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Jonathan's Jungle
News from
July - September 2009
16th
September 2009
I have acquired some new
animals this week, and am very pleased indeed with
them! Today I visited a good friend and snake
breeder to buy one of his beautiful baby
Western hognose snakes,
a species of snake I have always admired but for
some reason have never kept before in all my 20+
years of snake keeping!
He is so tiny because he
only hatched on August 28th 2009, so is not even
three weeks old yet!! I weighed him when I got
home and he is only 11 grammes in weight!
Hognose snakes are named because of their unusual
(and I think very cute) upturned snout, which in the
wild is used to dig in the soil to dig out frogs and
toads to eat. You can see the upturned snout
really clearly in this picture:
I have decided to name him
Puff, because if hognose snakes are threatened they
are able to flatten their neck like a cobra and hiss
loudly to scare away predators, with the hissing
sounding like a puffing noise! Despite
being able to do this, Puff has so far shown no
interest in doing so and I would even say that he is
the most relaxed and docile snake in my collection!
You can see above that Puff
has a beautiful greenish tinge to his skin, and I am
looking forward to seeing how this changes as he
grows - watch this space! For more information
and pictures of him, please click
here.
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As well as Puff I also
acquired a new pair of praying mantids earlier this
week, a species which originate in Cameroon in
Africa known as
Griffin mantids. The female is a lovely
big mantis and mainly grey in colour as you can see
below:
Like all species of praying
mantis, these animals are skilled predators and eat
a range of insects and other small animals. In
the picture below the female has caught a cricket in
her sharp front leg spines and is devouring it using
her powerful mouthparts:
The male of this species is
much more brightly coloured and attractive than the
female and is capable of flying very well, having
well-developed wings and a much lighter body than
the female. As you can see he is a very
attractive animal indeed:
Mantids spend quite a lot
of time cleaning themselves and they use their
mouthparts to do so, a little bit like a cat!
Here is the male cleaning his front leg:
Mantids certainly do have
an unusual appearance and I personally think their
eyes are amazing, but some people I know find their
eyes a bit too weird looking to be considered nice -
I can't imagine why...!
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5th
September 2009
August was a relatively slow news
month, with no new animal acquisitions made at all
for a change! Watch this space for new
additions which I'll be making between now and the
end of October in particular, some of which I am
very excited about...
I thought I'd just take the
opportunity here to show how the baby
Imperial scorpions born
at the end of January are growing, as they're all
doing exceptionally well. They've come a long
way from being like blobs of jelly on mum's back
like this back in January...
...to being well-developed
scorpions with much darker exoskeletons and a sharp
sting like this (pictures taken towards the end of
August):
They are growing very
rapidly indeed and eating large quantities of
crickets!
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4th
August 2009
Mrs Noah the rainbow boa
shed her skin at the weekend, and is now back to
looking her very beautiful self again after looking
very dull for the few days prior to shedding! Below
are 'before' and 'after' pictures of her sitting in
her sphagnum moss-filled hide box, which clearly
demonstrate the significant change which her skin
colour goes through during the skin shedding cycle,
with 'before' on the left and 'after' on the right!:
 
As you can see, the change once she has shed
her skin is quite amazing! In the case of Mrs
Noah, her newly shed skin is especially beautiful
because of the 'rainbow' sheen which it has when
viewed in good light, as seen below:
In my opinion this is one
of the most, if not the most, beautiful snake
species in the world and I am delighted to have Mrs
Noah in my collection (as are the many hundreds of
children and adults who have met her so far since I
acquired her in April 2009)! For more pictures
of Mrs Noah looking stunning, and for more
information about this amazing rainbow effect and
why it occurs, please take a look at her own webpage
which you can reach by clicking
here.
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28th July 2009
After a month of no updates at all here we are
having two in the space of two days! This time
it's the turn of
Mrs Noah my
Brazilian rainbow boa, who is about to shed her
skin and is therefore looking quite different to her
usual colour as you can see here!
When any snake is preparing to shed its skin, its
natural colour fades and the skin often takes on a
very dull appearance compared to its normal
colouration. This is caused by a build-up of
fluid between the old outer skin and the new inner
skin. This fluid helps the snake to shed its
skin when the time is right, by allowing it to slide
off more easily. In the case of Mrs Noah you
can still see some of the rainbow colouration which
gives her species their common name but they are
definitely much paler and subdued compared to her
normal, amazingly vibrant colours!
To ensure that all of my
snakes are able to shed their skin without any
difficulty I always provide a tub of moist
sphagnum moss in their enclosures when they are
preparing to shed their skin, as this helps to raise
the humidity level which prevents the skin from
being too dry to shed. Anyone who has met Mrs
Noah at their school, party or any other event will
also know that I keep a large moss-filled tub in her
enclosure the whole time anyway, as she likes the
dampness it provides due to her natural habitat
being a nice moist rainforest!
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27th July 2009
I can't quite believe that
a full month has passed since my last update!
The month of July has been another incredibly busy
one in terms of visits to schools, pre-schools,
children's clubs fetes, parties and many other
special events. I'd like to say a big thank
you to everyone who has invited my animals and I to
visit them so far this year, whether for the first
time or the second, third, fourth or even fifth time and
I will hope to see you again soon!
I will also
do my very best to update this page more regularly
in the coming months and thank you to all those of
you who have emailed to show interest in my animals,
I very much appreciate this interest and am sorry to
have taken a full month to write here!
July has seen my
first crested gecko
babies to hatch for a while and in fact three
hatched all at the same time, or at least within 48
hours of each other! They are
incredibly cute as you can see here!:
These three join quite a
large collection of crested geckos I already own,
around 25 individuals at the moment, as they are one
of my favourite species of all!
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I
have had two particularly important moulting events
during July, amongst the many many
moults which always happen every month in my animal collection!
Firstly my largest tarantula, Mona the Brazilian giant
white knee, moulted. Those of you who are
regular visitors to the website will be wondering
who Mona is, as she doesn't feature on the 'Meet
the animals' page at all!
I have never yet created a
page for her or introduced her into my Jungle
Roadshow because as yet she is not fully used to
being handled, having only been in my collection a
relatively short time. As such she can
sometimes be quite fast-moving when I handle her,
which some people who aren't too fond of spiders
would undoubtedly find a bit unsettling to see
(especially considering that at 16cm across her leg
span she is quite large)! Her moult happened
overnight and took several hours to complete, here
she is looking beautiful soon after she had
finished...
... and here she is
climbing the glass on one side of her enclosure a
few days later!
The next two pictures
clearly show the moulted exoskeleton, or exuvium,
with the one on the right showing how it looks when
the 'head' area (or carapace) has been
flipped backwards, which would actually occur at the
beginning of the moulting process.
This next picture shows a
close-up detailed view of the right hand picture
above, and you can clearly see the holes or tunnels
through which the eight new legs and two new fangs
(the holes at the top) are pulled clear from the
now-empty exoskeleton during the moulting process.
This final picture gives an
indication of Mona's size, although of course she
has grown a bit now as her 'new' exoskeleton is
always at least a little larger than the one she has
left behind! To me this still remains one of
the most amazing things to witness in the natural
world, and how they can pull their entire new body
out of the holes above without breaking the old one
is quite simply amazing!
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The other significant moult
occurred when one of my sub-adult female
jungle nymphs
moulted to maturity. This process differs from
that of a tarantula because although tarantulas have
to moult whilst lying on the ground on their backs,
jungle nymphs (like all stick and leaf insects) need
to hang upside down in order to complete the
moulting process. Unfortunately I did not
capture her actually moulting on camera but here is
the newly matured adult (top) pictured next to her
moulted exoskeleton (below).
Every month in my
collection a large number of moults occur amongst my
stick insect collection, the reason for this one
being significant is that the moult of a jungle
nymph to maturity is a difficult process due to
their size. The conditions for moulting have
to be just right including the correct air
temperature, relative humidity and having sufficient
space to hang down from the roof of their mesh
enclosure or from a branch.
If something isn't quite
right they can become trapped inside their old
exoskeleton and lose antennae or limbs, be
disfigured in some way on emerging or in extreme
cases they can die. As you can see this one
has come out perfectly and is looking gorgeous!
You can also see from these pictures of her in my
hand she is very spiky and quite large, measuring
around 12-13cm not including
her antennae!
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