Share your Advanced Practices!

[LLLReptile]

So I filled this out with my own practices at home. All the staff among the stores have their own techniques and preferences, too, so there's almost 30 different perspectives on husbandry for any one animal!

Some topics for discussion:

Quarantine
Personal collection - depends. If I've been watching the animal at work for a month or more, then no, I'll give it a couple weeks to settle in and start feeding and after that it just gets assimilated. If it's brand new, then 30 days being cared for separately to monitor it. Since I live in a one bedroom apartment, the best I can do is keep the new animals in my bedroom while the rest stay in the living room.

Hot Spot and Ambient Temperatures
My own collection I keep hot. Basking spot/warm spot 95, with gravid females sometimes getting hot spots up to 100. Ambients vary from 70 to 80 depending on time of year. I cycle my balls in summer, and dial down the hot spot to 85 with the tanks having an ambient of 80 (helps with my electricity bill during high demand months, too). Winter I had the most success the year I kept them in the garage and had ambients of 65 and the warm side of the rack with basking areas of 95 and a heat light pointed at the warm side to increase air temps. The last couple years they've been warmer and not nearly as fecund as they were the "cold year". The ball pythons, anyway.
My amazons I keep cooler - no night time heat, so they drop to 70 at night, and daytime basking temps only get to 85/86.
The lizards I keep hot - blue tongues with basking areas of 110+, ambients in the 80s, Frilleds with basking areas of 100+, ambients in the mid 70s.
I raise crested geckos under a mercury vapor bulb. Pretty sure that's my most controversial set up but it's also one of my most successful.

Hides or No Hides
Depends. No hides for snakes in racks, I have a hide for the retics because they're in a relatively large tub, hide for my house snake 'cause she likes it... ATBs don't need actual hides, as they perch, and the lizards all have basking areas. Cresteds get cork tubes.

Planted/Living Vivariums and Displays
I love these. When done well, you can put literally any animal in a display. Ball pythons included. They just need a sturdy, very specifically designed enclosure to do well. I think the expectations for a planted or display enclosure for different species need to be adjusted - a ball python won't do well in the same enclosure that a dart frog would, and vice versa. I've made some pretty cool huge terrariums for animals like corn snakes or leopard geckos. The video I'm linking below sits on my desk at the office for my frog eyed geckos. They love it!


Co-habitation
For snakes I don't usually like encouraging this, as predators rarely cohabitate in the kind of close quarters we inflict on them here in captivity. I've housed multiple ball pythons together before and can set up larger enclosures where they thrive (imagine 6 foot vision cages set up with cork and caves - they do great), but for my own at home I keep them individually the majority of the time.
I've done several multi-species habitats of smaller lizards and geckos that did extremely well. For several years I had a cage with gliding lizards, dwarf geckos, and limbless skinks where the gliding lizards and dwarf geckos were breeding quite prolifically. The limbless skinks may have had babies but I never found them. If you have a large, well set up cage with niches for each animal you're keeping, it is very doable and rewarding -but definitely more difficult than keeping animals individually.

Breeding
Ever since I started keeping my ball pythons warmer they have been little punks about breeding and I don't even want to talk about it

Assist/Force Feeding
I can and will assist feed a baby that will not start well on its own, and they usually begin feeding on their own after one or two feeds. However, I will not hold back or breed a baby that had to be assist fed to get started.

Incubation (maternal vs. incubator)
I highly prefer maternal incubation, personally. Just set em up and let em go. That's when I'll set up females with 100 degree basking areas - they often incubate just off the heat pad, which is perfect and keeps the eggs from cooking. I keep the temps up for the entire duration of incubation, as the reason they chose that spot to incubate is because with those temperatures, they could maintain their clutch at the right temps. The females are much better than I am at incubation.

Live and F/T Feeding
I feed live to all of my reptiles most of the time. The bullsnakes and retics will get frozen thawed when it's hard to get significant numbers of rats (like right now), but the ball pythons all get live. I throw the rodents in, do something nearby (usually talk in a baby voice to the blue tongues for an embarrassing amount of time...), and monitor them for a bit to make sure everyone eats.

Substrate
I prefer orchid bark, but I'll use cypress mulch too. My fire skinks and frilleds also get a mix of eco earth in theirs. Bullsnakes get shredded aspen. Retics get a blend of orchid bark and moss. ATBs are on cypress/eco earth. I have no problem mixing up bedding until I get a blend or consistency that works well for my needs.

Lighting
I put UVB on anything in a display cage. Ball pythons, retics, and bullsnakes are all in tubs/racks so they do not get UVB. But I've got it on my ATBs, my cresteds (that mercury vapor bulb, hah), frilleds, fire skinks, heck even my ornamental tarantulas in their display cages have old UVB bulbs on them. I use the old bulbs on the tarantula cages because they don't need UVB...so they just get the older bulbs that pretty much just light up the cage. Anything in display cages also gets a basking bulb, even if its just a low wattage bulb - I was pleasantly surprised at what the various animals would do when provided with naturalistic lighting. Those frog eyed geckos, for example, are definitely nocturnal, but I'm watching them on my desk now and they spend all day going inbetween the rock crevices and sticking just one part of their body out to bask. I've seen this behavior in my leopard geckos as well when I housed them in an naturalistic setup, and the same with my cresteds.

Fun topic!! I like reading these, seeing what people do. Keep em going!

-Jen