Blood Python Cage Thermometers

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to place one heat lamp on one side of the enclosure and one heat lamp on the other side of the enclosure. Your night bulb goes on one side and your day goes on the other one. The day bulb is only on during the day, so eight to ten hours, and your night bulb is going to stay on all the time, twenty four seven, okay. Now, what we're doing here is we're creating what's called a heat gradient. You want it to be hot on one side and towards the top and colder on the other side and towards the bottom. That allows the reptile to move back and forth to regulate his own temperature, which is what they do in the wild. Reptiles are ectotherms, which means that they don't generate their own heat. They get it from outside and they move around to regulate that temperature as opposed to us, which are always at the same temperature and it's internally generated. Now in order to know what temperatures you're getting, you're going to need thermometers. I do recommend that every reptile enclosure has at least two thermometers in it. One on the high end of the day bulb and one on the low end of the night bulb. What that's going to do is it's going to tell you your temperature gradient. There's a couple of different kinds of thermometers you can look at. There's your good old dial thermometer that generally have a sticky back; you can stick it on the back of your aquarium, inside the aquarium on the back. And it's going to have a little dial that'll tell you the temperature. There's your liquid crystal thermometers which generally go on the outside of the enclosure, or sometimes on the inside, and they're going to give you a reading across it. I don't recommend these, they do not read well and they're not very accurate. If you can, stay away from them even though they are going to be about half the price of a good old dial thermometer. Lastly, my personal favorites are the digital thermometers, which generally go on the outside of the enclosures, it'll stick on the outside, okay. And then it has a little probe, a little wired probe, that you're going to run into the enclosure and put it wherever you're gauging the temperature. The nice thing about these guys is that they don't stick permanently anywhere. So you can move it around and gauge different areas of temperature in your enclosure, not to mention that most of these gauges will keep a memory of the high temperature and low temperature. That way, you have a good idea, even when you're not around, what your temperatures are getting to be."