Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Got out to takes some pics. A very sunny day made it interesting. The top photo is female from Germany. The bottom two are Rex Knight's stock

Nice looking stock, John. I might be a little prejudiced there, but that's a good looker from the German stock too. Looks like you have quite a few Mandarins.

Do you have an opinion on whether the Sichuan stock requires less humidity than Southern China stock? TC

Thanks Terry. I've been able to get some good stock from several sources now. I'm up to an even dozen of the little buggers and only need a few more to complete my collection.

About the humidity, that's one of the conditions that I'm still working on controlling. I have my adult mandarins in Freedom Breeders which do not retain any moisture. This has forced me to spray very often. I've had shedding issues with both the South China mandarins and with the Sichuans when they weren't given extra moisture. In my particular case the South China that had a dry shed did a better job of shedding it on his own than the Sichuans did. But I don't have any definite feel yet for exactly how wet each type likes it (only definitely wetter than I manage to keep things). The little guys are in sweater boxes and I manage to keep them plenty moist. They have the opposite problem. The substrate gets moldy pretty quickly. I've been thinking of switching over to peat moss instead of aspen, but that stuff gets pretty dusty when it's dry. I'll probably try a test cage and see how it works.

Best regards
John

John, glad to hear the female's eating---good job. I've had much success with moist cypress mulch in suitable size comtainers for the adults and babies. Any other medium I've tried seems to grow mold fairly quickly, but no such problem with cypress---and it's cheap----a large bag from Lowe's is about $3. Love the mandarin pics. Will anyone out there have Vietnamese mandarins available?
Good luck, Jeff

Hi Jeff:
Yeah, now I just have to get her brother to cooperate (I like a challenge). Do you use cypress for the whole cage or just for a moist hide? Any nose scratching issues with the cypress?

Glad you liked the photos. But because of the quality of the photographer the snakes are not being done justice.

Very nice shot you have on this post. Much better lighting than my photos.

The only one I know who is producing viets is in Germany. I've been trying to get on his list, but no luck yet.

Keep in touch

John

The cypress is only in the hides. The floor subatrate I use for all my animals is Sani-Chips. In the breeder cages, I have 2 plastic shoeboxes with a hole in the top. One is fairly dry cypress, one is always very moist. They burrow and stay in both. Nothing foreign grows in it----it keeps for months. In the hatchling shoe boxes I use paper towels and a small platic container with a hole filled with moist cypress. They seem to love it---no shedding problems.

Hi, John. Sorry so slow about responding, but I was gone most of the day yesterday.

How come you have so many Mandarins? Is it because there's just that many types?

I've had some shedding problems with my Mandarins too, through the years. But usually our humidity is in the 50% range which they can handle adequately. Sometimes I've had to put a moist hide in their cage to help with their sheds.

I use aquarium tanks with large water jugs and a large hide box. I put shredded aspen in the open areas and sometimes cover it with crumpled newpaper. Then I spray the paper when I think it's getting dusty, or when I'm about to feed my snakes, or at cleaning time. This seems to provide some extra humidity for them...

Hope this helps a little and good luck with that great collection...Terry

Thanks Terry. Good info. Optimizing these setups is more art than science. I'll still be adjusting conditions for the forseeable future. It's funny what you learn from mistakes. A lot of mandarins are sparked to eat while warming up after a mini-brumation at the beginning of their first winter. I got a holdout to start eating during a cool down to 70 degrees in August after it had been refusing food for a year.

The reason for my large group of mandarins is that I'm looking for a particular appearance. The lines I've gotten tend toward the lighter ground color and larger yellow saddles (the "Sichuan" look). After I've had a chance to breed these lines for a while I may concentrate on one line or another. But I'm something of a perfectionist, so who knows? Maybe I'll still be tweaking this project for a long time to come.

Regards
John

Thanks, John. I like the light grey ground color too, with little or no speckling. I also like the large yellow blotches with bold, black borders. The N. Vietnamese look is pretty cool. I hope we get these soon in the hobby. One more thing. Krumke had hypo and anery Mandys. Do you know if he bred any of these?

TC

Terry:
I'm not sure about Karl's projects. I like that photo of the anerythristic on his site. Although I think if he were already producing anerythristic mandarins we'd have seen them showing up. As for the hypos, that seems more likely. But mandarin traits like hypo may not be as simple as what people have done with corns. There may need to be a whole lot of refining involved. And I wonder if enough generations in captivity have occured yet to test these things out. Of course the fact that I'm speculating about this indicates that:
1) I don't know
2) That I'm interested in the answers myself.
3) It's one of the things I'm trying to answer too.

Best regards
John