What's new at AAR

8/26/10: Well, great things happening at Australian Addiction Reptiles lately! We have had some new projects, some very exciting clutches hatch out, including some rare hatchlings, and some first time productions at AAR. I have finally managed to get some Pilbara rock monitors (Varanus pilbarensis)! We picked up a clutch of these amazingly cool monitor lizards and they are very entertaining to watch. Hopefully they do well here and we will be able to offer some up in the future for purchase. These are some of the coolest and most colorful monitors around and they are relatively rare in US collections, so we are fortunate to work with them. Check out the pilbarensis page for more info and some pics of the little varanids.

We've had our first Nephrurus asper or prickly knobtail gecko, hatch out, and it is awesome! Looks like it will likely turn out to be a light phase asper. It is starting to get a little orange coloration on its nose. We are excited to see how this little gecko turns out. Some amyae have also hatched out and we have listed some for sale on the available page. These are from some great looking and vibrant Lazik lines. We also had a couple Nephrurus wheeleri, banded geckos, hatch out recently as well and they are doing fantastic and growing quickly. Not sure if you caught Steve and me on Reptile Radio talking geckos, so here is a link to our show. It is fun chatting with the RR guys and we appreciate the efforts they go to to produce such a quality show. Unfortunately, the show heading calls Steve, Scott, so I better clarify that his name is Steve. We'll forgive them, though (LOL). If you are unfamiliar with Reptile Radio, check it out!


Our first asper hatching!	Little asper out of the egg

We also had a great result from a breeding loan with our friend Chris. He sent up his female pied and we bred her to our male bumblebee mojave. The clutch hatched a week or two ago and we were lucky to produce a male bumblebee mojave, 1.2 pastaves, and 1.0 normal, all of which are het pied! They look fantastic and the pastaves almost glow! It will be fun to breed the bumblebee mojave het pied male to pied and het pied females in the coming years and see what cool pied morphs we can produce. It is nice when a breeding loan goes so smoothly, as they seldom seem to do.

Many of the available pages have been updated with 2010 stock, including the centralian python, zebra and normal jungle carpet pythons, woma, and amyae pages, so check them out and let us know what you would like. The zebras are selling well, so if you want one, you better act quickly. It is a smart plan to pick up a female this year, while they are cheaper than males, in anticipation of producing super zebras, the yellow patternless jungle carpet python. The centralians look great again this year. Last years hatchlings from this pairing turned out amazing! We have lots of extra males, so if you are looking for a reverse trio, we'll make you a nice deal. The amyae hatchlings look amazing and are ready to go. We are happy to offer some of these amazing geckos for sale.

The reptile show season is coming up very quickly. We will be in Anaheim in a couple weeks, and after that we will be in Vegas, Tucson, Salt Lake, and possibly Pheonix. Come check us out at the booth and introduce yourself. We are always excited to meet fellow fans of Australian herps. My trip to Australia is getting closer and closer and I can't wait to get over there for some amazing herping. I plan to return with plenty of pictures, which I will put up on the site. It will be fun to see these amazing animals in their natural habitat! I am going to be careful not to even touch any of the animals in the wild to avoid any implication in illeagal acts. Rest assurred, I will leave Australia with only photos. My career and collection are not worth losing. I will be happy enough just to observe them in the wild. Should be a great trip! Looking forward to spending time with my dad as well. I am fortunate to have such a great dad that will hang out with his crazy son on a herping trip to the middle of Australia. My parents are the best!

Well, check out the updates and let us know how we can help you out with your addiction to these awesome animals. Get Addicted!

7/21/10: Things have been crazy around here with hatchling season, and I let a month go by without an update. We have had some great animals hatching out the last couple months. I really enjoy this time of year! Perhaps the most exciting clutch of the year is the Zebra Jungle Carpet clutch from our zebra male Grevy bred to Sis, a nice female jungle. The babies are very nice and we have to keep a couple of this years hatchlings. I am really loving this project and it is great to see the little zebras emerging from the eggs. Unfortunately, this was the only zebra clutch for us this year. It seemed to be a common theme, as very few zebras were produced in the US, with a few notable breeders striking out or producing very few of them. Should be a viable project for years to come. The super zebra project is still in it's infancy and only a small number have been produced in the world. I am very excited for the 2010 breeding season, when we can use Grant in our production. Grevy has an amazingly intricate pattern, but his color is not the best. Breeding him to Grade A female jungles produced some phenominal zebras with Grevy's pattern and the females color (as seen in the last update!), resulting in some contenders for the nicest zebras in the country after only 1 year of selected breeding. I can only imagine how insanely nice the offspring of zebras produced by the '09 zebras bred to some nice jungles. Should blow some minds! The babies from this years clutch should turn out just as nice as last years babies. One male has some insane striping, which is interesting, as the dam of the clutch is siblings to Skunk, our striped male jungle, so it looks like some striping went to this little guy. I am so curious to see what he looks like once his yellow starts coming in. I am also very curious to see how the super zebras produced from our F1s will look! Check out our Available Zebras page for pictures of all the available 2010 offspring.

Another notable accomplishment was the hatching of two clutches of Angolan pythons. Ben did a great job with these guys and the babies look great! A few have some really cool striped patterns. It is always nice to hatch out a new species of python. Angolans are still fairly rare in herpetoculture and prices are coming down to reasonable levels so more people can enjoy these amazing pythons. They have beaded scales, which give them a very cool feel. They are very good feeders, compared to their fellow Africans- the ball python- although they do get a bit larger. Angolans are great snakes and we are excited to be able to offer them for sale. Check them out on our Available Angolan page.

Yet another first for AAR is Steves production of Prickly Knobtails (Nephrurus asper) and Centralian Knobtails (Nephrurus amyae). We were fortunate to get viable eggs from the asper and the female is on her third clutch of the year. Can't wait to see how the babies look. Several amyae have hatched out and we gotten 6 clutches for the year so far. Check back soon if you are interested in getting some amazing amyae. These little basketball heads are some of the coolest geckos on the planet. Steve is rocking the knobtails and also has several Smooth Knobtail (N. levis levis) eggs currently incubating as well. We do have a few awesome male levis up for sale as well. Check them out on the Available levis page. I also have a couple of wheeleri clutches incubating and hopefully I can get some to hatch out soon.

On the ball python front, we were lucky enough to produce a super pastel spider mojave (Yee Haw on the 4-banger!) with a sister that is a bumblebee mojave. Also got a nice clutch of eggs from the bumblebee mojave to a pied female, so we should have some awesome morph het pieds hatching out in a month or so. We had a cool little dinker project, but it didn't really pan out with anything too special. We had an interesting female that had many characteristics of a morph. She produced a male spider that looked a little different from the normal spiders, so we kept him back and bred him back to the dam. The spiders that came out are really nice, but I don't think there is much else going on with them. Just some really nice reduced spiders.

We had some eggs from Skunk to Flower, which is a fun striped project, but unfortunately only one egg made it to hatching, and we are keeping the hatchling as a holdback to produce some cool stripes down the road. Both of our female Centralian pythons laid clutches this year, one of which has hatched. The babies are great, but they are a bit male heavy. They look great and are het for stripe. The second clutch should be hatching very soon, so hopefully that clutch is female heavy. Also produced some babies from our black-eyed childrens python male to a female VPI childrens. I was told that they are a recessive trait, but some of the babies look like they have black eyes. I need to take some pics soon so you can judge for yourself. I also need to check closely to see if they have keeled dorsal scales. The black-eyed childrens did originate at VPI, so it is possible that the female breeder from VPI that produced them was also a het for black-eye. Hopefully I can figure out what is going on with these. The woma babies produced this year are amazing. Unfortunately I only produced 2 clutches with 4 babies each. These are very nice babies from our nicest pairs. We also produced some nice jaguar coastal carpets from our red morph jaguar to a nice coastal female, so they should be up for sale soon too.

Anyway, we are off to a great start with this years offspring! We have a few more clutches in the incubator, so check the available page to see what we are producing. Thanks for your support and GET ADDICTED!

5/18/10: Getting excited for the zebra clutch to hatch, so I got the camera out last night for a Jungle photo session. Just pictures today. Oh, and some womas are out of the egg too! GET ADDICTED!


Three in the bucket	Add one more	Grant, HB male zebra	Grant, up close and personal	Fiesty female number 5	A little close, watch that bite!	Female 6 has a neat pattern	Another angle of female 6	Female 3 is a knockout!


Python Pete line girl	I really like this female	Stripe-line female	Stripe-line male, nice!	Female from Steve	A little closer, looking good.	Pinstripey female	Sis. Not bad for an old gal.

5/14/10: I would like to introduce our yearly giveaway: SnakeBucks 2010! SnakeBucks are a way to win a chance at getting triple, double, or a set increase of your money towards purchases at AAR. We have some great clutches on the ground and if you are planning on buying something from AAR this year, this will be the way to do it. Not only will they go toward the purchase of animals indefinitely, they will also allow you priority pick when a clutch hatches out. Check out the description at the above link to see all the details.

Well, the countdown is on for the Zebra jungle carpet pythons to begin leaving the egg! I can't wait to see those pinstriped beauties! There will be substantially less zebras produced in the US as initially anticipated, so this will be a viable project for many years to come. We didn't hit on a clutch from zebra to zebra, but it is not over yet and we may still see a small clutch from our zebra female. We are very excited about this project and couldn't be happier with the way last years zebras turned out. This years hatchlings should be no different and they will definitely make some jaws drop. AAR should have a nice selection for your zebra jungle needs. Contact me (Justin-contact info above in "About Us" page) if you have any questions regarding this project.

I am very excited for the carpet python world right now, as there are several world first morph clutches that should be hatching in the next month or two around the world. Paul Harris, of UKpythons.com, is hatching out many of them and recently had the first pure albino and 100% het albino Darwin's pythons (M.s.variegata) hatch outside of Australia, including some very nice striped albinos! He should have some more amazing clutches later this year, including various carpet morph combos. A clutch from an axanthic to an albino was also produced by Precision, which is a step towards snow carpet pythons. Our friend Kerry (Psychotic Exotics) got two clutches from zebra to zebra, one of which was sired by a zebra jag, so we should see the first patternless super zebras in the US very soon. It was a good race, but Kerry takes the lead in the US super zebra race. Hopefully we can follow later this year with a clutch, or next year. Anyway, very exciting times for us carpet fans. We are excited about some upcoming projects that we will be acquiring, so stay tuned for future project announcements.

In addition to the NARBC in Anaheim and the Wasatch Reptile Expo in Salt Lake City, UT, we will be attending a few more shows this year, including the Las Vegas Reptile Expo and the Tucson Reptile show. Ben and Steve will be vending these shows, as I will be busy chasing herps in Australia. I do hate to miss the shows, but it will be for a very good cause. We are also considering the Phoenix reptile show, but haven't made a commitment there yet. Should be a great year for AAR, so keep an eye out for amazing animals that will be hatching soon. GET ADDICTED!

5/11/10: Wow, this last month and a half flew by. I wanted to get a quick update up today, as it is the last day to submit your comments to USFWS regarding the proposed rule change. Make sure you check out the Kill Rule Change website created by USARK to help on how to best oppose this controversial legislation. Many key words and helps to writing your opposition statement have been posted. Come on people, it is the 11th hour, so there is no more time for holding out. We need to get those comments posted ASAP! Get something, anything, posted before days end!

We have a new promotion at AAR; Snakebucks. We are putting on the finishing touches and will soon be posting a description of the AAR Snakebucks program, so keep an eye out for that in the next week or so.

Our first clutch of the year hatched out last week. Some very nice Cape York spotted pythons left the egg and are looking nice. Also, we hatched a couple crested geckos, so regardless of the value, it is fun to hatch out a new species (for us). These will be the first of many clutches hatching, and this should be a hallmark year for Australian Addiction Reptiles. We have some awesome clutches on the ground, that are due to hatch in a few weeks. This was our first year to get Angolan python eggs, and we got two nice clutches from some unrelated bloodlines. We also got a huge clutch from one of our nice jungle females, Sis, sired by our zebra jungle carpet, Grevy, so another lot of amazing zebra jungles should be pipping at the end of the month! A female pastel, bred by our mojave bumblebee, also laid a nice clutch (come on super pastel mojave spiders!) as well as a normal female bred to a lesser platinum. Our first amyae eggs are also on the ground and asper eggs will follow shortly! We also got a large clutch from one of our centralian python females, so more nice red het stripe bredli are on the way. This is a very fun time of year, although hatching time is even better. This is a huge year for AAR and we will have some exciting projects available in the next couple of months. Take advantage of our Snakebucks program to help add some of these awesome projects to your collection. Another update should follow in the next week. GET ADDICTED!


Nephrurus asper breeding	Another pic of the asper	Angolan laying eggs	Woma female laying	Crested hatchling

3/23/10: Need to shout out to my friends at Moreliapythons.com for the birthday wishes. I had a blast with my wife and some friends at the Jazz-Celtics game, thanks to the generocity of Heidi's parents in giving us their 3rd row tickets. My wife is the best and I love hanging out with her. The Jazz also handled the Celtics nicely and beat them soundly. Not a bad win for the Jazz, and a fun game to watch. It was a great day/weekend all around. Last week we got to go to Vegas for my wife's brother's wedding, which was a fun time as well (as fun as a couple Mormons can have in Vegas, haha). We got to go dancing at Club54 and just hang out It was great to hang with Heidi without the kids. I am a lucky guy to have such a great wife.

We have a new member of our Australian Addiction team. His name is Steve Sharp and he is from AZ. He specializes in geckos and other Australian lizards, so he will definitely make a great addition to AAR! We will be adding his animals to the site soon, so stay tuned to see some amazing geckos. He will be picking up some cool monitor projects soon as well, which will be fun. He will also be vending the Tucson Reptile Show, so look for AAR at that show this Fall. We will also be attending the new Las Vegas Reptile Expo in October. I guess I should qualify that we means Ben and Steve, as I will be headed to Australia! My dream herp trip is finally a reality thanks to my wonderful wife. She suggested I go this year to check out the Land Down-under. I am stoked to say the least. Again, I can't speak highly enough about my wonderful wife. I am sure to have a million pictures to share upon my return, so the countdown begins....It will be a long wait to October. Anyway, we are happy to have Steve and look forward to his contributions. He is a great guy and works very well with many different reptile species. Welcome Steve!

Steve and me at Anaheim NARBC in 2009

The first eggs of the year are on the ground! We had 2 clutches of Cape York Spotted pythons laid earlier this month. Just like last year, the larger female laid the eggs throughout her cage and was not coiled around any. Hopefully the majority will go the distance. We also got a perfect clutch of 7 eggs from our nicest pair of Womas. It will be nice to hatch out womas again after all the females took a break last year. These should be amazing! We also got a single egg from one of our wheeleri females. Up to this point, I have had trouble with hatching the eggs out, which I have attributed to poor nesting box and cooler nesting conditions. I have changed everything up and this eggs is incubating in our new incubator in a new nest box. Hopefully we will see more eggs here soon. Unfortunately our striped female Jungle Carpet Python, Stripey, laid a clutch of 15 slugs. Last years babies from her were amazing, so it is too bad we don't get the chance to see more of her offspring this year. Oh well, you win some you lose some. We have several more females that should be laying in the next couple weeks, including Zebra JCPs, Angolan Pythons, more Womas, and bumblebee mojaves! This is a great time of year and I will try to update the site more frequently to report the eggs laid.

Female Woma laying eggs!

Well, we have been adding more fun projects. We got several colubrid projects as one of the big UT breeders is selling his collection off. This includes albino desert, mountain, and greyband kingsnakes. We are also picking up more tricolor hognose snakes, which have been fun so far. I couldn't resist the tristis monitors that I saw at Josh's house and had to pick up a trio of these awesome monitors. They are growing quickly and are taking on adult characteristics. It is still difficult to know for sure what we have genderwise, but it is looking like there is at least one female. They look really nice and I am having a blast keeping monitors again! Now I am thinking about getting more, but that will definitely have to wait until we have more room. I picked up a pair of tinctorius dart frogs for my office at the University. They are so fun to watch and are out all day. The fruit flies are a pain, but it is worth it to watch these little jewels hop around the cage.


Tristis monitor, probable male	A second tristis, not sure on this one.	Dendrobates tinctorius dart frog	This is the female	Albino desert kingsnake-yellow and purple!	Het albino desert king female	Hypo desert king female

I have been working on making the Available page a little more user-friendly to ease purchasing animals through PayPal. You can now simply click on the "Add to Cart" button to purchase animals on the website. This has been added to the childrens python available page, so check it out. Hopefully this will be a nice option for purchasing from the website. Check it out and see how it works. GET ADDICTED!

1/23/2010: First off, I want to wish my wife a very happy birthday this month. She is a great woman and I am very glad to have her. She is very supportive of all the reptile stuff I do. I appreciate all she does for me and our kids and couldn't have found a better girl. Happy Birthday!

Happy New Year! It's crazy that it is 2010. I was watching a show the other day, which was made a while back, but set in the future; 2010. We still don't have flying cars and silver jumpsuits, though. Bummer. Well, we're off to a good start with 2010, though. We have had a lot of good high pressure fronts moving through Utah lately, bringing some good snow and some good breeding action. JB was locked up with Stripey and she is progressing nicely. Hopefully we'll get some great striped babies from this pairing. That is one of our focuses is striped jungle lines. Flower is also progressing towards a nice clutch, so that should be another good striped jungle clutch. Jungles are such great snakes, and are up high on my favorite herps list for sure. It is just hard to beat a black and yellow snake. I also got a nice picture of our PXP holdback girl. I need a good name for her. She is so yellow! Our holdback zebras are also looking very nice and I can't stop taking pictures of them, especially Grant, our holdback male. One of our holdbacks that started out a little runty has some awesome yellows coming in! I am really hoping Doli takes, so we can see some super zebras pipping this summer. The carpet morphs are going to expand nicely this year, with several cool new morphs being produced.


Striped jungle carpets getting busy	Very nice PXP holdback female	Grant, our holdback zebra male monthly update	Nice female zebra that has great yellow coming in	Male jaguar holdback. We may be selling this guy.	Female red jaguar from Napoleon and Summer	Very nice adult female jungle jaguar.

Our ball python projects are going well this season. I saw our mojave bumblebee hooked up with a very nice pastel female. Come on killer mojo bees! Hopefully he will also hook up with the female pied on loan, as that will the start of some fun projects. We have a female pied holdback that is a pig and is growing quickly. It would be great to be able to breed her to a mojave bee het pied. That would be a heck of a clutch to hatch out. Our pied and het pied group is doing very well, too. The females are huge and had last year off, so they should lay some nice piles of eggs this season. Pieds are so great and we look forward to hatching out a bunch!

I will also post a few pictures of some holdback animals that I just took random shot of. Enjoy!


A nice childrens python from '09	Holdback childrens pythons '08	Last of the available CY spotteds	A nice holdback female IJ

Ben and I visited the Southerlands (The Snake Keeper) earlier this month. Ben is compiling and analyzing years of data that they (mainly Colette) have been collecting, which will allow him to discover trends in python reproduction. Discovering these trends will allow for improvements in how to maximize production as well as other aspects of commercial breeding. He will be able to publish these data and we will be able to supply this information. Ben will be on Reptile Radio tonight, so you can listen live or recorded later if you miss it, but he will cover some of the things he has discovered thus far. We will post a link to his interview at a later time, but here is how to get to the Reptile Radio site. I was also able to get some pictures of some of the Snake Keeper collection, which I have posted on the Visits page. We were also able to visit our friend Josh Ketchum, who owns Sunshine Boas, and also works for Jeremy Stone Reptiles. Josh is a great guy and a true animal keeper. He is very knowledgeable about a wide range of animals, and his herp collection is amazing. He has hatched out some unique blood morphs recently, and I have pictured some of his collection and animals for sale on the visits page linked above.

Hope your breeding season is going well, and I hope to have news of eggs in our next update. GET ADDICTED!

12/4/09: Breeding season is here! We have thrown a few breeding groups together as the temps drop. I have included some pictures of a few of the breeding groups. Of course my favorite is the zebra breeding group, and we are really hoping to hit the odds and produce a super zebra! The zebras seem to be a bit smaller than most of the US lines of jungle carpet, which makes sense as they descend from some of the smaller locality jungles. I have seen some hanging out among Grevy, our zebra male, with the females. Doli, our female zebra, has good weight and should be able to produce a clutch. She will be our primary focus for this breeding season, and we will keep her with Grevy for the whole season. Last year he was able to sire 3 clutches, and I am hopeful that he will repeat with one or two more, but I'll try not to get too greedy. We also have Skunk, our very nice striped jungle with a very similar female, Flower, which should be a great pairing as well. Flower has some great weight and should be good to go this season. JB will be paired with Stripey again this year and will hopefully repeat the great results from last year. Many of their offspring were fully striped and are turning out nicely. Jungles are such great pythons!


Zebra jungle carpet python breeding group	Holdback male zebra from 2008, awesome!	Holdback zebra jaguar turning out very nice.	An amazing PXP holdback jungle female

We have also put our het granite Irian Jaya males with some of our possible het granite females and we are hopeful to produce some granites. The males are a bit young. The male will hang out with the females, which is a good sign at this time. We also have our tiger coastal with a couple nice females, and will be trying for a jag clutch as well from our red phase jaguar male. I'm also excited to hopefully produce a couple of centralian python clutches as well, although one of our females has had an issue with a cloacal blockage, which will hopefully be passed soon. This should be a productive year for the carpet pythons.

We have also put some ball python groups together, and should have some great potential for some cool morphs. We have our mojave bumblebee together with a pied female, on breeding loan from a local friend, and a couple pastel girls. We also have our lesser male with a spider female and a couple mojave girls. Last year we struck out on leucistics, but hopefully the odds will come back this year. This year should also be great for piebald production, as all our het females are nice and fat after taking last year off. Our holdback pied girl is growing well and should be ready for a male in the next year or two. If we can produce some babies from our mojave bee to the pied female, we could have some cool morph het pied males to breed to her down the road. Our killer bee male is also progressing nicely, and should be ready for some ladies next season. The ball morphs are great.


Mojave bumblebee male with some nice females	Here is the lesser breeding group with one mojo in shed	Male killer bee that is getting big quick

Our new projects are coming along nicely. The female Pygmy python is putting on some nice size, but I still think she will be a bit small for this breeding season. She is sure nice, though. Unfortunately, she will only eat rodents that have been brained, which is a bit of a pain as she gets larger and requires larger food items. I'll put up with it for this nice gal, though. The Stimsons pythons are also doing well and growing quickly. I am very excited to see how these guys turn out! Our olive python male is growing well and is eating unscented rodents with gusto. These guys put on size quick! They have a metabolism like a colubrid. The colubrid projects are also doing well and the tricolor hognose male is eating well. Ben also has the pyros in brumation and we hope to see some breeding activity in the spring. What a great hobby! Several people have asked to see pictures of our reptile facilities. I have included a picture from one of our herp rooms. Not much more room. I think I need to expand it a bit. I will try to get pics of the other facilities later on, so hopefully these shots will do for now.


Female pygmy python doing very well	Male olive python growing quickly	One of our male Stimsons pythons	One of AARs herp rooms.	Another view of a herp facility.

This great hobby, business, and livelihood for all of us as herpers is currently under attack. We need to band together in support of those organizations that are leading in the fight of legislation to ban all python species from pygmy pythons to retics. Organizations such as USARK and PIJAC have laid the groundwork for fighting such proposed legislation, and our support, including calls to local representatives, filling of forms, and donations to these organizations will aid in this work. Please click on the following links and let your voice be heard. These will take you to a form to write President Obama as well as a form that will be sent to major news syndicates to hopefully make our case known. Do your part! We don't want to lose our rights, but we will if we remain silent. GET ADDICTED!

10/15/09: The Wasatch Reptile Show in Salt Lake City was a blast, as usual! It was great to see all the local vendors as well as the local reptile enthusiats. Thanks again to all of you who bought animals from us. You'll have to let us know how they turn out, as we love to get updated pictures or progress reports on animals that we have produced and to see how they colored up or how they produced. We had a great time at the show, aside from hydroplaning and smashing up a rental car on the way down one of the days. We were also able to pick up a very huge female Australian olive python in trade, which will make for a great new project. We bought a male, which will be shipped shortly, so hopefully, this big gal will be productive in the coming years. It is always great to get new animals, especially Australian pythons! I will definitely keep you updated on how this project goes. Unfortunately, Heidi needed the camera, so I didn't get any pictures at the show. There was some very cool stuff at the show. Evan from Black Lotus Reptiles had his goldfinger ball python project offspring on display and they were AMAZING! Looks like there is another gene associated with the project, which make the offspring look incredible. Looks like I may want to get in on this project in the future sometime. Josh, who works for Jeremy Stone Reptiles, had some awesome animals, including an albino pink-belly sideneck turtle and some mata matas, as well as a cool scaleless rat snake. They have branched out from boas and ball pythons and have a ton of cool stuff. Ben picked up some tri-color hognose snakes and a female pyro tricolor, so those will be some cool projects, even though they aren't Australian. There are just too many cool reptiles out there, and we like a lot of different species, so it's hard to limit it to just one continent.


Female Aussy olive python closup	Nice full body shot of new olive

I picked up a colony of lateralis roaches, which have been a great addition and are some great feeder bugs for the Smooth knobtails (Nephrurus levis levis). They are smaller than the dubia roaches, and move faster and elicit a better feeding response. They are about the size of a cricket, without the stink and high deathrate that accompany crickets. They are also very productive, so it should be a nice, never-ending supply of food for the geckos. This inspired me to pick up some more levis levis, which I got from my friend Steve Sharp. He has some nice animals, so these will make a great addition to the colony. I also have several Banded knobtail eggs (Nephrurus wheeleri cinctus) that should be hatching any day now. They are a bit overdue, but that is probably because they were at a lower temp for a couple weeks after it started to cool down. I also dug up another clutch of wheeleri eggs last week, so they are continuing to be productive. Sure hope they hatch out soon. Stay tuned for updates and lots of baby wheereli!

Well, the shows went well and we are almost sold out of our '09 animals. I did update the available pages with some of the remaining animals. There are still some awesome snakes available, though, so check out the available page. I have added additional information on the available zebras, and we have two female zebra jungle carpet pythons left. I also updated the zebra jungle carpet page with additional pictures of our stock and a holdback male. I also updated childrens python, diamond python, and the smooth and rough knobtail gecko pages. The '09 zebras are developing nicely. What a great project. We are keeping several females in order to make super zebras in a few years, and it is a good year to pick up a female to be on par with producing supers. I also have a couple more normal jungle carpet pythons, which should turn out nicely, but I haven't gotten them up on the available pages yet. We are sold out of our '08 Centralian pythons (Morelia bredli), but the '09s are starting to feed well and should be ready to go soon. I will get some pictures and info up on the '09s once they are feeding reliably. We have a few '09 childrens pythons left, and we are a bit female heavy, so we will sell lone females or multiple females with a male. There are also several nice ball python morphs available, and I have finally updated the available ball python pages. We also have some older jaguar carpets and jaguar siblings that are also not on the available page, as well as a breeder package consisting of an adult male mojave male and several proven breeders for a great deal. The mojave has also started breeding with a couple of the females, so they are already on their way to producing baby mojaves this season. There are also some other odds and ends, so if you are interested in some animals, let us know, and we will see if we can hook you up.

The breeding season is apon us, and I have seen several lockups already. I am just trying frantically to get as much food in my females as possible before they start going off food. 2 pairs of womas have been locked up and I am really hoping 2010 is a better year for womas. Our childrens pythons are also breeding lately. I put the male zebra in with several females, including Doli, our zebra girl, so I am very hopeful that Grevy will be up to the task of producing super zebras. Haven't observed any lockups yet, and he is still feeding, but I am really hoping he will get in the mood soon. We'll see how it goes. This should be a great year, and we also have several poss het granite females ready and a couple het granite males, so we may be able to produce some granite Irian Jaya carpets this season as well! Also threw our male mojave bumblebee in with a few morph females and normal females, so I am hoping he turns out to be a good breeder. It would be great to produce a super pastel mojave spider, so cross your fingers for us. We should also be producing a few clutches of Angolan pythons, which will also be a new species for us. We picked up a trio of adult angolans, so we are hoping they are ready to produce some eggs in 2010. Breeding season is fun, but I try not to get my hopes up until eggs are laid or noses are poking out of the eggs, but I am hopeful for this season. GET ADDICTED!

9/11/09: Another Anaheim show behind us. This one was the slowest one yet, but it is probably just due to the scheduling of it on Labor Day weekend. The show was a complete blast as usual and we had a great time hanging with our friends at the booth and at dinner. Ben and his wife just had a baby, so Ben ended up staying home and I got to bring my wife, Heidi. It was really fun and she did great. I might just have to replace Ben at future NARBC shows, as Heidi is much cuter. She was a little taken with Nigel Marvin, so maybe I should leave her home. Haha. Got to meet some guys that I had only known from the forums, so it is always nice to put faces to usernames. We had a great dinner at a local restuarant, which was accompanied by rousing conversation with a bunch of Morelia geeks, so needless to say it was a blast! Gotta love reptile shows!

I also finally pulled the trigger and bought some rough knob-tails (N.amyae) from Geckos Etc. I have wanted to get some of Steve's bloodline for quite some time. He has a very robust and nicely colored line. I bought some unsexed juvies, so hopefully I get at least one female. It was rough picking a couple out as I was so nervous that I would get a couple males. Time will tell what they become. They have some great orange and will only get better with age. They are so ravenous and ate right after setting up and should grow quickly. I always think I have what I need, but usually come home from the show with more animals. I also picked up the female pygmy python (Antaresia perthensis) that we had traded for earlier in the year, and she is awesome. The baby that we were expecting was not feeding reliably yet, so our friend Sterling hooked us up with one of his yearling holdbacks and she is amazingly beautiful. Can't wait to produce the smallest python in the world! I am really excited to work with these awesome pythons! Heidi also bought a fantasy horned frog for the kids. When I was a kid, I had an ornate horned frog and he was awesome! He would sing to music at night or early in the morning and was a nice garbage disposal for uneaten rodents. So, we sold some animals and came home with a few others, but I guess as long as we sell more than we bring home it is a good thing.


New baby amyae	Love that orange!	This one is very light.	New pygmy python female

Next up is the Wasatch Reptile Show in SLC, UT., so more fun in a week or two. The funnest part of the shows is hanging out with the other vendors and friends as well as meeting new people who are excited by reptiles. It doesn't hurt to sell some animals as well. I need to find some more close shows to vend, as it is so nice to be able to drive home in less than a day. I really like the UT show, as the breeders in UT are for the most part pretty good friends. Stop by if you attend the UT show and say hello!

Well, our last snake clutch hatched out with fairly dissappointing results: from lesser to mojave we got 1.2 mojos, 1.0 lessers, and 2.2 normals, so our luck went the other way. Could as easily have been 4 leucies, but it went the other way, and we can't complain....too much. I really wanted to see a white snake hatch out, but I'll have to wait until next year. Got a killer bee, a lesser spider, and several bumblebees, so it was a good year for ball pythons. Next year we will have the bumblebee mojave ready to go, so that should result in some cool babies. We'll see how he does. The killer bee is also a great eater and may be up to size later this year as well. The ball pythons are a lot of fun.

The banded knob-tails (N. wheeleri) kicked it into full gear, and between two pairs we now have 10 eggs incubating, including 2 that were laid last night. The first baby hatched out and it is so dang cute. That may not be too manly to say, but there are few cooler things than baby knobtails. Hopefully the other egg will hatch soon. It is interesting that one egg in the first clutch hatched out a few days before the other one. The second egg is looking close, so it will be nice to see the second one hatch out. It is nice to be hatching knobtails out again! This is also my first successful production of wheeleri, so it's fun to add another species to the list.


First hatchling wheeleri out of the egg!	I can't believe how this hatchling came out of these eggs	Here this little hatchie is in the new setup	They seem so delicate. Hopefully he grows well.

Well there are probably things I am forgetting to report on, but it has been a crazy month. I spent so many hours getting the displays ready for Anaheim and was staying awake until 2 or 3 am every night. It was nice to have them work out so well and I suppose it was worth the effort. I really need to stop procrastinating.....Tomorrow. You can see a picture of the new display on the link above for the Anaheim pictures. It was fun building the fake rock and the acrylic displays. It was a nice learning experience and I would like to make some more sometime soon. I love building things myself, even though it is so much more of a pain than just buying them. Got some nice compliments from people at the show, so as long as people enjoy it, it was worth the effort. GET ADDICTED!