next donny show 5th nov
1 ETB. went for almost £800 i think
my ATB is unsexed yet. paid 120
at the min hes in a XS tall EXO terra. ill move him in about 6 months to a bio viv. im just building it up now. gonna be 4x2.5x2 so quite a size. i like the idea of having 2 vivs joined up. but yes., you would need to treat them as 100% separate habitats. so maybe heat in the right\left middle? i might look at this idea some more for future.
so far ive got GTP\ATB Panther Cham and a rescued Yemen. all except ATB on fully bioactive. trying to keep it at a self imposed limit!
Sounds good with the ATB setup for its age and i'm sure you going to have a stunning bioactive setup again for it. Yes £120 is a fair price for it, happy to see they are not taking advantage of customers there, I have been to a few of the reptile shows and they in most cases try to take advantage of the newbies to the hobby and price things in a silly manner or worse have very poor quality animals for silly prices.
The ETB for £800 I hope it was a Basin(
Corallus batesii) type that went for that as Northerns/Surinam (
Corallus caninus) are a fair bit cheaper. The more I look into ETB's in the UK market the more I notice some strange monopoly going on with these animals, it's like they fix the prices between breeders I even saw a pair of breeding Basins for £10,000 but they were advertised in such a strange way and not once did they show proof of babies from the pair or even state their age or if they were captive bread pair or farmed or wild caught. The whole advert for them rang a lot of warning bells to me. Then there was adverts for some for £250 and again bells rang because that's a clear sign there is something wrong with these, a lot of people that don't know about snakes especially the GTP and ETB is when they are selling young-lings cheap is because they know they die in a very short period of time or part of the batch that were born are dying off slowly as they are trying to sell them and know they will not survive with the new owners and if you read the small print on the sale they will say you get a week to 2 weeks guarantee on them and anything after that is basically your fault if they die, I have even seen some adds state 3 days only.
I never rush in buying any animal and have waited years to get the right one, the GTP I have now is a great example of it as I use to have a pair of Biaks many years ago and one was red and one was yellow as a baby but as they matured they didn't look like how I thought they would and didn't like their look so sold them on to someone who appreciated that look of a GTP, one turned into a "mite phase" it was covered in black spots and almost looked more black than green and yellow. It looked like almost these designer GTPS they sell now, this was years ago before all this designer rubbish, I like my animals to look like the wild versions and maybe a slight bit brighter so they don't brown out with age for example or more intense wild colour, but in the wild "morph". It's funny to think I got rid of them Biaks because now they are worth a fortune that type of looking type but to me an animal I keep must be one I fall for and want to keep for life of the animal and sadly they were not that and wanted to give someone a chance that wanted that type and would keep them to their full lives.
The next bunch I am after the ETB,ATB and maybe a Carpet python all again have to be females (I only want female snakes as my personal pets as they get larger and not as crazy as males get at breeding season, some males even starve themselves to death in some species at breeding time and never eat again. Some you can assist feed to get them going again but that has its problems too) and exactly how I want them to look and must be in good health, The ETB I will get will be again one that has gone threw the colour change and a year or two old to prove it is a survivor and not one that will drop dead after a while. The ATB is like the one you have I'm after and again must have a nice look as the Halloween morph start out with the orange colouring and with every shed become less orange in the orange areas but the adult version is a very pretty look too. Yours is stunning as it has very defined patterning and will look great as an adult.
Yes the two vivs in one would be heated down the middle and cold ends at each end, that's why I say it would be easier to set that up
and make it look great. A project for the future, first I have to find a female ETB I like at a price I am willing to pay, that's the hurdle I have with pets I want to keep and not pets I'm re-homing because previous owners had some issue with them. The Ball Python I have was a re-homing snake as it tagged the owner and they freaked out and wanted rid of it, it was like 6 months old and tiny when I got her and she was basically a re-homing case to me when I got her but fell for her and she's now mine for good, sweetest girl and amazing personality and then you have people that call them pet rocks, she really is an amazing snake and has never shown that pet rock behaviour. One of the reasons I kept her because she was a very untypical Ball Python and has a very curious nature that I find really fun and she reminds me of my Burmese Python when she was younger too with the way she behaves.
So as you see I'm really picky when it comes to my personal pets and this is why I don't like how the "hobby" has become where people seem to collect them like playing cards and trade them in the same manner, my pets are life time pets not trading cards and the re-homing ones are ones I get to save their lives or to stop the previous owner getting hurt, all the re-homing ones when I get them are treated like my personal pets till I find them a good home that understands what they are getting into with keeping a snake, only snakes I don't re-home are the giants anymore as I don't have the space (Retics,Burmese, rock pythons, anacondas, Boa constrictors, large scub/amethystine pythons and some of the larger/giant colubrids as they can be a real handful when they don't play nice and extremely fast snakes), but if they are under 8 foot I might give them a chance if I know I can re-home them in a couple of weeks to a month, anything larger is a no go sadly in the place I live right now and if I had the space for such a large snake my 25 year old Burmese would be the first snake living with me and not at my mums in my old bedroom.
Also I hate that people that collect reptiles as a hobby/pet keep them in RUBs all their lives (breeders is a different matter), none of my snakes have ever lived in a RUBs for more than a year and that was the Ball Python only as she was a re-homing case and still a baby,then I realised she was a keeper and went straight into a Vivarium. I love to see them and see how they are doing every time I walk past them and handle them, a RUB is for breeders or very young snakes/reptiles that are stressed in a large Vivarium only.
Love what you are doing with the ATB in the small Exo and then moving it up to a bioactive that's how its done
. How is the ATBs attitude ? From the picture it looks like it has the typical ATB attitude
, more you handle it as a young one the better it will be as an adult with them, they are a lot easier than a GTP/ETB with an attitude as you will find out
, they actually make nice handling snakes when you get them from young and handle them, but of course always step with care around others with the ATB when an adult as they are very motion orientated so tell family/friends when it's out not to make sudden movements around it. Keep us updated on the reptiles.