. And you kind of mentioned that earlier, you know, intelligence and how we measure intelligence. And, you know, it seems like lizards might be more intelligent than snakes, but, you know, for their environment and what they need to do and what they need to get done. You know, everything has a certain level of intelligence or it wouldn't be around anymore. It wouldn't survive. So I think that's kind of how I'd summarize the topic of discussion today. Yeah, for sure. I agree. I think that's it.

And I think this was, you know, for me, it was really a rewarding conversation. And I appreciate your insights because, you know, you've been doing this a long time and you've got a lot of great insights. So I really appreciate you coming on and discussing this with us. Appreciate it. Yeah, no, me too. I appreciate you guys asking me. So yeah. Anytime. Yeah. Well, we'll definitely have to have you back. Yeah.

There's plenty of things you can, you can have really good insights into. So thanks for doing this. Well, we're thankful for you guys listening. And thanks to NPR Network. Check out their stuff, marliapythonsradio.com. And follow them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all that fun stuff. A lot of cool shows coming out. I've enjoyed some of the more recent ones. uh, follow them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all that fun stuff. Um, a lot of,

a lot of cool shows coming out. Uh, I've enjoyed some of the more recent ones. They've been a lot of fun. Chuck's episode was a great example that he, he got fired up and got some good discussion out of him on there. It's always, I have my moments. Yeah.

Yeah. Any other good, good ones you've been hearing lately? Um, good podcast. Are you asking me? I, I, I's i started listening to the second episode of the the venom exchange podcast phil's podcast yeah they're talking to the cloud king uh yeah i know i saw that and i was like oh man i'm listening to that but i i at work i i've got people pulling me 10 different directions. So I try to sit down and listen to stuff, but it's like I always get pulled away.

So that's on my, that is like the next podcast I'm listening to. Yeah, gosh, I, you know, I don't know. There's so many cool reptiles and, you know, clobberi are definitely one of those. For sure. The rock rattlesnakes are very cool animals. And I'm just like, after seeing the ridge-nosed rattlesnakes in Arizona, really, I'm interested in those. They're so cool.

Just really cool animals. And I think the Cloud King keeps those as well. So, very cool stuff. So, yeah, check that out. Venom Exchange Radio, Nipper and Phil do a great job on that one. Looks like they've got some cool guests lined up. So, well, lots of good content out there. But again, thanks for listening to Reptile Fight Club.

And we'll catch you again next week for another episode. Remind your legislators to keep their head out of their ass. Later. Thank you. Outro Music