Uromastyx Masterclass with Arids Only | Phillip Lietz

this is another one who's suffering from super super small importation numbers but they're drop dead gorgeous animals we're talking um they have a base of like a creamy pastel white with um they have bronco like denver bronco orange and blue it's it's such a bizarre combo it's like sunset orange and likes like a dark sky blue um and on that white patina they almost sometimes they look like pastel-ish um and it's just they're just gorgeous animals they're really really stunning they're just awesome i think they are those three i think are ones that not a lot of people have at the moment everyone kind of has their eyes on egyptians and ornates and and whatever but i think those ones in particular are uh cream of the crop that was an incredible answer and i'll tell everybody that's listening that is not a question i sent phil before this [Music] this is episode number 98 of the animals at home podcast my name is dylan perrin thank you so much for tuning in today if you are a regular listener then thank you so much for your continued support and if you're new to the podcast then welcome to the show today i'm speaking with philip leitz phil is one of the prominent euromastics breeders in the united states i think he's really one of the only ones that's actually working with almost all of the euromastics species now if you're somebody who isn't into your mastics or you don't know anything about them then this episode is for you it's also obviously for people who are into your mastics as well but even if you know nothing about them you will be mind blown by this episode i love talking to people who are just narrowly focused on one tiny little niche and that's exactly what phil does he is completely focused on neuromastics he does keep a few other species as well but his prominent projects are breeding projects with euromastics and the amount of information and passion he has for this genus is just incredible and we learned so much about this group of species and it was just a fascinating conversation so if you don't want a gyromastics right now you may want one after listening to this episode in the episode we discuss how phil got into breeding euromastics as a full-time position or a full-time job you know we constantly always hearing people that want to have that goal of working with animals for their job and that's exactly what phil does so he kind of walks us through that he walks us through all of the species or most of the species in the euromastics genus so many of us i think are just used to seeing egyptian urmastics or sahara urantics and we don't actually know that there's it's actually quite a diverse group of animals so he walks us through that we walk through the care guides for for the care requirements for most of those species and we also discuss the wild caught market and how that impacts the captive bred market and we also discuss even some areas that we don't talk about at all in herpetic culture for the most part as far as husbandry goes phil is a deep thinker and he's i had a feeling that he would have thought about some of these things on a deeper level so that's one of the questions that i asked him and he had a great answer for what are some areas where her protoculture can be better that we're not even talking about right now and that was a question i just sprung on him in the episode on the spot it's not something i prepared him for and he had a great answer for that as well so we really cover a lot of bases in this podcast but we tend to focus on your mastics obviously but it's a really good vessel for just talking about herbert culture in general so i really hope you enjoy i should say i know you will enjoy this episode and again if you're listening to this on audio i highly encourage you to go check out phil's instagram everything will be in the show notes as well go check out his instagram page afterwards because you can see all these amazing beautiful lizards that he has it's just phenomenal before we jump into the episode if you're looking for more information on this episode or any other episode that i have recorded make sure you head to animals at home network dot com there you will find links to the show notes in the show notes is all the links and any pictures or anything that i include in each episode so if you hear us discuss a link that you think that you might want to go find in the future go to the show notes or the youtube description because they will be there if you are interested in supporting the podcast really the best thing you can do is just share it share it on instagram or facebook if we can add one more listener to the podcast that will help grow the show if you do want to buy yourself a t-shirt or a sweater make sure you head to animals at home dot ca shop and there you can pick yourself up a sweater or a t-shirt five dollars does automatically get donated to the amazon rainforest conservancy if you would like early access to the episodes as well as the opportunity to submit questions to upcoming guests you can join us over at patreon at patreon.comanimals and finally thank you very much to customreptilehabitats.com for sponsoring this episode of the podcast you can find affiliate links in both the youtube description as well as the show notes let's jump into this episode enjoy well phil welcome to the podcast thank you so much for doing this yeah dude thank you i'm really psyched to do it yeah i'm super excited i i'm your collection is amazing and the work that you're doing is incredible and i think it is very niche in the reptile hobby there's not a lot of people working with eric so i'm definitely excited to get into that so tell me a little bit about how you got into keeping reptiles in the first place where did this all start sure i i think it's a fairly typical answer uh that i've that pretty much everyone in the reptile community says is i was really really into dinosaurs for a long time and as soon as uh i could remember i think i was like five or six years old my mom took me into a pet store and they had green iguanas and i was like oh this this is this is it this is everything i don't need anything else um and so it just snowballed from there i you know spent some time early on in my like a childhood with trying to always get more reptiles and try to catch reptiles all the time right and my parents did not like that at all um and my mom was pretty supportive of it she let me have a few pets but it it was kind of fighting an uphill battle for a long time in in high school i bred bearded dragons uh to do just to i was just got that's how i got into it i transitioned from just your regular keeping of stuff and i remember you know some sometime in seventh to eighth grade i went over to a friend's house and he had been breeding his bearded dragons and i was like you can do that you can breed stuff like you can you can do that whole thing here in the house you don't have to go find it it just blew my mind and so i started breeding bearded dragons and i did that for a little while and um that was like fighting it uphill battle with my family because my my father did not like the reptiles at all he didn't like that i had him and he didn't want the bugs and all that other stuff and so um and i kept stuff off and on uh from high school and into college and then um it was sometime after i got out of school and after i got back from living over in germany for a couple of years um where i decided to take that passion for doing it in the first place and it was like okay well let me see if i can also do make a little bit of money off of this like how how can i really balance this against the the rest of the life that i want to live and and and is there really a future here for me and um kind of took the took the leap and did uh got some spent way too much money on some euromastics thomas i that had been imported from europe and i got him his little hatchlings and i literally put him on a credit card you know what i mean because i was like well it's it's gotta spend money to make money right i don't know like this is freaking me out and yeah and and i don't mean to i'm not trying to make this sound like the money was what was a part of this obviously the the pursuit itself is is for me the the paramount thing like if i if i didn't do this for a living if i couldn't do it for a living if i if if if if it meant agony in my marriage for the rest of my life i would keep reptiles you know what i mean like it's there's something about it that is beyond rewarding i don't know maybe there's some kind of gene in me from millennia ago that past my pastoralist ancestors you know loved keeping cows as pets you know i don't know it's something in there it's got to be in there somewhere right so that's kind of how it all came to be i think yeah it's it's very actually i always think that too like there must be some genetic pull towards because you have animal people who you know will know a fair amount about animals and then everybody else just knows nothing about animals like it's kind of weird like my wife is just like is that a moose is that a deer is that a cow like i don't even know it's just all things it's just like animal that's it i don't know where that comes from it's just part of our genes maybe yeah no i think so i mean i'm sure it's got something to do with it if not if not everything to do with it but um it's it's pretty it's pretty it's a pretty wild way to live especially when you know your your family didn't necessarily encourage it you know for it for it to become something that um well actually and i and i want to i feel like this is worth mentioning the meaning of what i do and why i keep reptiles and and all of that has evolved and changed as time goes on right so the longer i spend in this industry the more i see the things that i like and i don't like um the more you know things come up in in in media like you know tiger king and you know wasn't there that whole thing going around on facebook recently about that cobra that escaped in florida like it might anyway all i'm trying to get at is that um i feel like every year i feel more and more like a newbie you know what i mean like every year i i did i'm like wow i really had no idea how deep this whole industry goes and like i just feel like i'm getting hit over the head with that every year you know what i mean it's just cool it's a good thing it's like you know it's gaining experience and learning about the world it's good yeah yeah the more you learn the more you realize you don't know what totally everything so it's pretty interesting so when you went to college like during that time did you have a career path in mind or was kind of yeah working with reptiles always part of that or no no no no actually um i never thought reptiles could ever be anything career at all um i don't know why because i definitely had examples of people who i could point to who i'm like oh that guy just breathes reptiles i know that like you know i you know i'd open up books and you'd read about tom crutchfield or you know philippe de ville or alan rapache or something somebody right and you'd be like oh you it's it's out there but in my mind it was like a very very far-off possibility um and what i was trained to do was illustration and artwork so i was trained to be to to do pre-production and pre-visualization for games and film and uh that's what i was doing living in germany and that was sort of what i thought i'd be doing for the rest of my life and the job that i had in germany was kind of like a dream job it was it was one of the jobs that i had been looking towards artistically speaking for my whole career and i was just psyched on it and it kind of fell apart and the ground got ripped out from underneath me basically and i was totally disillusioned with what i was doing and uh so when i came back to the states i was putting more and more effort into brazilian jiu jitsu because that's kind of my primary passion outside of reptiles is this is grappling and submission submission sports and um [Music] that while i was putting all my effort there and that was where all my money was going and all my sweat and blood and everything that's where all that was going the reptiles were always something that was just like i of course i keep reptiles like i'm gonna have something all the time and so i i had um a few nob tail gecko species and i had some um i was keeping some your other species of uromastics at the time and then um i bought those thomas eye like i was telling you and i started to just notice that you know i bred those the first for the first time and they it was kind of an accident like i i honestly you know i didn't try they just made it and they laid eggs and i was like oh wow okay and i they worked out really really well i mean obviously it was putting effort into it and i was caring for them well but it i i had i thought they were too young i didn't think they were ready to breed yet i had no clue what's coming is what i'm trying to say and um hatched them and you know the second i hatched them in a second i posted them anywhere so i got so much feedback so many people were like i want those i want those and i was just like oh this is kind of weird maybe there's like a little market here and i was already very very passionate about euromastics at that time i've been working with them for man eight or nine years already by then something like that i've never bred them but i've been keeping them for eight or nine years and uh and so it was just like okay well maybe i'm gonna pursue this a little bit more and i just kept you know slowly building up the numbers and slowly gaining more experience and breeding other species and getting more and more involved in that particular just in the genre of euromastics and and then um i don't know before i you know it was within a few years it was like no i think this is what i'm gonna do like this is 100 what i'm going to do and i actually have a kind of an interesting story uh you know so we all know ty park right yeah and so um at the time i was you know when i was thinking okay i'm gonna have to do i want to do reptiles right um i didn't really know anybody i wasn't friends with any big deal guys out there and i i like messaged ty um and i was just like hey you know he had mentioned that he was gonna be in denver for some soccer tournament and i uh messaged him and just said hey man i i know you don't know who i am and i know you're very busy and i'm not trying to intrude on your tournament but you know if i could get like 20 minutes of your time i'm trying to figure out how i want to do this reptile thing um i'll meet you at your hotel i just need 20 minutes and he was super gracious and really nice to me and gave me a couple hours of his time and he um chatted with me for a little bit and he was one of the guys who motivated me to actually do it you know full time and i was like i'm thinking about making this transition do you think this is realistic and he was like absolutely you should do it i was like okay sweet like and i literally went home that day and ripped up the basement and um bought a bunch of melamine and built out like a whole i like shelled out so much money to build and make a major expansion on what i was doing and uh you know by the next year two two years later i was i was producing more euros than anyone else in the country um so it's really it was wild it was a weird way when when did you pull the plug on a job like at some point you must have made the switch to go okay i'm gonna put all my eggs in this the euro basket was there a point where you're just like i'm gonna do this now or like how long after that conversation with ty did did you just go all in i mean it was are you do you mean like how long after that conversation did i just decide i'm dropping all my money on this and this is what i'm doing exclusively or yeah yeah okay sorry i'm curious to see what the other option was so the the other option was when did i literally make reptiles my full-time income i don't know if that's the same question or not maybe they are maybe they're not yeah okay so so basically it was like two weeks after i talked with ty or i i like ordered all the melamine to build out more pens and ripped you know like i ripped up all the carpet in the basements was very short but then it wasn't it was um still like maybe three or four years after that before it was my full-time source of income um uh i would say it's been two two years three years maybe where i haven't done anything else except for the periodic seasonal artwork or something like that but yeah yeah yeah and i was before that i was doing all kinds of odd jobs i was you know waiting tables and and um uh you know doing side construction and window cleaning with my buddy who has a window and gutter cleaning service and i was you know i was always doing some other little thing but with the intention of getting to this over the last like six or seven years you know so it's but but again only about two two or three years ago is when it went full time and like this is what i do you know well it's pretty amazing i mean it's always people always talk about that's my dream is to become you know work with animals and it's a lot easier said than done for sure there's so many things that you don't think of as a you know you think it's just breeding animals and getting to play with lizards all day but it's not oh man it's it's chaos i mean i have to admit um i underestimated the amount of work for sure i i was like i really underestimated it you know and and um uh i also underestimate like the value like social media honestly like i i don't know why i feel the need to plug this particular side of social media because like i know that social media is a huge problem and it's causing a lot of societal fracturing and all that stuff but if it was not for social media i would never have been able to do this never because well obviously never say never but like i would have never gotten in touch with some of these guys who helped me along the way who like showed me that this was possible and like encouraged what i was doing you know like if and if it wasn't for social media it never would have happened but i because of social media i very much underestimated the the amount of work that goes into maintaining your own facility and living living off of this stuff and like it's really really hard um admittedly it's amazing i love it i love what i do and i don't i mean i have no intentions of stopping but um it's it's a lot dude it's a lot that this year is my second year with like a proper shop this is i so i now have a dedicated you know before i was working out of the basement of a home and now i'm you know all my stuff is in a in an actual warehouse space a flex warehouse space and um that part that's been insane like learning how to and i don't just mean monetarily like yeah money's always tricky for people right but but i'm specifically referring to like you know i did everything in my in the basement of my family's home for a long time making the switch to a space so many factors changed right like ambient overall temperature throughout the year changed um a humid you know a little bit of humidity change because like this this space has 15 foot ceilings and my basement previously had eight or eight or nine foot ceilings so you know it's like there's you know the the just huge changes in the way everything has to run um changes in the way i have to manage ventilation in the summertime because you know you have to open up doors because the euros they all love it hot the ackees they all love it hot the xenogama that's all hot so everything cooks and if you're not careful you could show up to a warehouse full of lizard bacon the next day and then the same the inverse happens in this in the in the winter here in colorado because it gets god-awful cold here so you know now it's like okay i have to be very careful and i had to set up i didn't even think of this when i started any of this but like getting camera systems set up so i can monitor things when i'm away for security reasons right um getting uh uh uh temperature monitors and setting up backup systems so that way if the power goes out i don't go into the shop to a hundred thousand dollars dead animals like it's just i mean it's it's changed everything for me and it it's been a great learning process honestly you know uh learning uh learning curve right steep learning curve but it's awesome i mean i it's just making me better at what i do everything's just going to make me better you know so i'm super happy about it but it is hard what about the just the stress because i can especially i imagine in the early years where it seems like your livelihood will teeter on the success of a few clutches and making sure that those are healthy now maybe as you progress maybe you could talk about this too as you progress maybe you have more of a raft to float on as your business builds i don't know if there is but like what is that stress like i even get stressed like oh i got to clean these things like it has nothing to do with my livelihood so i can't imagine what that's like well it um it's pretty it's pretty odd so i mean it is stressful it is scary but i definitely waited to move into a shop until i felt like i was really truly ready you know um it i kind of had it in the back of my head for a while that there's no way i can continue this in the current space that i was in right it just the family's home was too small and there was no way to grow no way to expand the projects um and you know so it just became a necessity but there was i knew eventually it was going to have to happen but i was very worried about when because it was like you know euromastics are notoriously notoriously very very difficult to breed um and we can get into why but they're very very challenging and one little tiny change will throw them off in a way that you know or it can throw them off in a way that you just never expect and so yeah it was super high stress but i basically made the decision i the only time i felt comfortable pulling the trigger on on actually getting it proper facility was when i i said okay i have a sufficient number of animals here that even in a bad year i can still make rent it's okay you know what i mean and because because you have to because bad years are going to happen regardless like it doesn't matter right i've had a few of them now and each time they've happened they've been so devastating like utterly devastating but i've always learned so much and i'm i'm really grateful for that experience because it wouldn't give me the same confidence that i have now so yeah you do build like a raft for yourself like you know as soon as things get a little shaky you get better balance you know what i mean it's it's just like like weightlifting right you have to as soon as you start stacking weight on your back it gets real hard to to get those reps right but the putting in the work is what makes those reps in the future possible so um it's it's been hard it's been a real challenge but i love it man like it's only made me feel more alive and more confident about my future in this yeah i i imagine so and so how much of the success do you think is also because you've narrowed in on such a small niche i'm not sure how many people are working with euros in the in the states but obviously not that many because you don't see a ton that's captive reading right right very very few so um it is yes some of what i can do is because i have a great niche right or niche i never remember which is the proper pronunciation in canada we always say niche because it's technically a french word so i'm gonna go i'm gonna i'm gonna go with yeah i'll go with niche i think that's the right that's a good instinct but i yeah so uh i think some of my some of my ability to do what i do is because i i'm having success with it with a group of lizards that is not well represented yet um and yeah i mean i it's there's a huge percentage of what i'm doing that's pure luck you know what i mean it's just i'm very fortunate timing right like when i got into euromastics and i started breeding them in a dedicated way it had been a few years since the last couple of guys doing it in the us had kind of fallen off the map so we're talking about um douglas dix lindsey pike noel alt and a handful of other guys right there's a few other guys who've done it periodically over the decades here in the united states and so there was no one really doing it there was no one who had kind of taken up that mantle and also even then even back in the day most people weren't getting any good consistent results it was they were getting good results but like um bert langerworth would have been the only guy who i would point to in the past and say this guy was doing it exactly as it ought to be done because he was doing everything outside and you know in northern alabama or wherever he was and just crushing it with uh euromastic's [ __ ] of interest which is what he was working with back then but um that was one of the other things that drew me to euromastics now that you mention it is because i i have been interested in them for a long time and i'd read nothing but all the stuff that's so challenging about them um they're very difficult to breed they're very difficult to pair they're very difficult the eggs are super sensitive the babies are super sensitive like all these things that people had said i was like why this doesn't make any sense like why would these these these things be so sensitive like if you get everything right i think they're going to do just fine just like every other lizard they were snake or frog or whatever if you give them the right conditions they do the work for you you know what i mean and so it was like okay how do i you know that that drew me to them and and and that was another thing i had to do before i moved into a proper facility was like i need to know that i can do this repeatedly so i system yes i have brad stuff consistently like i had bred many species consistently for multiple like three four five years before i had moved right um and some of them like thomas i and ornata i'm coming up on ten years of reading those like which is totally weird to even think about like i can't that's very bizarre because i still feel like i just hatched them for the first time like a year ago but it was yeah you know it's like eight or eight or nine years now so it's like creeping right up there and uh yeah so i think that's there's a certain element of luck in what i'm doing um but you say you mentioned not many people work with euromastics in the states and that's true now there are more people now so um i would say that i'm i'm probably the like the largest for now but uh thankfully i've got some competition coming my way which is great like competition is is great it's a it's very necessary there's a lot of the demand for euros is high right it's good um and they're great animals man they're so so diverse and so uh intriguing and there's still so much to learn about them i mean uh even the best publications out there on euromastics are still very rudimentary right they're nothing like what we see for other more well established herbs like um i mean and by saying this i don't necessarily mean that i want them to become this kind of thing but you know the kind of level of knowledge and and institutional awareness that people have of like bearded dragons and crested geckos and ball pythons i would never i don't know that i ever want to see euromastics maybe be quite that abundant but if you know it might happen and it regardless there's not a single species that i would say is is anything near established in the united states at all um and in canada there's uh elizabeth villanue i think is her name um she's killing the euromastics up there too but but again the border makes it we can't really exchange stuff very easily i think she's in quebec yes she is that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah well and the reason i i phrased the question that way is not to like the luck i mean i always say because what i see all the time with people who want to want to breed reptiles for a living they go well i'm going to breed ball pythons and i want to bring ball pythons and i'm going to make morphs and i'm going to try to get money that way and i think there are so many other species you could go after go after something that's a lot smaller that's not totally saturated in the market and you will have a lot easier time establish establishing yourself as the breeder that breeds you can have a ton of breeders working with your mastics and it will still be a tiny fraction compared to the bearded dragons and the and the pythons right that's true and well the other thing too is um we were talking about social media a little bit ago right and i think social media is a is like another reason i'm able to do what i do right if it wasn't for that there wouldn't be as many people i couldn't get as many eyes on on euromastics right but that that's a that's a huge boon for the entire industry because now um i follow guys on instagram and facebook who are doing like one thing like one weird obscure like who's this guy i can't remember his name a blanking on his name but on instagram i think he's at indicator species this guy's breeding those those little purple um they're a little a little frog man i can't i'm not very versed with the amphibian so i can't remember the the latin on these little these little purple frogs that he works with but it's like it's amazing it's just and it's like this one obscure frog species right like you could do that for so many different reptiles i think that's kind of there's some future there's some part of the future of herpetoculture that is people who do like very specific stuff right yes um and this might be like something what i'm doing with theromastix might be like like like a contemporary incarnation of someone who's able to function well because of i have a niche a niche market um so i you know i i i think you're spot on with that yeah i think if like it's almost an uphill battle to start breeding a species that everybody else is breeding it's like how are you gonna like you know carve a spot on the market with for yourself so well i think i think that really lays out the foundation i think that that's a perfect way to introduce how you got into this and and why you're doing it now let's talk about neuromastics because it's uh they are a fascinating species and i think they are actually fairly unknown in the hobby we see them once in a while you see what i didn't realize is most of them are wild caught and we typically only see like one species and so people when they picture uromastics they picture one species and that's it and there's just so much unknown so maybe you can just like start ripping off some facts yeah sure sure so um yeah euromastics depending on the current state of classification and uh all of that there's anywhere from like 16 17 to 22 or so species of euromastics that exist from north africa in morocco across north africa into the middle east and then some of them stretch into india and pakistan and there's a separate there's another another genus that got split off from euromastics a few years ago called sarah and that's got um three species in there so you have sarah laura cotta os musa and hardware guy now those ones unfortunately are not really present in the u.s i mean there are a couple of people who have some sarah but it's we're talking very very small numbers um and and we you know who knows very very very tiny numbers so who knows how long they may may or may not be here but even the euromastics as a whole because of the the countries in which they originate like some of those uh north african and middle eastern countries they're conflict zones right and um so there's a lot of you can't get stuff from here there or wherever and so um and that's changed a lot over the last 30 years so that's resulted in um very very sporadic and irregular um shipments of of lizards and we're talking you know some like for example um euromastics mcfaden i which they technically i don't even think they really exist i know two people with lone males but that's it but it's this species of uromastics that doesn't really exist in the united states i think they've come in once just once right never again they they come from somalia so it makes sense right it's a fail state right so um yeah and then but then you've got others like saharans which are euromastics jri which are the ones that everyone's used to seeing very commonly at expos the red and the yellow or the orange and yellow and the same species they just occur in two color forms and um they are imported by the tens of thousands every year but even those very very very few of them make it into um suitable homes let alone breeding homes and some of this is due to um the kind of onerous uh assumption that they are like bearded dragons which they are not um they have obviously just like any desert reptile they bear some resemblance and care but it's it's pretty it's pretty base level resemblance in care and it gets way more complicated after that um but because of these things and um we just have seen so few go into good homes and then even fewer going to breeding homes and then out of those people who have decided to dedicate any time to breed them there's been low success low consistency and low longevity and so all of those things make a perfect storm for like a lack of availability of these reptiles in the united states now it is changing it's been great to see a handful over these last two years two three years or so i have there's been a number of other people who have started to get more a little more consistency breeding europe euromastics um but even with that it's gonna be another 10 15 20 years perhaps before i would say um that something like an ornate euromastics is like legitimately established like the red you know enough people are breeding them they're they exist in enough places to where they're going to be here um but it's a long uphill battle and some of that is along with their importation stuff some of that stuff is due to the fact that they are um sort of like shell-less tortoises in some ways right um they're herbivores they're long-lived but they're very sensitive in some some regard they need very very specific care requirements and um you get a lot of uh a lot of like you know you only have so many chances to get these things to breed right if if you can barely get them to survive getting them to breed is gonna be even harder um they take a long time to reach sexual maturity so we're talking um three years minimum and that's a fast growing that hits three-year sexual maturity um males can get there a little sooner of course uh you know i've had little yearling males uh make make it make efforts at mating with females and seemingly worked so you know males can get there quick but females you got to wait three years or so and some of that is is due to just regular growth rate some of that's the fact that they take certain seasons off and don't grow at all so they just sit you know they sleep all winter so they take a long time to reach that and they only breed once a year you know you have you have a couple of species that will double clutch but it's but it's rare and it's not really good for them and so and they're smaller clutch sizes you know um except for a couple of species your your max clutch size sits somewhere around 16 to 18. you do get some outliers where you get some ornates and nigriventris and flavafasciata that lay higher numbers in the 20s and even up into the 30s but these are bigger animals um they're older probably but your average clutches are going to be 18 and below you know um sometimes even fewer so for like the smaller species ocelotta mcfadden eye thomas i princess if you get a clutch of 14 that's a huge clutch you know so one animal one time a year they breed low success rate with those who do do it plus their sordid importation history makes it they're just so hard to get a hold of so how why is it that just one or the one is it the sahara your mastics you said is just is brought in at such high levels is that just because they're so abundant in the wild and they're easy to catch or what's the reason there yeah so it's that and it's their country of origin we there's no conflict there's no restrictions on where they can be collected from and so over the years you'll see some people kind of skirt some of those regulations um by collecting animals in a neighboring country bringing them into a into a country where it's it's totally cool like you know egypt a lot of stuff comes out of egypt and uh so if you can get a euromastics in egypt or like at the border and get it over there then you can get stuff imported from there but it's mostly due to country of origin and a little bit of you know a lot you're you know i'm sure there's some cites restrictions in there but um that's yeah those are sometimes not always skirted yeah yeah yeah yeah how difficult is it for you to compete with the wild caught market then because i guess obviously with many of the species you don't have to compete as hard because they're not coming in at such volumes but there obviously are some species where you are going to have to compete and those are the animals that we see in like the petsmarts and the chain pet stores and sure people just go home and like you said they just care for like a bearded dragon and an animal probably dies that's the frustrating thing about the wild caught market is it's sort of just feeding an endless cycle of animals that are probably just gonna have a demise early demise at some point yeah that's a great question so um there are a few ways i think i compete with that the first is that because they are relatively sensitive animals with relatively specific care requirements um i see a lot of people who take interest in them initially and then fail with their first one like the number of people who bought their first euromastics at an expo and it was an imported saharan and it was emaciated when they got it and it struggled for two weeks and then croaked i mean the number but they put a ton they spent like 350 on the setup and so then they'll go looking around for captive bread and they'll find someone like myself or another breeder or you know or someone who's just taking better care of their imports and so it's it i don't find it too difficult to compete in that regard so there there are two species that are imported regularly that i breed and that's saharans that's the euromastics jri and egyptian uromastics right so euromastix egyptia and the other way i compete with that with that uh importation market is i show the animals as they're supposed like i show the best side of those animals so you go to any importers shop or their table at an expo they're not they're europe there's not a chance in hell their euros are going to look anywhere near as good as mine there's just no way and so i know how to i know what they need to look like i know how to make them healthy i know how to show them at their best i know how to take good photos and i and i can display that and i can say like i have a lot of experience with them and i think that um i think people who are interested enough to buy all the stuff for a wild caught don't want to give up that easily so they're going to go seek something else out the other thing is there is a growing awareness like i'm getting an increasing number of emails from customers who know about the importation problem in reptiles and want to buy captive bread you know they don't mind spending extra money to get captive bread that's right yeah so uh yeah that's i think that's one way that i compete um and i also it's like a double-edged sword right because all of my foundational animals all the animals that i got as breeders they're all wild caught of course you know what i mean and it's it's but there's that's the only path to have them in captivity and then slow down those importations from the wild is to breed them more you know and i don't mind like it doesn't bother me that my animals cost more you know like if it's very rare that someone comes to me and says what do you mean it's this much i can go buy it from the expo for whatever whatever i'm like go do it that's fine i don't care like that's you want to do that because you're not you're not thinking about what you're talking about right now you know yeah you're just trying to haggle with me and you're losing so it's like so what and i have you know the again this is another luxury of the demand for euros the demand is such that i can i can be picky i can be discerning and i can just i don't have to sell to anybody i can i can hang on to my stuff you know um so i think all of those things allow me to compete with that market pretty well and i know some of the species actually get quite large and this is where there's a little bit of an awkward animal for to be in like a regular pet store where a kid can go home when it's just like six inches long and they go this is great you feed it lettuce and that's all you have to do yeah and then they get like two and a half feet long and yeah can be aggressive and yep it's like a socada right it's like it's just you know you get a little five inch tortoise and it grows into a 400 pound monster one day right they're awesome awesome uh i love those tortoises by the way but um yeah no you're right so egyptians those are the largest species and those are the ones that they can reach the largest i've ever heard of or seen recorded like legitimately recorded is 32 inches so i think that's about the max end of their build i'm you know everybody says oh they get three feet i don't think that's true never actually seen any evidence of one that was legitimately three feet get a lot of fish tails from people but that's about it yeah and yeah those things are uh uh legitimately uh not to be trifled with you know um even moroccan neuromastics euromastics nigriventris uh they can get 18 inches long and a beefy you know heavy-bodied lizard so they can't they're not small um but uh you know that's why i try to be very picky about who gets my egyptians you know and i have a lot i i i ask people to if you ever have to get rid of this thing just hit me up like i will buy it back from you like you know as long as it's not a nasty mess like i'll buy it back you know like it's fine you i'll pay you what you paid me you know um because i want to see them go to good homes and i charge more for the egyptians for that reason too if you're if you're going to if you're going to drop a good amount of coin on an egyptian you're probably not going to you know you're probably not going to just jack around blow it off yeah you're not going to blow it off yeah so um yeah and i try to do that with most of them um and try to set them up with good homes so what are some of the price points for just like i'm sure that it ranges throughout the species that you breed but maybe you can kind of go give us the high range in the low range yeah for sure yeah so um you know low range can be uh down around 300 um and then high range can go up to like 900 for hatchlings and depending you know depending on the species right like euromastics princeps would pro and thomas i are probably the two most expensive ones i have and i keep them up there yemen's also usually about around 750. um and uh that's just due to their rarity and they're they're just breathtaking beauty they're the best um but then you go all the way down to like the more common stuff but i try not to let the price get too too low just be just for the some of the same reasons we were just talking about which is i don't care that you can buy a 75 jri uh from an importer it doesn't matter to me like it's not the same animal you're not getting the same thing you're paying for a cat quality captive bred animal and you're paying for like consulting with me for the lifetime of that animal you know what i mean i know it sounds a little business minded but it's not meant to be it's meant to be welfare-minded you know like it's yes it one of the stresses of the job is like my customer brace grows all the time and so but i i give i i've worked very hard to give every one of my customers attention if they if they have any questions about what they're doing or what might be wrong or if something's not working out right i will always talk with them and give them the time because it's worth it you know um and so in my mind that that fetch is a higher price tag too of course yeah and like you said people are gravitating this way anyway so people are sort of already primed to want to spend more on captive bread so is there a species within that sort of flight of species that isn't that popular that would be a good popular animal like you're saying the egyptians and the saharas are maybe not the best because of the size is there one that is a little bit smaller that would actually do well or the smaller ones more sensitive and more challenging um yeah no so that's a really good question i think that generally speaking they're all pretty much the same in that regard so and what i mean by that is um i think for years you know the the general vibe in the euro community has been these are the species that are more forgiving these are the ones that are more sensitive um but from captive bred animals i don't think that's true at all i think they're all quite quite forgiving if you give them the right setup now i may be a little bit uh what's the word uh not jaded but uh i may be forgetting how tricky it can be to set them up very very well but you can give them a pretty wide there's a pretty decent range of ways you can care for uromastics and it'll keep them happy and healthy for a long time so it's like wild caught is one thing but i don't think any one species is any more hearty or sensitive than others people i know they're guys who disagree with me on that but i would say there's two species of uromastics that i think are well three that i think are less popular than the rest but way way like the dark horses people are sleeping on them so let me just tell you some of the most popular ones first some of the most popular ones i have are ornate's far and away the most popular euromastics out there and i totally get it they're absolute stutters they're bright blue and green with crazy fluorescent highlighter colors they're incredible they look like a lisa frank lizard man it's crazy um thomas i because they look like jewels of the omani desert and they're they're so beautiful and they're small and they tend to be pretty relaxed you know they're not very crazy wiley euros and then the third would um would probably be egyptians in terms of popularity right um but if i had to say the other the three that i think people don't pay enough attention to are euromastics yemenis euromastics princeps and uromastic's [ __ ] so that's the moroccan neuromastics so the moroccan euromastics is the one that everyone used to have that used to be the one that was important most frequently that was what bert langerworth was breeding at agama international those things were all over the place but they've kind of fallen out of favor and i think some of why that is is because of availability it kind of dropped off a little bit for a little while but also because um [ __ ] of interest don't show color for a long time they don't get when when you buy a little hatchling [ __ ] adventures when they hatch out their brown drab little babies but it takes them about four or five years but when they really start to hit a color like that ontogenic point where they start throwing out all the breeding coloration both males and females are stunning just some of the brightest most like eye-catching euromastics i've ever seen are negro ventress and they're they're beautiful they they come in either like an orange kind of orangey red and a lime yellow and then there's a bi-color where it can be like kind of one colored with the other color a little subdued but but of either one so you can have like a a base line with orange highlights or a base orange with lime highlights and then you can get there's a particular group that's floating around in her pentacles in the u.s right now where they have like these light blue flecks like along their neck and their face and on their and on their chins and then the sky blue can sometimes fleck onto their um sides on their flanks but it's like a a very very light light like gray blue you know what i mean um and and they they get a little larger but they live for a long time the record for moroccan euromastics longevity in captivity was an animal that died at 52 53 years old in a zoo in germany and and it was imported as an adult so it had lived those 50 to some years in captivity and it had reached adulthood before it got to that age so you know these things yeah they can they're again tortoises without shells right they can really live for a long time um so the other one was euromastics princess now euromastics princess is from somalia they're a dwarf species so they're they don't get very big and some of that's due to their their tails they have those like explosion of tails or an explosion of spikes rather on the tail um which kind of sets them apart from the rest of them in that their tail is really intense um but some of the reason that not a lot of people pay attention is because right now they're rare and they're and they're not um you know they're just not i'm literally there's been two people to produce them in the united states myself and and my friend damon gee and then this year there stands to be i think one or two more people but there's so few people who breed them that there's just not a lot of visibility but the other thing is that they are not they're not the bright gaudy colors of the rest of the genus right they're they're slightly more subdued they're like a green and gray blue and it tends to be just a little bit subdued but man it's a beautiful they're a beautiful lizard they're really stunning and um those for my money are some of the most like active interactive intelligent they're they're bird-like you know they kind of have like an alertness about them that it sets them apart a little bit from the rest of the euromastics and they also because of where they come from equatorially speaking um they don't have a huge slump in the winter like a lot of other uromastics do so they tend to maintain a higher level of activity throughout the year so they're more interesting for people right [Music] and then and and that's a that's an example of a species that a lot of people in the uromastics community think are very sensitive but in my opinion they're one of the easiest species i mean i i know it sounds weird to some people and i don't mean it in an arrogant way i'm just saying like those ones have as soon as i got them older as soon as i got a viable pair and they started breeding those things have been bulletproof like just kicking ass you know over and over breeding no problem the females have no problem with it the babies grow and just kick ass and they're strong tough little things so i think they're excellent excellent uh candidates for for for uh great pets now the last one is euromastics yemenensis and this one is an example this is the rainbow uromastics they used to be classified as bentai but they got split from bentai a little while ago and um this is another one who's suffering from super super small importation numbers but they're drop dead gorgeous animals we're talking um they have a base of like a creamy pastel white with um they have bronco like denver bronco orange and blue it's it's such a bizarre combo it's like sunset orange and likes like a dark sky blue and on that white patina they almost sometimes they look like pastel-ish and it's just they're just gorgeous animals they're really really stunning and they're all the captive bred ones that i've hatched have been really mellow maybe they go through a little bit period of skittishness but they as soon as they uh get to like a stable adulthood and they start gaining your tr you start gaining their trust and stuff they are so interactive and interesting you know and they're just they're just awesome i think they are those three i think uh are are ones that not a lot of people have at the moment everyone kind of has their eyes on egyptians and ornates and and whatever but i think those ones in particular are uh cream of the crop that was an incredible answer and i'll tell everybody that's listening that is not a question i sent phil before this i i said i always sent a couple questions off that was just one that popped to my head now that that was as if you've rehearsed it but that was an amazing answer so that's great you can tell how much passion you have for them oh thanks man and that's the funny thing about reptiles in the trade is the ones that are popular often are the ones that are just easily imported and people gravitate towards them the ones we see but there's so many other ones that would be better especially in the euro example ones that are smaller maybe a little more mellow and yeah it's pretty interesting so maybe we could talk a little bit about the i actually now since we're talking about species diversity you should be able to just quickly ask this as far as their native habitats and native range goes are they living in very similar habitats as far as just the landscape or does that vary quite a lot yeah no it varies a lot um so that's a that's a really good question also so um i want to preface this by saying that so far i don't necessarily like i've spent several years caring for all of my euros essentially identically and they all did very well under the same kind of setup so it's not to say that they won't do well in a given setup it's just to say that there are definitely major major variations so animals such as euromastics or nada yemenensis ocelotta and mcfad mcfadenite uh but they don't exist here anymore um and princeps uh well let's leave princess princess out of that one actually so ornata ocelota yemensis and philby i uh are all like like cliff face rock dwellers sort of like american chuckwallas right so they're living on rocky outcroppings and cliffsides living in crevices and probably in some boroughs but mostly in rock crevices and things like that so those guys are excellent climbers and really benefit from a lot of vertical space they also eat um i think it's acacia trees or acacia bushes these they can there's lots of photos um and in fact the the background on my on my phone is a is is a euromastics or nada in the wild eating flowers off of a tree they can climb really really high so they are they are they don't look like climbers no but they're but they're very very good at it um i almost included euromastics princeps in that group but they're not cliffs they're not cliff dwellers they the area they come from in somalia is more like shrub land and um like more colored lizard type territory so like you know boulder piles and things like that rugged but yeah not vertical yes that's right yeah and um they uh but they are also very very good climbers very good climbers so i give my princeps my renata my eminence my philly bi my ocelotta i give them all a lot of vertical space if i can um and then you have other species such as the disbar complex which is um flavafasciata maliensis de spartus bar and saharans and jri they are much more like low level like closer to ground dwellers some of them come like there's photos of fasciata and egyptians by the way on like basically sandy rocky gravelly loam and they dig burrows under rocks and they come out and bask on the boulders and then eat like low little low grasses thomas eye the same way if you've ever seen photographs of oman in the wild actually i don't know if you can see it but there's my friend frank there's a picture of a thomas eye in the bottom picture and it's flat it's just flat nothing with little river rocks it's just all river rocks and it's just flat it looks like there's nothing there it looks like the surface of mars and that's where thomas i come from they live in little burrows in the ground um and then uh i felt like there was one other in there that i wanted to um as you get further east and you get into like the sarah stuff like sarah musai laura kata and hard wiki the hardwick guy our heart wiki hardware guy they they're actually like plane dwellers they live on these these these dirt planes where there's all these little grasses and they pop in and out of the holes kind of like almost like ferrets or like uh weasels or um meerkats that's kind of what they remind me of these long-bodied you know euromastics looking lizards and they eat all that stuff so there's a huge range um and but but at the end of the day they are simply desert reptiles right so there's a certain level of base care that you can give them and they'll all do well under that um yeah yeah no that's that's amazing so yeah we'll we'll come back to the characters we'll kind of break that down in a little bit and but before we do let's get into the breeding a little bit so maybe you could describe what your facility looks like and kind of how you're operating it and then what the the enclosures that you have them in and sort of the setups that each of them are into to have the success that you're having sure yeah so um my space is basically just an open floor plan flex warehouse and i have rows of um excuse me rows of wooden platforms that are just it's literally just a plywood sitting on cinder blocks and that's my base and then i put um various types of cages sometimes they're like aquaculture ponds sometimes they're melamine boxes and sometimes um what i had to do is because i had to do this in kind of a pinch i took uh those blue kiddie pools that you can buy from like walmart or or home depot or wherever and i took you take two of them i cut a hole out of the bottom of one flip them over and then screw that like rivet the lids the the rims together and so it creates this double towel you know because a kiddie pool would be a perfect dimension for a reptile but it's just so short and the euros can jump out so i just double up so they're about 20 to 24 inches tall and then over that i have a like a wooden rack my craftsmanship's not that great but that's okay but you know it's this wooden wooden rack that goes across the top of all the pens and the lights hang from the top so what this gives me is it gives me the whole room will go up and down with temperature in the seasons and that also gives me a ton of ventilation so i think one of the places where people go wrong is they they keep euromastics in a fully enclosed front opening not available the side of the cage is supposed to be cool just bakes you know gets up into the mid 90s and even higher sometimes in some people's cages that i've seen and then um the but in mine because of everything's open top plan um there's a huge range of temperatures my my guys can get everywhere from about 125 to 130 tops in the basking zone all the way down into the low 70s especially at night obviously and in the winter time and in the winter time even lower i've got sometimes it gets down to in the mid low 60s and sometimes even really really high 50s in the cold cold nights during the winter you know when we get negative temperatures outside um yeah yeah yeah so as far as what about the ones the the species that you're saying that need more vertical space do you just have higher walls and how are you how are you accomplishing that yeah yeah so it's basically just taller pens so they're super tall pens and and i keep all of the furniture and everything is kind of localized towards the center because a lot of my cages are circular yeah so they can't hit the walls now i definitely have had escapees but but um that's just been because i i underestimated it's usually been young ones and i underestimate their growth and then they can they can hop out of some of the brooder pens that i have and so it's it's just it's only happened like maybe three or four times but when it has happened i just pull them and i'm like all right you need a bigger cage so i put them in a bigger pen with higher walls and yeah that's it so why do you think they are so difficult to breed in captivity like you said you have success with them you've just kind of been setting them up how they you're replicating their natural environment and having relative ease breeding them but you also said that people struggle with them so what's going on there okay so there's there's a few there's a few reasons why i'm i'm fairly sure that this happens um the first is a poor diet right so um i think people tend to give them too much of like dry foods so um it's it's kind of a little bit of a trend in uromastics you see people feeding them seeds lentils and seeds and and lots of dry processed processed pellet foods and stuff like this and i while i don't think that there's not necessarily anything wrong with giving them seeds because they clearly eat them and it's a part of their diet in the wild to a certain degree i think people overdo the dry and processed foods and then you couple that with improper temperature gradient leading to a really really low metabolic like low metabolic lowly metabolized lizard so they're unable to get the full range of temperatures and metabolic processes going on in their body to live full regular healthy lives now one of the reasons that people struggle with this is because they don't notice for a while it takes them a long time before they recognize something's wrong with their animal because euromastics can appear like they're doing just fine for a while and then have something go wrong and they crash but usually you know we we used to hear a lot about euromastics way back in the day people would say oh i had these animals and they were doing just fine and in a matter of days one of them just crashed and died it's like that's not normal like that's something else altogether something went hor that was like um so you're an athlete right so you know how we talk about low back issues people say oh i sneezed or i bent over and i and i picked up something in my and i threw my back out out right it was nothing well that was years of of of imbalance that you you've never addressed and that was the straw that broke the camel's back that's the same thing that's going on with people whose euros crashed super hard it's something else was going on but the number one thing the the and this is something that's been it's pretty controversial because uh i don't know but uh it's super contra it's i don't know why this is such a big deal to people but um i think the primary thing is you for breeding long term consistent breeding success you need to keep your animals alone you need to house them alone um now i've been kind of tooting this horn for several years and i when i first started doing it this way i had a lot of people who were like ah that's not necessary you don't have to do it that way um and i get it i i i'm not saying this is the only way to do it um but i'm saying in terms of like if you want long-term success and you want to want repeat years of breeding you need to keep your urmastics alone um they are notoriously territorial and aggressive to each other and they are very very difficult for for even moderately experienced euromastics keepers don't know what to look for they don't understand this right um now i could point to uh just to kind of try to steal man my argument here i can point to some friends overseas um a really good buddy of mine camille hammers in the netherlands hammerhead reptiles he breeds heromastics he can breed them longer than me he was one of my mentors learning how to do it camille you can point to him and say he keeps his animals in pairs and he gets excellent results from his heromastics but what people who aren't friends with him or who don't follow him and what he does don't realize is that he has massive cages with multiple basking zones multiple hiding areas multiple food bowls and he has empty cages in his facility all year round where he'll split stuff if stuff gets aggressive and when they have to so he he will be the first to tell you that if in a perfect world yeah you could keep them all alone right um but i understand that a lot of people don't like that because they want they want to have them together right you can have more animals if you're keeping them in pairs right it's just the old thing but i i'm telling you it is so stressful for euromastics to be together and to be forced to be together you know in the wild this was talked about in thomas williams's book on euromastics with regards to babies so with baby urinastics you catch a clutch of 10 depending on the species and depending on the the setup and the things you have that you have going on i'm gonna give you five days to two months before those animals start tearing each other apart they are super aggressive with each other especially as hatchlings now the conjecture in all the literature i have ever read suggests that it's because where they come from is so sparsely vegetated that they aggress one another and drive each other away so there's a each animal has a sufficient territory to sustain it sustain itself right well this same thing i'm telling is got to be true for adults and people will point to wild photos and say oh look this is a pair of euromastics basking on a rock pile they clearly can be kept in pairs well that wild photo is not captivity in the wild these animals can get away from one another whenever they want they have ample access to anything they need and the key is that they can get away from one another whenever they want so if one of them changes their mind and wants the other one to get out of there one can flee and that is not possible in a captive setting it's not possible and i've used huge enclosures to put pears in before and i'm not saying that there haven't been animals that seem to tolerate one another in pairs but most of the time that results in like weird missing of cycles so you'll get like maybe one good year of breeding and then you know or two good years of breeding and in the third year the female lays duds before the male's ready to breed or something like that you know they just end up getting a little off and i'm and and the reason this happens is because there's there's overt aggression between reptiles that we all know and know how to recognize right you see two lizards they're turning on each other they're biting each other's hindquarters or you know mounting each other and biting their necks or something just chasing each other around the cage that's obvious but there's a whole different level of suppression and aggression and bullying that happens on like a way lower level and it's not obvious and it's not noticeable unless you have a lot of experience and so that's the other thing that i think this is the key when i say other people haven't been as successful getting consistent breeding it's because they're forcing their animals to stay in pairs all year round and i'll get all kinds of other excuses for people about why you know they'll come to me you know i've had a lot of people come to me and ask me like do you have any idea what might have gone wrong here and the first thing i always ask people is do you keep your animals in pairs and and almost all the time they say yes i'm like split them up like they don't want to be together even even without regard to breeding just the keeping of two uromastics together and you're not trying to breed and you've got one that's kicking ass and one that's going downhill it's a pretty simple equation man like put them up pull them apart you know and and they they share the same hide they do this that cigarette that's not that's the best hide in the cage of course they're both going to use it it doesn't mean they want to be around each other it's that that's the best hide and in order to use it they have to put up with one another but that's got their cortisol levels high all the time i think this is one of the things that leads to people getting bad clutches right um and then this would lead into one other thing that i wanted to bring up which is um uh the tr any female uromastics that's been transported or that has been recently imported if you try to breed that animal in the same year that it got to your house you're very likely to get dead eggs you're very very likely to get duds now they may be fertile the female might mate and eat and lay the eggs and have no problem but the eggs are mostly gonna fail and and the same it's for the same reasons the baseline level of stress is too high something's not right the animal is not happy the males it doesn't matter because they got one job you know and so it doesn't matter so those ones it's not a big deal but for females in particular all of mine almost always have to have a full year in a new spot like a full calendar year they have to go through you know either go through breeding or don't and then go into winter go through spring go through summer and breed again they have to otherwise it's just not going to work and i have i i had a whole year where this happened to me like right after i expanded and i spent all this money on melamine and building out all my cages i bought all these animals i was finding them i was getting them from import groups i was finding them from other people and i just bought them all up and then the next year i got like 15 clutches of eggs and three of them hatched it was it was awful it was awful and i've just i've seen it so many times throughout the community throughout the years and even now even after having all that a lot of that behind me i get new animals that come in either it's a you know whether it's a like a female yemensis that i bought last year because that species basically gone i need every animal i can get i found one that came available i snatched her up while i could like while i could and and she struggled this year she bred and i thought she had enough time but she didn't she laid a clutch of like 18 eggs but she struggled to lay them she scattered them all over she didn't even bother using the nest box but it's it's it's the first year she's here i guarantee you next year she's going to do just fine you know it's it's crazy yeah it's you know it's really funny listening to you say especially with the cohab piece because it's almost the it's almost like listening to somebody in opposite world where normally people are like don't keep animals together because it stresses them out and of course that's the problem we're in the euro world is the exact opposite you're saying people have a tendency to try to keep them together so do is there an issue with because they're becoming more popular and because there is a captive market for them and people are willing to spend that money are you seeing kind of like weekend warrior type people just go and pick up a couple euros that they can find and then trying to breed and just making all these mistakes oh yeah yes it's it's yeah it's really really common like you know i'll get somewhere on the order of like five percent of my income inquiries every year from people is people saying um you know hey like i want to get a pair i want to breed which is great like i love that enthusiasm i want people to want to do work more with these reptiles right but you definitely get people who you know i want the the reddest saharan you you got and it's like dude they're orange anyway like people say red and yellow saharans but they're definitely orange you know what i mean um but they just you know they think they're gonna just make a quick buck and then they disappear you know um the other thing that you see is you see people who will um people will buy so you know in europe in my opinion um reptile guys seem to have a little bit more of what they're doing figured out they take it a little more seriously they spend a lot more money on it they take a lot more time and they know i'm gonna buy captive bred babies and raise them up right in the united states everyone wants a shortcut so people will go they'll get involved with euromastics and they want to buy adults for me and i'm like dude i don't sell my breeders i sell everything as unsexed babies you know what i mean except for occasional ones in the fall like and you can't sex babies anyway they're just it's not possible most of them um and uh people will buy animals as adults or something and then they go to breed them and they get problems and they wonder why and it's like dude you have no idea where that animal came from you have no clue what its history was whether it was housed with other animals whether it was fed properly like i mean you could be dealing with an animal who has lots of metabolic issues and a lot of things to figure out like you have to you have to account for you know it's just like people right like a human being if they get the less healthy they get the harder it is for them to reproduce it's the same thing with lizards you know um and and it i don't blame people for this like it's not a bad thing i understand that people want especially when people get really passionate about it they're like i want to do it i want to do it but but really the the very best way to ensure your success is to buy captive bred babies or buy good babies even if they're imports buy babies and raise them up sit on them raise them and grow them up give them the time and the care they will they will pay for it not monetarily but you know it's such a headache to get old not even old animals you could get animals that are two three years old they just weren't cared for right they're gonna get some kind of problem you know i mean and sometimes you're not gonna know for two or three years it might as an example i had two female euromastics or nada that i bought they were the in fact they were the first two i ever bred and i bought them as youngsters they were sub adults but they were like five or six years old they shouldn't have been that small at five or six years old so i bought them and i raised them and they were healthy and they bred for five years no problem but in the fifth year both of them had issues whereas all the other females who i had raised and started breeding around the same time i'd raise them from babies i knew their whole life story they have no problems to this day there's no problems you know because you know where they're coming from and um it's rough yeah and i guess that's where the passion needs to be there first you don't just get to say hey these lizards sell for a lot of money i'm gonna breed these lizards if you don't have an interest in keeping them for three years or four years before you even get into that then you're it's not going to be a good it's not going to turn out well and i think your your breeding operation also dispels that myth we'll see what you think about this where people think if you're going to breed reptiles the only way to make money is by keeping the setups extremely simple and being extremely low on the oh yeah yeah sure i think the overhead is too high so like how am i going to make money if i have uv lights or i mean obviously you're going to need uv for these animals but so what do you think about that line of reasoning that we hear quite often oh yeah so well you know i think it's i think there's there's pros and cons to each end right like i you know i i don't i don't necessarily like when i see stuff being kept in racks but i also understand why some guys do it and i understand that like healthy animals can be kept in those setups like i i get it i i don't um there's a there's a that's a great it's a great debate um and i don't think there's a right answer i think they each have a pro and a con i mean i think the more we learn about um microbiomes and um like psychological connections to physical well-being the less in vogue setups like that will be you know um and again maybe i'm wrong it could go the other way um you know there is something like i'm not i would be lying if i said there aren't animals that i have had that do better in a less complicated setup so um so for example my aeromastics thomas i there have been years where i've kept them in massive cages with tons of hives and all kinds of you know they just don't like it they didn't do as well you know they just had a little more trouble for i don't know what it was i don't know if it was a temperature gradient issue or a an illumination issue who knows um i thought i had everything pretty well squared away and and as a matter of fact the same setups my ornates thrive in but now all my thomas i keep them in slightly smaller cages right so we're talking um four by two foot by two foot boxes um you know so relatively small uh but really simple and and if you notice where thomas i come from if you look at pictures of them in the wild it's again it's that martian landscape flat so maybe there's something about maybe it's a visual thing right maybe big objects on the horizon stress them out for some reason or some you know who knows but they do a little bit better with like a little bit more simple setup and a little less complication and just things that are a little more stable a little more sterile but then you've got others like um yemensis and ornata and ocelotta and philbia [ __ ] ventress they they do way way way better the more hides and the more places they have to explore the more microclimates more little micro habitats and things they get to puts around in they get in fact some of my ornates even seem to like when i change things around i mean again that's another thing that's sort of counter to euromastics lore is like most euromastics really really hate change and i i i would be the first to admit that but for some of my rnas they just seem to really like it when i take it you know some of them i have these huge so some most of my adult male ornates are in these big six foot diameter swimming pools so these big big they have a lot of space to crush right and one of the features that i have in there is a big manzanita branch like a huge puffy manzanita thing it's not secured or stable it's just in there it rolls around like a like a tumbleweed and they get to crawl on it puts around on it and climb on it and i feed them on it so they get some you know variety various ways of getting food um and they like sometimes i've noticed that some of them seem to kind of enjoy it when i get in there to clean some of their features and then i put them back in and i maybe change a few things about it they almost like it a little more they seem a little brighter they're happier exploring things you know it's almost like the change was good for them you know um and so i like to see that and and i don't keep myself anywhere near as as elaborate and natural as some guys do you know but i definitely go pretty all out with the setups you know i've probably got three tons of rock and slate and roofing tiles and stones and uh uh logs and branches and stuff i mean and i it's a nightmare having to clean that stuff sometimes because you know you get a euromastics you know you give them a this is a total tangent but you feed them spineless cactus sometimes when i feed them that it gives them gives them the shits and so they'll like you know they'll splatter that one area of the cage from this new food and so then i come through and i'm like oh i don't have to clean this but yeah you know it's still it's worth it because they really really do i mean they're happier animals you know they're not as skitch you know i have some of the stuff that i keep in a much much more simple restrictive setup they get a little more frightened you know i mean it makes sense the stakes are higher for them they've got two hiding places to go and that guy who walks by every day and reaches in to grab him from above it's just going to terrify him and they're going to fly into the hives right but this the stuff that has 30 hides to choose from and a big man's anita branch that i that they crawl up on and i feed him from it every day then they're happy as clams you know they're really great so i don't know it's a but i'm with i do get there's a there is a problem with there is some there is a problem with animal welfare sometimes yeah and i think the main point that i like to highlight is that it's actually still possible to make money including features including some naturalism so it's not like it's an impossible endeavor endeavor and it is it is something that you can do i mean if i was doing something else though like if i was doing um like i think there's a luxury with the desert reptiles because all i have to do is get a bunch of rocks you know what i mean it's it's not it's not like um i couldn't imagine keeping like imagine having like a hundred varanas priscinus right those green tree monitors yeah i mean i it would i did you'd have to there would be so much capital that goes behind live planting cork and you know making about if you want to do bioactive i mean you conceivably you could get real crazy and make some intense setups that that cost more to upkeep than you'd ever make off the animals but the same thing is true saltwater aquariums but that's a base need we recognize that in saltwater aquariums there's like a baseline level of like chemical balance that has to happen for your fish to survive right and with reptiles there's this assumption that that doesn't exist and i think maybe eventually you know like i like a guy who i really admire is ron st pierre and um you know him and him and heather out there in florida crushing what they're doing all their outdoor setups are so cool man i mean i know it's harder to do things outdoors in some ways but in my mind that's like that's the coolest thing ever because they're you know gary i would guarantee that like even if you took the sunlight equation out of it like let's say that there was no sun and you had an animal outdoors and you were just artificially lighting it that animal would be better because you're healthier because they're getting like a natural interaction between the microorganisms of that plot of land in a way that a captive animal is never getting you know yeah yeah yeah is now this is a totally random question you may not have an answer for but i just wonder because it seems like you're somebody who thinks deeply about these things is is there any thing you're thinking about or speculating as far as caring for these animals goes that is something that nobody talks about like i've already mentioned like the microbiome and things like that is there anything that you're sort of sitting back and wondering on a deeper level that we're totally missing and it doesn't have to be just keeping yeah yeah no i think it's that exact stuff so um i think a lot about like microbiome type stuff you know so um you know for example euromastics when babies hatch you have to feed them um well you don't have to but you you should give them access to dry feces from the adults um because the babies will come same thing with american chuck wallace that if you feed when they have access to the poo from the adults they eat it and it establishes helps establish their gut flora right um i think that there's probably all kinds of ways that could be applied at other times so like when let's say you have a uromastics that for whatever reason got a parasitic overload and you have to medicate it with antibiotics if you i'm willing to bet you if you put some poo in there from a healthy animal after that thing goes through its course of antibiotics it's probably going to eat the poo you know because it's probably going to help get some of that healthy gut flora back back going in its gut right um i think a lot about um specifically i think the way i would describe it best is like chaos you know so in reptiles i think there's there's other guys who have talked about this same kind of thing so certainly not the first to think about it at all but you know one thing i do a lot with a lot of my animals is i'll pick a random day every every couple of weeks and i'll shut their lights off you know and i'll just say you're only going to have the uv light there's no basking lamp or today there's only a basking lamp no uv light or like you know in the wild it's not it's not 85 and sunny all the time right like it gets windy some days it rains some days it gets more humid some days it gets less humid other days there's seasonal food availability um and i mean even i've worked with two different types of lizards that have demonstrated very clear seasonal food preferences and that's euromastics and collard lizards and bo and both of them you know dandelions for example that's a that's a flower you could feed euromastics and it's like coke for them they're like they freak out and they go after it right but you give it you offer them a dandelion or the wrong time of year and they won't touch it sometimes not all the time but sometimes you know and it's like there are there are probably so many ways like what i would love to be able to do in some way is like fast forward 200 years and see the way people are keeping reptiles at 200 years because it's gonna be like i mean just imagine how sick it would be to be able to have like a single a single light for everything you need one light that does your whole up and down sequence of sunrise midday sunset twilight moonlight i mean follows the patterns of the moon emits all your heat uv and visual light i mean that oh it's like a it's like heaven right it's amazing or some people would say it's the sun but uh yeah but it's outside dude it's right there you don't have to pay for it but yeah yeah i get that but for those of us who can't do that because colorado is not suitable right yeah yeah it's bad here but i i think there there are probably a lot of things that we're not thinking about um and and people touch on it like the buzzword in the community is enrichment right like that's the thing and i love it i've got nothing against it like i'm not i mean i do things to try to enrich the lives of my animals all the time but i don't want to stop there i want it like what else like to me what's going to be really cool is seeing in like 100 years how many people have like dedicated themselves to a group of animals that's like i'm not just talking about how many your ornate uromastics can i hatch like i want to have the oldest living one ever recorded in captivity i want to have like females that have spent their lives breeding healthfully have no problems like they die of old age they don't die of some chronic illness because you fed them too many fruity pebble looking treats you know what i'm saying like i want to see i want to have i'm getting psyched on having f3 f4 f5 or nada if you know f3 f4 f5 yemenensis like i that's gonna just oh man maybe that's not the same exact same topic but that's that's the kind of stuff that i like stay awake thinking about at night and like how could i you know i i i give all my euros tons of wild foods in the warmer months and i'm always experimenting with that like where can i find them how often can i feed this like this is always going to be better for them you know and maybe eventually i'll be able to set something up where i can just literally grow it all the time you know what i mean i have the spring diet the summer diet the fall diet and then winter nobody eats you know what i mean something like that i think it'd be great yeah well it's funny because i i was just thinking about the the other day thinking about the age of the animal and i thought a cool number for people to keep track of would be the average age of the group of animals that you keep because and we should all be striving to have a larger number now of course you bring in young animals it screws up your average but i think that's okay because we want to promote people keeping animals for a long time so if your average age of your animal is like two and i mean breeders would be a different story you couldn't really of course but for people that are just keepers like if you're constantly getting young animals and all of your animals are going to live into like the 50s or the 60s then we really want to start promoting keeping animals for a long time and i also like the the chaos idea as well and since we both have an athletic background you know that's one of the things with when you're training athletes is you can do a you can run a training cycle maybe it's like three months into a competition and the athlete will have a great physiological response to that training cycle right now if you did the exact same training cycle again after that competition you'll get less of a yeah exactly less effect because your body gets better at that thing that you the stimulus that you gave it and that's just biology in general and the lizards are the exact same way right yeah yeah absolutely and this is where i think the topic of um like sterile setups kind of hey there's a new there's like a new way to kind of frame that because the one thing i will say about um you know like if you're keeping like say leopard geckos in drawers and it's paper towel and you have like one hide and then a wet hide and then a food and a calcium bowl or whatever food and water bowl right okay maybe it's a little bland but you get in there every every few days and you clean everything out and and you know you maybe put the same food well back in and they get some of the same dirt in their in their moist hide so it's not a microbial upset but it's like it's a it's a visual and sensorial one so they're getting some kind of change over right that makes that it's got to make an impact to it you know it's got it's got to be more interesting they're like wait a minute like 10 minutes ago there was a pile of [ __ ] in the corner of this tub now it's completely gone i gotta [ __ ] there again you know or whatever it might be right um or or like uh you know with my with my animals it's not just the lighting right like i um i've talked with a few guys about this but like obesity is a huge problem in reptiles just like it is in people and in euromastics it's a major problem and so you know you these these things come from the high deserts in the middle east and africa like you they're not eating piles of wet salad all the time you know what i mean so we're always looking for ways to like how do i dry that out how do i how can i reduce this like more wild foods less food less often and people like oh but he's hungry it's like yeah yes he is and this is why like fasting is good for you too it's good for people just like you know what i mean it's like good for everybody and obviously i'm not talking to the point of cruelty by any stretch of the imagination but we do it with our dogs right i got a golden retriever she gets two two cups of food a day morning and night so she's gotta fast 12 hours at a time before she eats that's not fun i'm sure like you know what i mean but it's the same but it's healthy for her it's good for her it's what she needs it's how we know how to care for dogs and the same thing is going to happen with with all these reptiles you know like i know people who breed varanas talk about this i have a keys um now i've never because i've you know never bred them i've got some that are going to lay eggs now but i i'm not a varana breeder but like i know already going in that obesity is a huge problem in in varanas and so you know i don't feed any like turkey or or whatever to my to my a keys um it's just just bugs just insects and the occasional rodents that's it you know yeah yeah well it's funny i mean anybody who follows me on instagram knows that maybe like two weeks ago i did about i did a five day fast like a five day workout oh myself nice yeah and it was it was awesome like it was it's it's in some ways easier than you might think but i think oh yeah sure that that is the thing is where i not only do we eat too much we feed our animals too much and the fasting state is an incredibly healthy state for us and our animals to be in that's different than a starvation state we're not talking about emaciating the animal but so much healing happens when you can stop digestion and if it's just perpetual your gut is full it the animals can't heal they can't do all the the processes that they would normally go through yeah no it's true man it's really true and i mean um you know in winter my euros i've got some that that will will kind of go through winter on their own where um i don't change anything about the heat and light and they just sense it they're like i get it it's time to go down and you know so starting sometime in like september late september sometimes even mid and early september i'll have animals that just disappear and i don't see them i'm talking for months on it they just dive into a hide somewhere never they don't move and you know they might come out once in a while go poop maybe maybe bask for 20 minutes or something like that but most of the time they're just down and i've had some like uh when it happens in yearlings they grow over winter you know what i mean like they come out of i haven't seen you for four months and you come out bigger than you were when you went in that's weird like that's totally kooky stuff but you know i have some stuff like if you don't change the lighting or change some of the stuff they won't they won't do it some of them just won't do it and i'm like oh no no no no no you're going down so like i'll pull the heat you know turn the light down i'll drop the wattage on the bulbs or i'll i'll pull their food for like two weeks or something like that and by that by the end of that two weeks they're gone they uh they they dive and they just they just hunker down for the winter you know and um it's true man fasting and all this stuff is and the chaos thing is i guess what i try to embrace because i don't i don't like i mean i don't even like it when my animals are friendly honestly like you know like friendly euros are cool like don't get me wrong that's what everybody wants it's like a pet euro and they're super this is my other cat she's she's telling you the podcast yeah she knows what's up she's beautiful wow thank you yeah she's a she's a sweet little kitty she's still real little and um but yeah she's awesome she's a sweetie but uh oh man i just lost my train of thought uh oh uh the the mean euros oh yeah yeah yeah so tame neuromastics are also very nice but i kind of prefer them when they're grumpy because it's like that's the way you would be if i pulled you out of a crevice out in saudi arabia you'd be a pissy mean thing you know what i mean yeah and i don't like i don't almost don't like when i pick up a euro and they're just super floppy because they're so relaxed i'm just like i mean i get it it's cool and it's cute and most of the captain brett babies start out that way so it's you know no big deal but all of my animals even the adults the the most they let me do is pick them up and they'll be kind of cool with it for a second but then they flinch and they twitch and they bolt off you know they don't they don't want to be you want some vigor there yeah and i think they're probably better breeders you know and they'll probably live longer you know it's just like uh just like people if you have a will to live if you have a reason to get up you're probably going to do everything with a little more intensity than you would otherwise if you could could i mate with this female or can i go eat that pile of greens over there i don't know a tough call man yeah yeah yeah i think that makes sense actually so why don't we wrap up the conversation with talking about care just in general care we haven't we haven't really hit care at all that's true we're already almost uh into the past 90 minutes i mean just i'm really enjoying this conversation yeah me too it's been a blast chatting with you so yeah let's chat with uh chat a little bit about the care you've mentioned some things kind of periodically through here but maybe we can start with the diet because i think that's one of the most intriguing things with with euros they they will not eat insects at all right in the wild are they going to eat it yeah no they totally will yeah for sure yeah this is this is a very controversial topic i don't think it needs to be controversial at all but in the euro community it's contentious because people have argued for a long time that they're strictly herbivores and that's just obviously not true you can find video of different euromastics eating insects in the wild there are some various field studies that show some variety of percentage of gut contents being being insects of certain species usually younger individuals [Music] that being said i don't really feed bugs to mine so it's it's clear that they don't require it uh necessarily but but i guess what i'm trying to say is that i don't think feeding the occasional insect is going to be a big deal so i think if you do ever choose to feed your euromasters muramastix insects stick to the small mealworms the little zoophobia right and just stick to those keep it no more than you know once every two weeks or so and keep it small in number because they really don't need it it's obvious that they don't really require it um but do people is it like a gout issue or do people get worried about having too much yeah it's just it's yeah it's too high of protein and and it is a gout issue euromastics will get gout but i've seen euromastics that were never fed any insects get gout which is totally wild but that's another that's another thing that i'll talk about in a second but um so i keep everything strictly herbivorous um i i've never i haven't given any insects for a long time but i will tell you to this day i have euros that if i've seen a spider dart across the cage every now and again like a little wolf spider and i've got euros that tackle those things and eat them so it's like clearly they they would do it at some point without me even interfering right so um but i i keep it strictly herbivorous diet i use this website called the tortoisetable.org dot uk it's an excellent resource for foods that are good for tortoises and if it's good for a tortoise it's probably good for a hero in most cases so i'm just feeding strictly greens we're talking endive escarole turnip greens um collard greens radicchio i'll branch out into a handful of other greens every now and again and then i give a ton of wild plants and flowers so i'll feed uh hollyhock flowers dandelions clovers uh um nasturtiums uh you know i'll just use the tortoise table is great for that because you can type in any plant and it'll tell you like good every once in a while or go for it you know or don't don't feed it you know or whatever it might be um and so but where i think where people are going the biggest issue in neuromastics at least at the moment that i see is people feeding way too much of dry foods specifically seeds lentils bee pollen and processed foods so um by processed foods i'm talking sort of like some of the processed tortoise pellets and stuff like this now none of those things are like inherently bad for them but i think they should just be kept to quite the minimum um so you know like let's take bee pollen for example um it's very likely that in the wild euromastics would only really encounter bee pollen when they're eating flowers right which is only going to happen in the warmer months so you should probably keep it to the warmer months and not give it to them in the winter time right yeah but the other thing is um it's probably not that much you know those little bee pollen granules that you can get at the stores that's like a hundred flowers worth of pollen or something like that you know and so to just load them like i've seen people give like piles of bee pollen to their uromastics and i used to feed it too but i think it's way too rich they're not they're really not designed to get that high load of of like nutrient density and you know delivered in that short of time it's sort of like us drinking a coke we're not really designed to take in that much sugar all at once to kind of go pre-diabetic right so yeah it's the same kind of thing um and uh but but it doesn't mean you can't give it to them it's just keep it keep it really minor right so i have a little thing of seeds of like finch mixture that i have it's like a little jar about this big and i've had it for like eight years and it's never run out and like once or twice a year i'll take a handful and i'll walk by and i'll throw a couple of seeds in the cages and they'll eat them and then they'll be if that's the last they'll see it for the whole year you know what i mean it's just a rare thing um i do feed some of the tortoise tortoise diets like zoo med grassland tortoise chow and um there's a desert or a it's a it's a it's a it's a blend made by tortoisesupply.com it's like a desert tortoise blend of uh it's like a dry food and i i feed that to them um but it's it's sparing we're talking once or twice a month you know i try to keep it pretty minimal you can give it a little more often a little less often but that's also the only supplementation that my uromastics get so i don't do any calcium or vitamin supplementation outside of what is already in those processed foods and then i'll um periodically i'll put a little bit of calcium on the food of of uh nesting uh gravid females just a little bit but um really so other than that no no sprinkling powders none of that stuff nope no and then did you decide what made you decide against it well it's it's multi-fold right so um i used to keep collared lizards and one thing we would see with collared lizards a lot is the calcification of the organs because people would feed them and they want to it's just like bearded dragons you feed them you know they just powder the food every single time they give it to them and they just don't know how to moderate right but at least with my euromastics i use really high powered uv lights by arcadia brand and every now and again i'll use mercury vapor bulbs um like in the winter time because of the like the level of heat they'll put off is really high um so they're getting really good quality lighting and they're getting a really diverse diet um so i don't find the need to add anything to it um now some people do and i don't think there's anything wrong with supplementing and again mine gets some when they're eating the uh you know like the zoo med brand chow and the pellets and stuff they'll get some from that um but unless i see some some reason to give it to them and they all have strong bones all they all lay eggs the eggs are all pearly white nice and you know healthy fat hatchlings pop out of there so i don't really feel the need to give them much um outside of what they'd be getting otherwise now with little babies sometimes i'll get like a little paranoid and i'll i'll put a little little mineral on there on their on their greens but it's just it's more for me than it is for them you know yeah yeah i think some people think it's like a magic bullet so they're just sprinkling everything you got these giant globs of like wet powder and it's probably not the best well then they also don't like it so for example if you know you you chop up a bunch of greens you mix up a salad right it's kind of wet it's like a little wet to the touch you put you sprinkle a powder on that and it gets slimy and i've seen the euros go over and bite that stuff and then spit it out and eat the stuff underneath it you know yeah they know what they're bitter yeah yeah it's probably really bitter um and so i give them you know and then i also in the summertime i open up the garage doors at my shop and i i'll give it each of them like an hour or two of sunlight a week you know so they're getting plenty of what they need in terms of like d3 and uvb and um and and everything and uh i also feed him uh timothy hay so i take timothy hay uh just like you would for a tortoise and and every couple of months i'll scatter a little bit of it in the cage and it'll do two things it'll act as like a visual barrier because they can burrow in it and dig around in it and it'll you know it'll block certain it'll modify the way features look but then they'll snack on it and they'll eat it all the time um so i give them that and then um there's one other thing which is there's a there's a dry blend of dried greens that tortoisesupply.com makes and i actually um i modified the blend a little bit had them take out two of these things uh because these little petals these little dried hibiscus and rose petals they get hard as a rock and i have had some babies die from uh getting that stuck in their gut like specifically the really small ones because it does it's too hard and they can't break it down especially when they're little babies so i had them pull those things from the blend but then that what's left over is like a grip of like dry dandelion and dried chamomile and calendula and a dozen and a half other plants and that's a dry food and i leave a bowl of that there's almost always a bowl of that in the cage almost all the time but they don't eat it all the time they just snack on it yeah yeah that's interesting so yeah you have a very very wide diet so when you when you go out and collect wild vegetation do you just go outside and just do a collection and then both so yeah so i do go out so i'll go to open space near me in colorado we've got wild dandelions wild alfalfa stuff that grows here that i'll go give the euromastics um and i can just go collect it from open fields because there's places here where i know that they're just open it's just open space they're not spraying there there's nothing nothing bad so i'll go do that but then also my mom has a huge backyard and i i totally conned her into growing a bunch of hollyhock and uh nasturtium and all this other stuff and so i'll go over there in the mornings and i'll pick like she's got like right now this time of year like right now all the euros are getting nothing but hollyhock they haven't had anything for but hollyhock for like two weeks um and uh i go up there and these plants get huge they're like you know six or seven feet tall and they flower like crazy so you can go there every day and i can pull hundreds of blooms and then i just all i do is i just walk by the cages and i strip the petals off of the bulb of the flower because the bulb of the flower is really hard and they don't like it that much so i'll pull the petals off and i'll just throw it into the cage and they'll eat that they just go nuts for it at the beginning of the seasons dandelions everywhere so i'll drive here by the side you know somewhere some open field and i'll pick like a million dandelions you know and for like a month all they eat is dandelion flowers and and i'm telling you you know you don't you don't want to overdo it because like um they're probably pretty rich and i've noticed that if you give them a ton of dandelion kind of like you know you just feed them as much as they'll possibly eat of dandelion it'll kind of like slow them down a little bit they're like they get a little sluggish after because they ate too much so now i'll just walk by and i'll throw like 10 10 blooms 10 dandelion blooms in per cage and they'll just tear out that for the deaths to all they get for the day the whole day you know well and it's probably pretty natural like you know in the in these habitats that they live in or in their wild range they're going to be you know flowers are going to come up at a time of season then they're going to get chomped down and then you know the seasons will change so you're gonna have this perpetual change and it's probably like very mass crop style when they come up just like dandelions do here right you have massive amounts of dandelions then they go away so yeah that makes a lot of sense and so what about temperatures because that's a big one with with uh so you already mentioned that you you have the uv like the arcadia bulbs and then how hot i think you did mention earlier but i forget how hot do does the basking spot need to be so i keep their basking zone at about 120 to 130 degrees and the reason i give a 10 degree range is because i've you know some of them will have preferences over others right so some and i control this by like how close the basking lights are to the basking surfaces and so if i notice they're avoiding the basking site too much i just raise the bulb up and i get it you know and then once they're hanging out under there for a couple of minutes at a time and then flying around and coming back hanging out for 10 minutes and then flying around okay that's that's the sweet spot right so they're not basking for too long and they're not they're not running around avoiding the basking light for too long so i keep and by basking zone i'm talking about the whole i'm talking about the zone i'm not talking about a spot of light because thermal burns are a real problem in desert reptiles right so um i get a space that is as big as the uromastics is so head to tail that animal can get to 120 to 130 degrees it can immerse the whole body in it so even my egyptians um on my website and on my instagram i have a couple of photos of my egyptian pens from above and they're they're five feet long eight and a half feet long eight and a half feet deep and um two feet high two and a half feet high and i've got four or five heat lamps over the basking zone for the egyptians so they're getting a huge projection of heat so even my huge adult egyptians can get full fully hot the whole body can get hot and i keep it about again 120 to 130 and i adjust that based on what i see in the animal and then the ambient temperature i'm shooting for like the upper 80s right so the ambient temperature in the shop even when it's cold i try to keep it above 80. um and so sometimes in the winter it dips into the 70s but i really want it to be very hot overall and then what i do is because of how low all the cages are to the ground they're getting a lot of like they as soon as they go under the hides it gets cold right so they can get into very cool temperatures they can cool off very easily one of the problems i think i see a lot of people do is when they're using stacks of cages or just in closed cages they get all that rising heat you know and so even the animals like the animals in the middle cages and on the top are getting even on the cool side it's getting up over 90 and 100 degrees so the animals never getting a chance to chill out now they might do very well under those conditions for a while but i don't think it's sustainable you know i think it's one of those things that long term is gonna screw with them metabolically because they're never getting i mean there were photos from somewhere around five or six years ago where there was snow in egypt you know i mean that's where egyptians and ornates come from is egypt man egypt and israel i mean you telling me that those animals are not experiencing cold temperatures you bet you bet your ass they are you know um i've had them i've had animals where the power has gone out at the shop and the temperatures have dropped into the low 50s and the animals wake up they're fine they didn't they didn't care um i do a lot of field herping out in the southwest of the u.s and i've gone into arizona in like early march and found chuck wallace in crevices exposed and it's 40 degrees out you know what i mean like and they're just sitting there you know just frozen they don't move yeah and it's like come on dude that has to be integral for their seasonal metabolic functioning and like breeding health and long-term health it's got to be just like whim off you know get yourself you're so cold once in a while hey i did that too i get cold shower every morning see it's been so hot here lately that the shower doesn't get cold enough in the morning anymore but yeah but uh yeah i know it's so true and yeah there's the old joke that the you know you keep the heat on when the owner gets cold you know because yeah oh i'm cold so i need a sweater like my lizard's cold but yeah totally and you don't you kill the heat at night right there's nothing besides keeping the ambient temperature yeah some guys will keep some of the species like princess and thomas they think they need higher um nighttime temperatures and i don't i don't see any problem with that but um mine don't get it and and they do they do just fine um but uh yeah so no it's no supplemental nighttime heat nothing like that and i changed the uv lights you know once or twice a year um i use arcadia brand uh 14 i think dragon is the dragon bulb or i don't remember the exact name but yeah i i restock them i've got a standing order i just get them you know every every year and i have a uv meter and so i i replace them and a lot of times i replace the bulbs and they don't even need to be replaced you can they're still putting out tons of uv they're great products yeah oh yeah i find mine lasts way longer than 12 months so what do you do after if if you're replacing them before they're burnt or before they're spent do you chuck them or no no i hold on to them and i'll i'll use them for like um like alternative cages or if a bulb goes out during the year or uh yeah and i have friends who will buy them off me the ones that you know like they're still putting out plenty of uv so i'll kick it back to them for one-fourth the cost and i get you know i recoup some of my costs of buying the bulbs yeah yeah yeah so there's that what about humidity yeah that's another another good one so um i keep i'm in colorado so everything here is by default super dry yeah so um everything here is baseline dry and i just kind of want to start out with that so i actually regularly add supplemental humidity to my euromastics now if i lived in north carolina or florida or you know alabama i probably wouldn't do that because it wouldn't be necessary um but i for some of my animals for parts of the year they have humid hides available um so like especially nesting females during the breeding season they always have a human height but i leave them in there for months after um unless i have to reuse it but i go through it's been a standing habit for several years for me once or twice a week i'll go through the the uromastic room and i'll spray stuff i would just spray it down with water and the euromastics all bail and they freak out but they always look a little bit better after that you know they like it um they like it to a certain degree some babies i've had people drink from the from the mist um but then uh it was actually after listening a couple of months a few about i don't know four or five months ago or something i i listened to a an interview with ron st pierre and he was talking about nighttime water acquisition so like stuff you know out in florida catching chameleons he said they would come out and lick the dew uh off of plants and stuff like that from the from from the dew so he said he started spraying stuff at night or in the evening because he he likened having lights on to like uh you know putting water into a cup of the hole in the bottom of it yeah if you spray animals with lights on i was like that makes a lot of sense so i've it's been now a few months where i've been going through at night or in the evening and spraying down all the desert lizards and i've noticed that when i do that they come out the next day looking a lot better they're like shinier they look like they've gained a little something from it so even if even if they don't like it you know and then the other thing i'll do is some animals i'll walk by randomly and maybe i spray the cage but i'll choose one or two hides inside the cage and wet it down extra make it an extra humid little high and i've had you know some of my thomas i and princess have gone to use that high some of them dodge it but it doesn't hurt them so yeah i do that too but it is something that people got to be concerned about with euromastics the combination of high humidity and direct humidity we're not talking about like relative humidity high direct humidity low temperatures and high stress those three things are the magic tornado for respiratory infections but right you know if you keep them dry and cold it's safe but wet and cold and wet cold and stressed that's when you're going to see problems yes yeah yeah yeah having a high humidity with some heat is not a big deal yes but yeah you can flip it yeah that makes sense yeah so actually but i think that we've covered the i think the care really well i think maybe one more thing we'll wrap up on now that i'm interested is can you just sort of lay out just an average day for you what does your day look like yeah so um i'll get up and you know go grab myself like a little coffee and breakfast or something uh either i make it or pick it up and i drive to the shop and i pick up greens on the way and then i i get in and i i usually the first thing i do is i just go through and i check for eggs if anything's laying i check the incubators see if anything's hatching and then the first thing i tackle is i do clean up so i i take and i just run through the whole shop and i clean up turds and then uh same thing i'll move into the baby room and do the same thing because the babies especially right now this time of year the babies are just [ __ ] non-stop they're crapping all day long man like multiple times a day so that's usually a twice a day clean up job um and then after i get everything clean i kind of i go around i'll i'll throw some animals out into some boxes to get some sun if it's warm weather if it's winter i'll usually call it a little early in the day but then i'll decide whether i'm going to do like a full feeding where i'm going to chop up a bunch of greens and have a pile of greens for them or if i'm going to do a more restricted day which is what i i tend to err on that side of things more often than not so that might be instead of giving every animal a whole pile of salad i'm going to run through and i'm going to throw one whole turnip green leaf in this cage or i'm gonna go to this cage i'm gonna hang a turnip green leaf from a piece of manzanita and that's all the food they get for the day right and so then i'll watch them as they go around the day and they'll go up and they'll pick stuff from it and then go cruise around and then go pick a little more off of it they'll forage on it um and then uh you know i usually have there's usually something i'm working on so i'm usually either setting up some new cage or you know trying to figure out some animal that's me either maybe one's giving me a hard time and i'm having to figure it out or like right now i got those uh i've seen a gum a tailor eye i've been reading those things for a few years and so i i end up having to spend a little time with those because they're a little more interactive and they're omnivorous and uh really fun to keep and feed so um i'll punch around with some of my side projects those a keys couple of a knolls some nob tail geckos stuff like that and then um i'll usually take a little break and play with my dog and uh throw the ball around for her outside um i'll do some cleaning stuff sweeping mopping managerial kind of notes if i have to box anything up i'll box animals up and i'll take them to ship out on my way home um and then uh usually the end of the day is where like the very end of the day is usually i take baby i have cleaned all the babies and i'll try to take some photos if i can depending on the day um you know and usually it's for records but sometimes so i can post and share what i have going on something hatching something you know something like that then i leave and come home edit some photos drop animals off on the way home at the at fedex to be shipped if it's that time of year and then um then i'll go train and do a home message jiu jitsu or lift weights one of the two yeah yeah well that sounds pretty amazing actually that's pretty sweet yeah yeah i bet you have uh you enjoy each day i do yeah thankfully i'm very grateful it's incredible yeah so when you're talking about going back to as far as spraying them down at the end of the night is that something you have to go back to the shop to do or does that happen kind of as you're leaving at the end of the day yeah so that's a great question i hate to admit that sometimes i go there i go back i go back yeah especially in the busy season i go all the way back i'll drive i'll get home and i'll do my things and i'll go all the way back up to the shop and i'll do more stuff and usually it's because i'm a little neurotic and i can't i i get nervous and i just want to go do stuff and i i'm very easily bored so um i will go back to the shop and i will wet stuff down in the evening after the lights have shut off um sometimes i'll do it at the end of the day and i'll just leave a lot of excess moisture in the cages and it'll it'll it'll come through um but sometimes i go back and i'll find i'll find like a whole new set of things i needed to do it's like oh i needed to i needed to split up these animals and put this one in a different cage and i need to set up this one and you know a lot of a lot of right now is is playing interference with the babies so as i mentioned before baby euromastics can be really aggressive with one another so i end up having to split up a lot of stuff and so um you know for example uh right now i've got a little clutch of ornata that one of one of several that are all hatched at the moment and um one clutch has just decided that they're gonna beat the living [ __ ] out of each other and so i had to split them into two groups of 10 because there was a 28 it was a 28 clutch and then both groups of 10 started to bicker so i had to split them into groups of five so they're working their way down to one yeah they worked out yes and and some of them like [ __ ] ventress and flavor fasciata they often do work themselves down to one and i i don't mind doing it because it's worth it man like they really beat the crap out of each other if you don't they i mean i've had them i'm talking babies where you know they'll scar up the sides just bite my bite by bite and i look for it the first thing i look for is i flip when i'm doing cleaning and i'm counting the babies per cage to make sure i have the same number every time i flip them over and i look at their bellies and you can see if they're biting each other they have these little black triangles or black diamond shapes it's just like a little outline of a diamond and it's that's the mouth of the other euro biting it yeah so i'm like ah damn it and so i have to pull those out and split them up um but it's worth it because they grow better they they don't have any scarring on their sides as youngsters um things like that uh so it's a lot of splitting babies up and a lot of movement a lot of cage juggling you know what i mean how far is the shot from your your place about 10-15 minutes oh okay so it's nice yeah it's not too bad no no but it's only there's a lot of driving sometimes yeah yeah i bet i bet it is are there days where you don't go to the shop i'm sure you go on vacation what not but i i go every day the the times when i go on vacation um in recent years my mom has been the one to watch everything at the shop i mean i'll tell you what that lady's collected more euromastics eggs than half the people in the country man she's she's a killer yeah she's the she's the reason i can do what i do but um she will help me out a lot but she's getting older now so i'm getting to the point now where i'm gonna have to hire somebody or get a friend or pay somebody because i can't in good conscience let her you know she's get she's gonna be 70 soon i can't i can't let her do any of that stuff anymore it's getting too old so yeah so i'm there every day monday through friday monday monday through monday uh you know and and when i do go on vacation she watches and i have ring cameras so i'm keeping an eye on everything and i call her five times a day to make sure everything's taken care of and and and i get stressed when i go out of town but i i do i do tr i do travel pretty regularly so it's not completely unheard of yeah so it doesn't pin you down but but i can definitely relate to the stress of you know leaving a collection and being you know worrying about it so it's hard it yeah and is as great as your day sounds yeah i know that there's a tremendous amount of work every day and not to mention all the work that you had to do to get to that point and um yeah this was uh i loved this conversation you have so much experience and like i was saying before i think we started recording you have more experience than your age should show almost which is really fascinating to talk to somebody like that oh thanks we appreciate that have we left anything out that you wanted to to mention um you know no i just feel like every time i i talk with with people about about reptiles i always just want to remind people to like just relax a little bit you know just like stay humble stay hungry don't don't be a keyboard warrior you know like i get a i'm i'm just as guilty of it as everybody i'm i'm an admin in one of the in the biggest euromastics group on facebook called euromastics club and i love it i love i love helping people i love seeing other people get successful with their animals but um it bums me out to see the way that some people are dividing uh themselves from each other uh all the time over really meaningless stuff you know and um i think that one of the things that i would love to see is more of what i see out of the people that i really admire which is a lot of community building a lot of open-mindedness a lot of willingness to learn and try new things and the willingness to swallow that some people do things differently than you and that's totally okay um so that i think if anything i i really i hope anyone who like is interested in euromastics and listens to this like takes that to heart and like you know just you know the mind is like a parachute it only works if it's open right so you know you just just just do that all the time yeah yeah let and let the animals teach you and oh yeah very much so they will do things different yes that's even better man you should have said that uh they really i feel like so much of what i do with reptiles is like it's all just you're getting out of the way you're just letting them do they do all the work for you you just you get all the benefits and all the downsides you have to pick up the [ __ ] and collect the eggs right so it's like it's a drag but at the end of the day be responsive to your animal don't make assumptions that just because you do it this way with your one animal that it's what everyone else should do it's like no dude until you've had like 500 of the same species and you've had 15 years of solid consistent regular success don't bother telling people what is and is not right about what their care is it's just not come on man i don't know it's a it's a bummer because i see it's in every community for reptiles right there's a lot of vitriol right and i just wish that that i would like to see that be something that kind of falls to the wayside as as things move forward we get people who are doing more more diverse collections more more more bizarre experiences like i've you know i've been very lucky to send some of my animals to some aza institutions and i've got some friends locally here like troll my friend troy at the denver zoo really really he's a great guy man and we've been really he's been a great friend to have and we bounce ideas off each other i mean that's the best part of this outside of the animals and seeing the animals do do well the other people in this industry are like the best part of it man and i just would uh like to see more of that as time goes along you know well i think that's such a good point too to kind of wrap up on is yeah when you meet these people in person you can have a great experience with them and when you interact with on facebook it can hit the ditch really quickly for no reason at all where if you just had this conversation in person it wouldn't even be uh it would just be oh yeah that's how you do it well this is how i do it and this is why yeah it wouldn't be this whole derailment so yes yeah the people in the community are great but facebook it doesn't make it obvious no it doesn't and it's a drag because it's also a huge part of it right like it is it there's so many things i learned from following you know philippe de vocillae or some of these other guys any of these dudes like quetzal dwyer these dudes doing crazy cool stuff right just the wildest innovative keeping and at the same time then it's all the terrible posts that we see of someone throwing three euromastics together that they just picked up at an expo that are emaciated and they're a 20 gallon cage with insufficient care it's the whole gamut so it's a drag you kind of like sign on for both sides of it when you when you decide to get on social media but i think the trend the art the long arc is going to go towards the positive i think overall so uh you know hopefully the growing pains aren't too too dramatic for the industry to absorb you know yeah i i completely agree and i see it heading in that direction as well well phil welcome or thank you so much welcome to the end of the podcast thank you so much for for being here this was just amazing can you let everybody know where you can be found online just plug whatever you want and especially your art as well because we didn't really talk about that much but i want people to check that out too cool thanks man yeah so um errors only dot com uh air is only on facebook and instagram and then i'm also i'm just phillip leads on facebook i do a lot of posting there and then art wise um it's at p leads at pleats but i also have art on my arizona instagram too so i have both of them there but uh feel free to check them all out and uh i mean ditto man it was a real pleasure this is a great a great chat and uh i appreciate the invite yeah thank you so much for being here for sure man anytime and that's the end of the episode phil thank you so much for joining me on the podcast and having a really wonderful discussion we covered so many different topics there and the amount of passion and knowledge you have about the genus gymnastics is really incredible and i know you probably think you're only scratching the surface because i can already tell that's how your mind works you probably think there's so much more to go and i will be super excited to see how far you take your care and how much more you're going to learn over the next couple of years and of course we'll have you back on the future when you learn some more things because the amount that i learned in this episode was a ton and i'm sure the listeners feel the exact same way listeners thank you so much for tuning in i do hope you enjoyed that episode i'm sure you did again make sure you go check out the show notes if you want to have links to phil's facebook and instagram as well as artwork as well the lizards that he produces are incredibly beautiful but same with the artwork that he does is just phenomenal so go check all that out and make sure you go support him there if you are interested in joining us on patreon head to patreon.com animals at home there you'll have early access to the podcast episodes as well as the opportunity to submit questions to upcoming guests and we have been slowly starting to do some zoom rooms maybe once every four to six weeks where i have the listeners come in and we can chat face to face or in quotes face to face on zoom if you are interested in an animals at home t-shirt make sure you head to animals at home dot ca shop and thank you very much to customreptilehabitats.com for sponsoring this episode of the podcast if you're looking for anything new reptile related go check them out first you can find links in both the youtube description as well as the show notes again that is an affiliate link so if you do pick up something a small commission comes back to me at absolutely no extra cost to you and of course that helps me put on this show i think that's it for this week everyone thank you so much for tuning in and i will catch you next sunday

Channel: Animals at Home

Views: 143,256

Keywords: animal podcast, reptile podcast, animals at home podcast, animals at home, animals at home network, dillon perron, arids only, phillip lietz, phil lietz, uromastyx, uromastyx setup, uromastyx care, uromastyx yemenensis, uromastyx nigriventris, uromastyx princeps, uromastyx aegyptia, uromastyx ornata, breeding uromastyx, how to breed uromastyx, moroccan uromastyx

Id: KE50WKCdBz4

Length: 122min 51sec (7371 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021