YouTuber teaches reptile care
Joseph Brabin feeds his bearded dragon. • Photos Submitted
By Tom Victoria
Joseph Brabin not only cares for his reptiles, he instructs other pet owners how to tend to their own as well.
The 18-year-old college student educates people on reptile care via his YouTube channel JTB Reptiles, where he employs graphics to help liven up the content.
Joseph said problems occur with reptile owners when they can’t discern the needs of cold-blooded animals.
“Reptiles have a subtle way of doing things,” he said. “It’s easy to miss the cues.”
Joseph said reptiles are intelligent creatures. He cited the example of his pets, which include three leopard geckos, knowing how to ask to be released from their enclosures by such actions as pressing against the glass doors.
His other lizards, snakes and central bearded dragon also know when their owner is preparing their meals.
“All my reptiles have learned when food is coming,” Joseph said.
The bearded dragon in particular is keenly aware.
“He springs to attention,” Joseph said. “He gives you a long gaze with one eye.”
He said another mistake reptile owners make is never keeping up with modern approaches to care.
After handling reptiles, Joseph realized artificial lighting would not have an adverse effect on them just because they’re nocturnal animals.
“There was something flawed here,” he said about that belief.
Joseph looks into the vivarium.
According to Joseph, nocturnal species actually need at least two types of lamps: a fluorescent lamp, which provides ultraviolet radiation and a small amount of visible light, and a halogen lamp, which emits infrared and additional visible light.
“A small LED for an extra boost of visible light wouldn't go amiss and will let you grow plants in the enclosure,” he said.
Joseph said diurnal, or daytime, species, have more needs, including a mandatory boosting of background visible light and warmth.
“You want to use these lamps to replicate the sunlight conditions your animal would find itself in should it choose to bask in nature, taking care to offer areas of shade as well as light,” he said.
Joseph said lighting is just one misconception people have about reptile care.
“There are things in the hobby which are known facts that often go unchallenged,” he said.
Joseph cited such examples as snakes live in dark holes and don't receive exposure to sunlight; bearded dragons don't recognize standing water from drinking water, so they shouldn't be given a water bowl; and reptiles won’t overindulge when they're full, so it's impossible for them to become overweight.
“These things are just stated and not questioned, believed, and passed on to anybody who listens, which is most people getting into keeping reptiles,” he said. “Yet, it takes only a scratch on the surface to see that these things are only half-truths at best. To address the examples provided, certain snakes do spend lots of time in burrows, but they don't spend their whole lives in the same burrow without ever having contact with sunlight and what is more, many snakes do openly bask. Bearded dragons don't drink often from standing water, but they definitely do it, so why not offer them a water bowl just in case. Reptiles are greedy opportunists. The majority of reptiles I see are overweight, if not obese.”
Joseph said more pet owners need to question what they hear about reptile care and not blindly accept folklore husbandry.
Bearded Dragon
“We want the information itself to be right,” he said. “And we'll only get there by thinking and challenging, not by accepting the opinion of the crowd.”
In addition to the bearded dragon and leopard geckos, Joseph has a corn snake, two Chinese leopard snakes (also known as twin-spotted rat snakes), a crested gecko, three lined day geckos, two Western green lizards and dyeing poison dart frogs.
His interest in reptiles started like any other red-blooded boy - an imagination captured by dinosaurs. He eventually shifted focus onto living reptiles after initially obtaining fish.
Then came the first gecko, stored in an old plastic box with a heat mat taped to the bottom.
“It was really bad,” Joseph said about that setup. “It never even had a thermostat.”
He later switched to larger glass and wooden enclosures.
“I view a vivarium as having three principal components,” Joseph said. “The first and most obvious is all the stuff your friends will notice when they visit: the decoration. This aspect of an enclosure is something that any keeper can achieve and understand. It might seem simple, but if the inside of the enclosure looks like the reptile's natural habitat, you've probably done a good job at decorating it. Reptiles want to dig, bask, climb, hide. Soil, sand, branches, rocks and leaf litter cater to all of these things and at the same time, make the enclosure look like the slice of nature it's meant to represent.”
He said the best part about adorning enclosures is that process can be inexpensive.
“You can save a lot of money by collecting and sterilizing appropriate things from your local park,” Joseph said. “The garden center will also be your friend. Stones intended for garden rockeries are much cheaper than what's sold for vivaria. Get creative.”
He said the second component to an enclosure is electrical.
“We want the information itself to be right. And we’ll only get there by thinking and challenging, not by accepting the opinion of the crowd.”
“You really cannot underestimate how vital lighting is for all species, whether diurnal baskers or crepuscular (twilight) shade dwellers,” Joseph said. “The majority of reptiles, certainly most of the ones we have in captivity, thermoregulate by moving to and from areas of light and shade. Maintaining their body temperatures governs their daily lives. If you don't offer the right lighting, they simply will not thrive.”
But lighting isn’t the only concern. Joseph also listed ventilation via fans as well as automatic misters and foggers.
He said the third factor, space, might seem trivial compared to the other two, but really isn't.
“You cannot have a good reptile enclosure if it's too small,” Joseph said. “For example, I used to have my lined day geckos in a 40 x 40 x 50 cm vivarium, but it was not big enough. Yes, the geckos are only about 4 inches long including the tail, but that enclosure still felt too small for them. There was just something in the behavior of the geckos that seemed wrong to me, so I upgraded them to a 90-centimeter-by-45-centimeter-by-90-centimeter enclosure, and the difference in their behavior has been enormous. They're less shy, for one, and a lot more active.”
He cited another example being the periodic relocation of his corn snake to larger enclosures, which never seems enough. An upgrade also is planned for the bearded dragon.
“Please. If you are thinking of starting a reptile collection, plan on having less animals in big enclosures,” Joseph said. “Your animals will thank you for it.”
Joseph’s passion will be his career. He is a biology major focusing on genetics and taxonomy at Cambridge University.
“As I see it, taxonomy is a bit of a mess,” he said. “The classic approach - first put forwards by Linnaeus in 1735 - entailed putting organisms into hierarchically ranked categories (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and species being the main ones used today) simply for the point of convenience.”
He pointed out the scientific names for organisms, such as Homo sapiens, is comprised of the Genus to which the organism belongs and the species.
Joseph and his bearded dragon.
“We use something similar in common parlance. A blackbird is a type of thrush (Family Turdidae), a thrush a type of bird (Class Aves), a bird a type of vertebrate (Phylum Chordata), a vertebrate a kind of animal (Kingdom Animalia), and so on and so forth. The interesting thing about this classification system is that it fits in nicely with concepts of common descent. You can, for instance, state that any given bird is more closely related to any other bird than it is to any other living organism. Thus, as we have moved away from classifying organisms just because it's convenient to classifying them with the intent of saying something about their relatedness - a shift in focus which came naturally with our understanding of evolution - the old Linnaean system hasn't really been changed.”
Joseph started making videos showing his fish swimming in their aquarium. As time went on, he filmed his reptiles. But when Joseph knew was not going to keep acquiring new reptiles, he focused more the ones he had, leading to the educational aspects coming to the forefront.
However, Joseph knows many viewers don’t want to be educated, they are seeking entertainment.
“Pretty much all of the big reptile channels on YouTube are popular because they buy lots of animals,” he said.
Joseph said people are not invested enough to care about lighting needs for reptiles, but will check out a video titled something like: “Buying 100 new, rare snakes and feeding my giant anaconda a pig!”
According to Joseph, churning out videos like that becomes a vicious circle.
“YouTube is a long, hard game to succeed at, and your position is never certain,” he said. “You drop the ball for a few videos on the bounce, and you'll have to fight to reclaim your former relevance. If someone gets views by buying new animals on a regular basis, they have to keep doing that or people will lose interest, and that means a hefty penalty in terms of future viewership. The result is that these sorts of channels need to keep on getting more animals.”
Joseph said this cycle is bad for the animals and sets the wrong impression on what constitutes acceptable reptile care.
“I could easily have gone down that route,” he said. “I started off watching the big "PetTubers" and went on to make videos of my own. In my case, though, I happened to question what I was watching and so, ultimately, adopted a very different outlook.”
Joseph dispensed some advice as far as advice to those considering making their own videos.
“It’s so cliche: by being yourself.”
The link to Joseph’s channel is: : www.youtube.com/c/JTBReptiles