what a beauty! must be the ventral split scaled morph. I think the genotype work on the easterns by matt rand gave us the answer. few people successfully bred their indigos back in the 90's. all of today's indigos pretty much came from those few females with few outliers. fast forward three generations of inbreeding and we're seeing the genetic bottleneck effect. if you noticed most of the original breeders who worked with indigos are no longer working with them anymore because of inbreeding issues. red throats were selectively inbred for "redder" throats back in the late 90's early 2000's and therefore, are now more prone to genetic issues. aberrant/split scales are not exclusive to inbred indigos. i have seen them within the Pituophis genus also. when I got back into drymarchon, took me about an hour or two of internet searches to figure out what was going on especially on the west coast. thank God I located alan b. I think I see the breeders initials on the aberrant scales j/k!

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