Dang, that's a big snake, Toby. My two and a half yr. old female is nowhere near that big, probably around 300 grams. I wonder how big you're clutches have been?



I still think there needs to be some work done on this species/group. I don't know why Dixon went with the change from Elaphe guttata meahllmorum to E. emoryi meahllmorum, since his last paper. There's supposed to be a new paper coming out soon on the different subspecies of the guttata group, by Vaughan, et al. The new TX field guide just uses some current classification put out by the Collins group w/o any research data to back it up. I'm sticking with Pantherophis (Elaphe) guttatus meahllmorum until it's proven that meahllmorum and slowinskii aren't intergrading along the TX coast, and they really are two separate sps.



I know we were calling the southern subspecies, the Southern Great Plains rat, for awhile, as opposed to the Northern Great Plains rat, but there's two reasons why I've stopped doing that. One is that the range of meahllmorum is in the Tamaulipan ecosystem, rather than what most herpers consider the Great Plains. Also, I don't believe the Great Plains ratsnake is a separate species from the corn snake, so I hesitate to call meahllmorum a G.P. rat, as if these two ssps formed a separate species. It's not that I'm just going with the new terminology, but I just don't consider meahllmorum a Great Plains rat. So, I'm calling it a Southwestern ratsnake now, to make that distinction.



I do think there's some similarities with emoryi, however. I'd like to be able to do some research on similarities and differences, but don't have many specimens right now. One similarity is clutch size, I believe. Meahllmorum is also similar with the corn, or at least Slowinski's corn. I believe they intergrade along the coast. Those Nueces snakes are very large, like the corn snakes. I'm a little surprised they get so big. I've always thought of emoryi as being much smaller than most corns. My western emoryi are small and bulky, not over 36 inches. Also, my Freer, s. TX, meahllmorum, is pretty small too. But she's only 2.5 yrs. old though.



Anyway, interesting stuff. Keep posting the info and those nice pix guys...



TC

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