Reptile Adventure

I often tell people to only feed cooked eggs to your pets. I figured I'd explain why!

Raw eggs contain a substance called avidin, especially in the whites. This is useful to the developing animal as an antibiotic, but if eaten, it can bind to biotin (aka vitamin B7), which is needed for several things in your cells. Eating too much avidin can cause a biotin deficiency, which leads to multiple problems, the most noticeable being skin problems.

For wild animals, it's not a big deal because:
1. As the egg develops, the avidin gets used up, so the egg is likely not as high in it as the eggs we eat, which are either very fresh or unfertilized

2. The diet is generally varied enough that they're not getting a high percentage

Cooking the egg can denature the avidin, so we suggest doing that. We prefer hard boiled for convenience (and the tegus eat the shells as well), but any cooking method is fine, just don't add anything.

✨Make sure the egg is properly cooled before feeding though!✨

What have we been up to?

Communication issues are mostly resolved, although our voicemails still get randomly not delivered sometimes. The other issue was our owner having been sick for over two months starting in mid April. Fortunately she's mostly better now and more functional!

We recently adopted two of the ball pythons from the Queensbury SPCA; they'd taken in over 120 snakes from an abuse situation in April, and they did a great job getting them healthy again (they were severely underfed and mite infested). Cavatappi (pictured) is a very young pastel, while Udon is a normal female who is at least 6 feet long (we measured!).

We also adopted a beautiful male tegu named Goji; he is big, and a hybrid of the black and white tegu and red tegu. He's not unfriendly, but he needs a lot of socialization before he'll be ready to travel. He also appears to be going through "guberty" which makes a tegu extra difficult to deal with socially for a while until their hormones settle down. Goji brings our tegu count to 10, although Callisto is still fostered out for training.

Another adoption was two beautiful corn snakes.

We also accepted a big, heavy redfoot tortoise. He is heavier than Violet, although he appears a bit smaller. He's got pretty severe pyramids, and we're watching to see if he's got long term health issues. So far he's starting to trust us. Thank you to the volunteer who transported him to Albany from Ithaca!

Lastly, we took in a HUGE northern blue tongued skink named Sapphire. Sapphire is sweet and beautiful. He'll be traveling very soon.

Taking these animals in required a great deal of rearranging. It helped that the corn snakes and tegu came with enclosures, although we had to really scramble for space to put the tegu habitat.