Just For Fun: What Were Your Newbie Mistakes?

[aff19802]

I went to petsmart and picked up 300 worth of stuff and next month i was looking for a rack and more snakes... I bsically did no research and wasted allot of money for nothin...

[luna13]

basically what everyone has said i have done as a noob, well im still a noob but a more educated one

[Kysenia]

Having my wife present the first time i handled nibbles our spider ball, took her out of the bag, held her, put her on the floor lol, and got tagged lol, looked up for my wife and heard her jumping on the bed 4 floors up lol...never seen her move so fast

[muddoc]

incubating eggs...

Didn't think that it was possible for the incubator to get too hot.

Lost a whole clutch of pastels back when pastels were $$$$. (yes, that is four digits... Do you remember when??)

2004

[Freakie_frog]

Newbee mistakes..

1: I bought into the whole after a year they only need fed once every 14 days
2: started feeding bigger than normal prey.. (caused fasts)

[dr del]

Oh God,

I think I made all of them and even invented a few.

NO thermometers
No humidity readings either
NO control on the UTH (thankfully it was an ultratherm by sheer luck )
GRAVEL for the substrate (horrible horible choice - scuffed BP balanced on rocks above a layer of drying urine ) Even I knew it had to go after 2 weeks.
Not enough hides - and of the wrong sort.
Too small food items.
Bought a hatchling with ticks that had never eaten.
As you can tell I had done ZERO research and just relied on the guy in the pet shop. He actually wasn't that bad but I was/ am a stubborn cuss and didn't listen correctly.

Once I got a book and started listening I improved Cleos tank but then made even more mistakes when I got more.

I housed 3 females in a 5 by 2 by 2 foot wooden viv with sliding glass doors and ceramic heaters in the ceiling - with a thermostat at least this time.

I knew to keep the male seperate but then put them together while I cleaned and rebuilt his cage - so had an unplanned breeding (which later resulted in a clutch of eggs from a way undesized female who then retained 3 of them ).

It was at this point I joined this site and started reading - though I still argued about it for a bit like everyone else.

Quite apart from what it has done for me this site has totally transformed my snakes lives for the better.

Now if I can just remember to keep learning.


dr del

[Sammy J.]

Baby corn snake in a 40G critter cage.

[unrezt]

Bought bp from petco
Bought the supplies at the same time
Didn't get everything I needed
Fed him too small of mice
Still don't have a scale
Got bit, so must have done something wrong

Thats probably not everything xD

Thought of one more, and this is probably one of the worst things anyone can do, and is a reinforcement that you should always, always buy everything you need before buying the animal.

Used a human heating pad for two weeks before getting a real one(reason being I had to order a thermostat online and it took forever to arrive)

[knott00]

Unrest, I've got a site for you to go to, this is the cheaperst you'll get a good scale.
This is the same scale as they have ar RBI, but its much cheaper here. You won't find a better price.
http://www.saveonscales.com/product_mw_7001dx.html

[Mina]

This makes me feel left out, and rather sheepish. We went to a local pet store that is a reptile only store, saw Dax, fell in love, put a down payment on him, and came home and found this site and spent the next two weeks on here and the internet in general reading everything we could find that even mentioned BP's. We went back twice before we brought him home so we could feed him ourselves and learn how it was done. We haven't made any changes in how we keep him except he now has a bigger home, bigger water dish and bigger hides than he started with.
We aren't sorry now but had we been more informed we wouldn't have gotten him from them, he was a captive hatch. I'm sure we weren't doing the best job of feeding him the right food at the right time when we started either.