Animal facts - Brazilian Rainbow Boa (2023)

Introduction

Come along as we learn all about this awesome boa from the Amazon and how it gets it’s cool name!

Video

Hey, everyone it's shawn.

And I am back with another animal facts video.

As you can see, I have a very awesome snake with me.

This is skittles and skittles is a brazilian rainbow boa now, rainbow boas get their name because of the iridescent nature of their skin.

So with this awesome kind of bronze copper colored skin, light will hit it and refract and kind of give you like a rainbow type colorization across it a little bit hard to see on camera.

But when you see these guys in person, you can definitely see the rainbow refraction on them.

These are a very very cool snake from the south american river basin.

They get called brazilian rainbow ball.

But they also live in a multitude of other countries all over in that basin.

They can even go upwards into south america.

Now just like other snakes, as you can see flicking your tongue using that to stock out prey.

She can pick up pheromones out of the air by flicking, the tongue that tongue then can be interpreted by a special part of her brain called the jacobson's organ that jacobson's organ then tells her what those pheromones are that she's smelling.

She also has these awesome heat pits on the front of her face, a little bit hard to see in the camera, but they're little squares that run along the lips.

These are heat detecting signatures that basically like seeing it infrared it's, almost like being able to see in the dark.

Those squares are picking up heat signatures.

The tongue is picking up pheromones and she's able to hunt now, mainly she's, looking for rodents, she'll be eating, small, rodents, she'll even go after birds, uh and being that she's, actually, an excellent swimmer and pretty good in the water.

She may even eat aquatic life, but kind of at a minimal, mainly they're, a rodent hunter.

Now the snake is primarily terrestrial.

But as you can see very very strong and very good at holding itself up.

Now if you've ever been in the jungle, you know that even though a snake or something may be terrestrial there's, lots of roots down trees, vines and everything else.

So most animals that live in that environment have to be extremely dexterous, which she is she's holding herself up with no problem been gripping on my arm, then kind of all over the place while I'm doing these sorry.

I went too close to your head there.

Now, rainbow bows are often sought after in a pet market, just because of uh, the refractive nature of their skin.

And also because with all this colorization on it, like I said, you get a lot of different colors of oranges, reds, rustles, browns, a lot of cool, patterning they're more known, uh with this type by looking at the stripes on the head, as you can tell there's, three distinct black stripes on the head.

And then this circular pattern, uh, that goes all the way down the spine.

This is how we know it's a brazilian rainbow bowler.

Now they can get pretty long typically you're looking at four to six feet.

Uh, sometimes you may even get upwards of seven feet that's, a pretty big snake, but they're also often considered a medium-sized boa, uh.

So despite being able to get four to six feet long or even a little bit bigger, they don't get very heavy bodied, uh, right.

Now.

Her thickest point is maybe three to four inches diameter.

They may get up to six inches in diameter, but not much more than that.

They do like a high humidity environment being that they come from the amazon basin.

More often, not when I keep these guys, I like to keep them on sphagnum moss sometimes I'll, take that moss and mix it either with eco earth or jungle mix.

Uh, not often will I put, um any type of, um forest bark or anything in there, just because it'll mold over pretty quick, but you do want to have different types of substrates in there that can easily handle about 60 to 75 humidity or above.

And then also having something big enough for them to be able to like lay in now being that they're, good swimmers and everything again.

You want to have a big enough water dish, but you don't want it soaked in there, even with high humidity snakes, if you're adding in a lot of humidity, you can actually cause bacterial infections.

They need to be able to get out of that water as needed, um, she will spend a lot of time burrowing and going underneath things, um in her current habitat.

She has a lot of large branches that she likes to hide under and even a big wooden cave.

So as you can see she's, very curious and very active.

Uh, typically sundays are the feeding day for my snakes around here.

Uh, she did not eat this week, but she got a very good body condition.

Now, body condition is something that we've briefly talked about before in previous videos, uh, but never really talked about to an extent with snakes.

When we talk about body condition, what we're making sure is that they have good muscle tone throughout the entire body.

And then you shouldn't really be able to see the spine.

What you're kind of looking for is you can see there's a ridge where you know where the spine is at, but it shouldn't be concave onto either side.

It should be this nice slope that she has there.

This is pretty much a perfect body condition.

What I'm looking at right now, an overweight snake, you won't have that slight divot there it's just going to be built up with fat and also with an overweight snake you're going to start to see snake, uh, scale, separation.

So, um on a scale of like zero to ten zero being like completely emaciated.

Ten being morbidly obese, skittles.

Here sits right in the middle at about a five or a six, um, it is hard to get snakes to lose weight.

You pretty much just have to stop feeding them, and then hope that they get active.

Now when a snake's not eating, they typically go inactive to conserve their energy.

So what you can do in order to get them to start losing weight is offering enrichment items that make them want to move around lots of branches, lots of vines.

And then also I've noticed that adding leaf litter into an exhibit, especially knowing where it came from, you don't want anything with pesticides or fertilizers on it, but it makes them want to go around and smell everything.

So the activity level gets them moving snakes, don't exercise by stretching out.

They exercise by winding and wrapping around.

So adding lots of obstacles for them to have to go through and up and around and down that's going to cause them to exercise more.

And so by cutting back some feeding making move a little bit more.

You can hopefully get a sink to lose weight, but unlike a mammal where you can get weight loss in days weeks or months and get them back to proper body score, typically with reptiles and especially snakes.

It can take months or even years.

So luckily, this snake is in good shape despite having not eaten this week, really at a body condition like this in this size I'm, okay, with every two to even four weeks, trying with the a lot of times what I look for with my bigger snakes.

And medium-sized ones is activity level if they're out and they're, looking like, they're, hunting and they're flicking their tongue all over the cage.

I know, they're looking for food that's.

Typically when I'm gonna offer it up, but other than that, they can conserve as much as needed.

So that's, skittles, the brazilian rainbow ball.

Uh, I hope you guys learned a lot if this is your first time on my channel, please hit subscribe tag people in it.

Send it to people as I say at the end of every video.

I love teaching people about animals, it's it's, just awesome it's.

One of my favorite things, I'm, very lucky that I get to do this.

So um, and also my comment section is open.

Um, I don't believe that anybody is 100 an expert on anything if you have info or facts that you can add about rainbow boas that would be awesome.

I'm always up for learning more.

If I happen to make mistake, um, you know, please politely call me.

Oh and I'll be like, hey, actually, did you know this? And, um, if you can give me sources for it that's even better, I love finding scientific-based sources, a lot of times if I'm looking up animal info I'm using google scholar or I'll go to zoological websites and see what I can find.

But so hope you guys learned love learning about skittles as I did very very cool snake here and we'll.

See you next time.