What's new at AAR

3/27/08: Finally some childrens python eggs have been laid. Our two girls have been basking belly up for a while, and I knew they were close to laying. The first is from my original VPI childrens female, who was purchased in 1999 as a yearling from Dave and Tracy. She has taken a couple years off of egg production in 2005 and 2006, but is back to producing. She laid 15 perfect eggs. Of course, I forgot to take pictures of her on her eggs. Can't wait for those tiny red worms to hatch out. We have some of the best childrens pythons that are brilliant red/pink as babies and fade into a nice light red color as they mature. Can't beat VPI childrens for purity and nice color. We expect the other clutch from our younger VPI line female any day. I have never compared babies from the two clutches before, so it will be nice to keep them separated and see if there is any difference between the offspring from our two girls. I need to name the childrens, so we can have designations for the offspring. Not sure why I have such a difficult time naming my snakes, especially such long term kids like the childrens. Oh well, I just need to put a little effort into it.

One of the woma eggs went bad from the clutch shown below, but I wasn't too optimistic about it in the first place, as it was excluded from the coils, but I thought I would try it out anyway. I am a bit nervous regarding the woma eggs, and hope to hatch them out. People seem to have a difficult time with woma eggs for some reason. Thankfully, Pete has been giving me some great advice. I just hope I can make it work. The addiction needs to see carrot-top babies hatching out! The IJ eggs look like they are doing well. More egg updates to come, so keep posted.

Well, I made last Wednesday's Snakebytes episode, although it was a bit funny as it was the "women of reptiles" episode. My mom went with me to Dallas and the NARBC show in Feb, where she was filmed by Brian's crew at the show. She told some fun snake stories from the snakes I kept as a kid, but they didn't really include any of that, just a little blurb on how long she has liked snakes. Oh well, the episodes are so short, I couldn't expect too much to be included. Anyway, that's me in the hat next to my mom. She was the best mom a kid into reptiles could hope for. She always liked snakes, and would let me keep just about anything I brought home. We had a 12 ft burmese that would regularly escape it's cage (I know, so irresponsible), and one night it ventured into my parents bed. Not sure how your mothers would react, but mine felt sorry for the poor snake, and pulled it up under her legs to warm him up. Once he was sufficiently warmed up, she returned him to his cage. Not may better moms than her. I guess she is partially to blame for my obsession with herps. I am addicted! GET ADDICTED!

3/20/08: Another clutch has landed. I am very excited about this one, as it is the first time we have bred this species. I was not expecting her to lay so early. This was a nice pairing of Python Pete line of high contrast womas, so the babies should be stellar. It looks like there are a few infertiles, but it is her first clutch so we'll forgive her. I was surprised with how large the eggs were and how many fit in that girl. She had excluded one, probably because it wouldn't fit, but was nicely wrapped around the others. Womas! It's a nice little dream come true for me. I have been waiting for this day for a very long time, and it is weird that it has finally happened. I am very greatful to Pete for making this a reality and for his help along the way. He's a great guy, and I really hope to keep his legacy going with these amazing womas. Some of the most amazing jungles in our collection came from Pete as well, so I am also thankful for the oportunity to work with such a great line of jungles. Hopefully the other woma pairs will follow suit. My good camera is at my wifes parents house, so I have an old point and shoot that was in the car so it immediately fogged up, which made picture taking difficult, but there was no way I was going to miss getting a picture of this event. I am just glad I was in a frame of mind to remember anything, as I was so excited to see this sight. Can't wait to see those carrot tops peaking out of the eggs! GET ADDICTED!


Here she is, wrapped around some nice looking eggs.	8 egg clutch from our high contrast womas	Here is an older picture of the sire	This little Python Pete line JCP shed, so I included him too.

3/17/08: Third clutch of the year is on the ground, and the 3rd place prize goes to.....our nice female IJ bred to our 100% het granite male, Kip. There were 10 eggs, so we are hoping for a nice hatch rate. We will likely be letting go of most of these, so if you are looking for some females for a granite project, let us know. Last years babies from these two are stellar, and we are happy to have more on the way. The Antaresia and some of the womas look like they are ready to go at any time as well, so stay tuned and GET ADDICTED!


Here is the female shortly after the eggs were taken away. I always feel bad removing eggs from the females, and really need to get cages set up for maternal incubation.	Proud papa, Kip, facing the female. He sure does pass on some great coloration and pattern to his offpspring. Excited to see this years brood.	I never get tired of seeing eggs. Only thing better is seeing them hatch. We got a few "nipple" eggs in this clutch, which should be fine.

3/11/08: Well, things are shaping up nicely for this years egg laying season. I have witnessed several hook-ups between JB and Lilly, and also saw her ovulation. A couple '06 females are also looking like they will be nice and big for egg laying, and JB has been locked up with them as well. Ben has reported that Opal is looking gravid, so hopefully she will drop her first clutch this year. Should be a great year for jungles. The hard part is waiting for the eggs, and then waiting for the eggs to hatch, and then the babies to feed, then for them to color up. I guess I should just enjoy the events for the events. I do think my favorite part is babies hatching, though. There is not much better than a baby python poking it's head out of the egg. We should be seeing plenty of that, so good times are around the corner. This is a great time of the year. Pictures of females on eggs will follow soon. Unfortunately, we left our camera at my wifes parents house, so no pictures this go around. I did film a few videos that I will be adding in the next couple days as time permits. One can be seen at the end of this entry, which is an exciting lockup between our male bumblebee, Nacho, with a nice striped Mojave female. Hopefully we will see some Mojave bees! Our big female, Burg, was also completely inverted, which is a good sign she is getting ready to lay a big bee clutch (she was also bred by Nacho). We will hopefully have quite a few bees this year as well as piebalds. Those have to be two of the coolest morphs out there, and I am excited to see more hatch out this year.

I have been thinking a bit, which is a dangerous thing, I know, but I get to write whatever I want here. I guess you can stop reading, though. OK, here goes some breeding season philosophy. Anyway, I see comments about their snakes breeding for weeks at a time after introductions. The reason I am thinking about this is I rarely see lock-ups between my pairs during the breeding season, and when I do, it is for a day or maybe three. Sometimes I don't see breeding at all. My pairs are kept together year round, which is a bit of a challenge at feeding time, but the reason I do it is for the breeding season. I'm not sure where the notion came from that separating them was better than keeping together. The reasoning for this is that the snakes know the cycles better than I do, so they will know when a lock-up is productive. It seems snakes kept apart the whole year are maybe a little extra-amorous, which may not be good for productive breeding, although the snakes may "enjoy" it. When kept together, they are used to each other and know when the important cycles are occurring, which would result in spending energy during the breeding season in productive activities. The question is, how many copulations are needed to result in fertile egg production? The copulations I observe in pairs housed together year-round usually coincides with ovulation, which would make sense, as copulation just after the follicles are released from the ovaries would result in better chances for fertilization. Anyway, that is my take on improving chances for a productive breeding season, so enough babbling for now. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will have plenty of pictures of females on eggs. GET ADDICTED!

2/27/08: Had a great vacation in Dallas area, which included a trip to the Dallas zoo, a day at the NARBC show, and a trip out to Shawn Christians house. I have posted pictures of these trips on the Visits page. I was going to do the Fort Worth zoo as well, but didn't have the time. The reason I chose the Dallas zoo is because of their perenties and the friendlier herp staff. As well as the pictures, I also posted some videos on youtube. I went a little wild with the camera at the zoo and took a ton of pictures, many of which are posted here. I neglected to post any pictures other than reptile pictures, but they had some crazy stuff that I hadn't seen before. It is nice to be introduced to new species that I have never seen before. I think the Dallas zoo has one of the best herp collections out there. The perenties were awesome! The NARBC show was great. My buddy from Dallas, his two kids, Gabbi and Lachland, and my mom went with me. Mom got interviewed by BHB for an upcoming episode of Snakebytes, so we shall see if she makes the cut. Should be cool if she makes it on. I was standing next to her, so if she is on, I will be too. It was nice talking to Brian, who has lots of great plans in the works, and I really hope they work well for him. I also got to meet a few of the guys from Moreliapythons.com, including Shawn C, Michael P, John L, Steve Argo, and Blake B. They were great guys, and it was fun talking carpets with them. It is always cool to meet people with the same interests and excitement about carpets. Later that evening, I went over to Shawn C's to check out his collection, including some amazing granite IJ carpets. He's a great guy and it was good chatting with him. Later, John, Argo, and Argo's girlfriend came over as well. Anyway, check out the pictures.

Our breeding season is in full swing, and we recieved our first clutch of eggs for '08! They were from Skunk and Deb. Unfortunately, there were many slugs in the clutch. We are not sure what went wrong there. We have around 10 good eggs (see picture below), so hopefully we'll have a good hatch rate. We also aquired a pair of Skunks siblings from a friend of ours in SLC, which were adult size, primed, and ready to breed. The female is great looking, and the male is not bad himself. I put them together in a spare cage for quarantine and they locked up. Here is hoping we have some eggs from these guys soon. JB and Lilly were also locked up, and Lilly appeared to be ovulating. The picture is not the best, but I included it below as well. They are in need of a good cleaning, but I don't like to disturb them during breeding season. One of our nice striped '06 JCPs also looks like she may be progressing towards a clutch. We could be up to our eyeballs in jungles this year. Opal also looks to be progressing towards a clutch, but we won't count our eggs until they are laid. If everything goes as planned we could have 6 clutches of jungles. Good stuff.

The Aspedites and Anteresia are also having a good breeding season. Both of our female childrens pythons as well as our Cape York spotted python females appear to be gravid. You can see one female childrens inverting and one of the Cape Yorks with a swollen caudal 1/3rd. One of our female womas was going through a monster ovulation. I have included a picture of her as well. A couple of the other woma females have refused food, so that is a good sign. We may end up with more babies than we know what to do with, but we are definitely excited! We'll take whatever we get. Kip has been busy with our female IJ, who has been refusing food, so we should have some poss het granite IJs soon as well. Also looks like we have a couple gravid ball pythons that should be ready to lay soon. Good things are happening at AAR! I love this time of year. Here are some pictures.


Skunk and Deb eggs!	New jungles breeding	Closeup of new jungles	JB and Lilly breeding	A nice PXP 07 juvie	Holdback red jag female

Inverting childrens female w/ male	Cape York trio. Notice swollen tail.	Huge ovulation on this female woma	Sweet red morph jungle jaguar	Female Irian looking a bit plump	Kip is looking nice. Check out his name.

Recent pic of JB	Recent pic of Lilly	One of our female jungle jags	Tiger coastal just shed	Red morph jaguar carpet male	Last available jaguar (not for long)

On the down side, I returned from Texas to discover the female Angolan python at my place dead in her enclosure. She had a stuck shed, but seemed to have been dead a few days. The worst part is I am not sure what happened with her. Talk about a tough loss. She was doing very well, and growing nicely. Well, we still have the female at Ben's place, so hopefully she will do well and produce a replacement for this female. That is the biggest downside of our hobby/business is that we work with live animals that can and do die. We will all lose animals from time to time for no known reason. It never gets easier, and I really hate to lose animals. Well, we have some great projects, so it makes it a bit easier to take with so many great projects going strong. We just need to focus on the positive. Well, thanks for looking. GET ADDICTED!

2/3/08: Back in 2006, Ben and I had a great conversation with Brian Barczyk of BHB reptiles regarding the reptile hobby/industry. He is a great guy and is passionate about bringing our hobby out of obscurity. I am excited about his upcoming release of an episode of his new video series "Snakebyte TV". The teasers are great and can be seen on Brian's site. He also has a great blog on the site, which also includes guest bloggers. We submitted a short guest blog on the red morph jungle jag that should appear soon. I agree with Brian that this hobby could be so much bigger if people see how cool this hobby is. Of course, we all do our best to get the word out there, but if we increase our efforts, there will be many more voices to aid in promoting our hobby and combating misinformation. One important issue occurring now is the threat to ban the interstate traffic of all pythons. More information can be found by clicking here. We need to do our part in helping to dispel false information on snakes and reptiles in general, and lend our voices to stopping legislation that would limit our enjoyment of herpetoculture. We need to be aware of these kinds of potential legislation, because once enacted, this type of regulation would be very difficult to reverse. Let's do our part.

I also thought I would post a few more bucket pictures for the beginning of February. I am enjoying the bucket shots. Just trying to pass the time until the eggs come, which should be pretty soon. I thought the bucket shots of the childrens python breeders really brought out the beauty. It is so hard to get a good picture of these dwarf pythons, but the white background really brings out the nice red of the VPI line childrens. I am also including pictures of a few of our crested geckos, which are a new project of my sons. They are turning out really nice, reaching their adult colors as they mature. Looks like we have a few females. We will likely be setting up a few breeding trios, unless we are male heavy. They are fun geckos, jumping around and chowing down on crested gecko diet and roaches. They come from New Caledonia, which is just above Australia, so we thought they would fit in well with our collection. I still need to get a collection page with info about them up, but am waiting until we get ready to breed them. It is always fun to have new projects starting. Hope you enjoyed the bucket series, and I hope to have egg pictures up soon. GET ADDICTED!


Fresh shed '07 pied	Female jungle carpet python from '06	This red morph jungle jag just shed	Original VPI childrens python female	'99 VPI line childrens python male	One of our younger childrens python females

Freshly shed angolan python male	Striped female jungle carpet python	Nice creamcicle crested gecko	A harlequin crested	Orange flame crested gecko	Another nice creamcicle line

1/30/08: Happy New Year! Thought I better get with the new year and get an update up before January is over. What better way than with some pictures?! Here are some "bucket shots" of some of the collection.


Nice red amyae female	Nacho is currently siring some clutches	New female Cape York, looks like she'll lay too	This ghost male has been breeding a het ghost female	Nice poss het granite female	This is my favorite PH granite girl. She eats great and is amazing

Our lesser male is getting some size on him	Thought this picture brought out the weird colors of this mojave	Our larger female mojave is currently with Nacho	A male red morph jungle jaguar	This female is getting big and yellow	I really like the contrast on this female jag

Another female jag with some nice size on her	This was one of the twin red jag females, who is doing well.	This jungle male is starting to color up	Another male jungle from the PXP lineage	I really like this female striped jungle carpet	The last of our female jungles for sale

	Male spider het pied is a pig!	This female spider is getting big	I love this shot of a female wheeleri	This red woma is one of our nicest

I am very happy to see how these pictures turned out. I really like the bucket style photos, which I have occasionally used for many years. I think I like the side/eye level shots a little better, but it is nice to get a "birds-eye" view of some of the kids. I really like the white background, though, as it really brings out the contrast and looks so clean and nice. We have some great animals and projects up and coming, which I can't wait to see how they all turn out, and I am especially excited for when they produce and I can hatch out some nice ones just like them. The jags we are raising up are turning out nicely, and I can't wait to see how they look as adults.

Alot of our animals are breeding. Ben reports that the pied male is quite the stud, and we are expecting a bumpercrop of pibalds. Our female het pied took a rest last year, so we are hoping for an extra large clutch this year, which she definitely has the weight for. The jag male is also doing his job, breeding a few nice females. We will hopefully see our first clutch soon from Deb, bred of course by Skunk. We have a great female coastal that is very beautiful, and are hoping for a first clutch from her. Our tiger male has also been with a very huge coastal female, and we are hoping for another first at AAR by producing some tigers. Our female tiger was not quite up to size, but she has been growing well and we hope to have her produced next season. Tiger jags are on the list to be produced. At my place, the male bee, Nacho, has breeding our largest female ball, and hopefully the mojave female and a few pastel girls. I would love to hatch out a mojave bumblebee as well as a killer bee. The womas have been breeding throughout the cool months and one female has even stopped feeding, if you can believe that. It seems womas are always up for a feed, so this may be a very good sign of things to come. We are hoping for a bunch of woma clutches, so if you are interested, we should have plenty top of the line womas. We are excited to begin breeding the knobtails and centralians in the early spring. I can't wait to hatch out some rough knobtails. I have been wanting to see the giant-headed babies hatching out of the eggs ever since I knew about them. The wheeleri should be ready to go as well. One of the female childrens pythons is already inverting, so it looks like it is time to turn on the incubator again. This should be a great year! Hopefully the next few updates will contain pics of eggs. I am having fun with the breeding season and can't wait to see how it turns out. I am addicted and would recommend this addiction to everyone. GET ADDICTED!

12/20/07: Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you! Time for another update. First off, thanks again to all our customers this year! We are almost sold out of the stock we produced this year and have stopped shipping for the winter (except for a few things). If you are interested in the few remaining animals we have available, you are welcome to put them on hold with a small non-refundable deposit. We will feed them well during the winter and ship them to you in the spring. We have a few jungles, childrens pythons, het pieds, and a few others. I also added a page of pictures from a trip down the Colorado river through Cataract canyon. It was a great trip!

I took a bit of video footage the other night to add to AAR video collection. These were filmed with my old digital camera so the quality is nothing to brag about. The lighting was also a bit weird, but you get the picture. As you all know, it is difficult to get representative photos of most animals, and they always look better in real life. These videos are my attempt at conveying a further element of how the animals look. We are hoping to get some better video footage from my brother JD, who is a videographer (recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq). He is fairly busy, so I am not sure when that will exactly be, but it will be fun to have some professional footage. Maybe with the down time of the holidays, I can talk him into spending a day or two up here to complete our project. Haven't taken many pictures lately, but I will get on the ball soon.

The breeding season is underway, and we have witnessed breeding activity from some of our carpet pythons and womas. The balls haven't really gotten into gear yet, but they should be kicking in any time. We are slimming down our ball python collection to focus on more of our Australian herp projects. This has been difficult, because every time we talk about what we want to keep, the list is always too long. Another difficult thing is focusing, as there are so many cool reptiles out there. I would love to add monitors, skinks, dragons, and other Australian herps, but there is just not enough room for those projects at this time. Future plans include building a bigger herp facility, but until then, we are limited to the great projects we have going now. This should be another hallmark year with the hopeful production of some new projects, including womas, amyae and wheeleri knobtails, striped levis, and various ball morph combos. I was surprised by two of our 18 month old ball morph females that were up to 1500+ g, so it looks like they will get a shot at love this season. With more morph females up to size, we can hopefully produce some cool combos including mojave bees, killer bees, pastaves, etc. Breeding season is fun, but hatching season is the best.

The mouse room construction, I am happy to report, has made a tremendous improvement to my rodent colony, and the rats and mice are back to good production. We are planning on extensively tracking the production of our rodents to more thoroughly gage their output. Once we have worked out more of these details, I will post some of this information to help any that want to breed their own rodents. We will also include some of the things we have learned from our academic training. Ben works in a repro lab, which has given him some great insight into rodent production. I also had some good experience with mouse repro during my PhD work, and I think this has helped design my rodent breeding plan. During the coming season, I would also like to try and test a few hypotheses that I have been rolling over in my mind, regarding some aspects of reptile reproduction, as well as to set up some females for maternal incubation. Hopefully this coming season I can finally test a few things I have been thinking about.

Well that does it for this month. I hope you all enjoy the holidays with family and friends, or at least with your herps. GET ADDICTED!

11/8/07: Time for another update. Things have been a bit hectic around here. We are trying to get the last snakes of the year shipped off before it gets too cold. Things have really started to cool down, and we lost a few rats from our breeding colony, which necessitated the building of a room for the rodents to keep them warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Hopefully this will solve my rodent problems, making for steady production year round. The heat this summer kind of messed up mouse breeding, although the rats did well. Mouse reproduction can be altered by high heat, which will result in approximately a one month recovery time. We had very high heat in the summer, and despite good airflow and open doors to the garage, the mouse colony shut down. I was going to cull them and start over, but on the advice of a fellow professor, who specializes in reproduction, I kept them and waited a month to see if they would recover. Sure enough, after about 4 weeks after the heat went down a bit, the mouse production came back. I plan on installing a small AC unit in my mouse room to keep temps cooler this summer. I also plan on expanding the rats by 1/3 to have more rats on hand. We have had to buy rodents, which is a bit of a hassle. I prefer to produce my own rodents despite the occasional headaches. It is nice to have a supply of live rodents of every size to meet the needs of our snakes, plus I hate thawing rodents! I need to write up a little article on rodent breeding sometime, utilizing the things I have learned both by experience and through my associates at the University. But, with the pace I keep, it might take a little while.

Well, we will likely stop shipping in the next week or two, so if you are interested in anything let us know. We may even bump the price down on some of the ball morphs, as we would like to get them sent off. We will be posting some sale prices on ball morphs to get them into new homes. On the carpets however, we wouldn't mind keeping them over the winter to see how they color up. They only appreciate as they get size and color. There were a couple carpet python articles in the latest Reptiles USA magazine recently, one on wild carpets and one on keeping carpets as pets. I really liked the wild carpet article by Simon Stone, which gave some interesting insight into taxonomy and such of wild carpets. It is nice to see carpets taking a larger place in herpetoculture. People are beginning to realize how cool they are, and it sure doesn't hurt to have all the cool morphs being produced. I anticipate they will get more and more popular in the coming years. I have heard that a book or two will be forthcoming on carpet pythons, and I am excited to see that happen. It will be interesting to see how things progress.

Our new projects are doing well, and I have added a page for our new lesser platty to the collection page. He just shed out and is looking very nice. We are still not sure if we are going to breed our female mojave to something else this year, or just let her get some size to be ready to make some nice leucies. I still need to make a collection page for our cresteds, but I thought I would let them develop their adult colors and put them up in the winter sometime. They are eating well and growing fast. The knobtails are doing well, and starting to slow down a bit with the cooling. Hopefully we will see plenty of eggs from them this upcoming spring. I sure am enjoying keeping the rough knobs, and we are going to pick up a couple more pairs of wheeleri soon. All in all, I am very happy with the collection, and am fortunate to work with such amazing animals.

Breeding has been observed between our red morph jaguar, Napoleon, with a few coastal females. We are also pairing him up again with Aster, one of our jungle carpet females, which produced some amazing red morph jungle jags last year. I have included a snapshot I took last night of one of the red morph jungle jag females that is amazing. I often go in the herp room just to stare at this girl. She is starting to get yellows, which is very exciting. Aster has been eating rats like a champ, so she should lay a nice-sized clutch. Some of the womas have been courting and copulating, including one of our older pairs, and we are very excited for the great pairings we have lined up. The red woma pair pictured a few updates ago (10/1/07) is a prime expample of why we're so excited about producing womas this year. These will be some of the best in the country. We have also put our het granite IJ, Kip, in with one of our females that produced some amazing offspring last year. We are keeping several females to breed back to Kip to hopefully produce some granites in another year or two. Het granite or not, these girls are looking hot. It will be great to see them mature. We have also put our tiger coastal male with a HUGE normal female coastal (fed very well by her previous owner) that we got this year, that will hopefully produce a large clutch (unless she is too fat). We also put jungles, Cape Yorks, childrens, and some of the ball pythons together. Whatever had stopped feeding got thrown together. I have high expectations for the coming season. Hopefully we can improve on our great results last year. Well, that will do it for now. Have a great season and GET ADDICTED!


Tiger female just after a recent shed	This red morph jungle jag female rocks	One of our holdback poss het granite females	Kip, our het granite IJ male	Nice female mojave from this year	Deb looks like she will be able to produce a large clutch.