Terry, I certainly respect but do not fully agree with your conclusions. Are you inferring that a diet of snakes is responsible for the vibrant red one tends to see in wild snakes?

If so, maybe we can (and I assure you folks are working on it) find the nutritional components responsible. Certainly dietary suppplements influence the morphology of other taxa, i.e. birds and fish, lizards, etc.

Also, some of us do feed highly diverse diets, including snakes (readily available to me as dor's in my desert home). My snakes have a wide range of colors, some redder than others. I do agree the wild ones are often more vibrant red, and I think we will figure it out. So you make two points, you state the captives are "inbred" and you infer that dietary components from an ophidian diet is missing...which is the problem or is it both?

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