Posted by:
sballard
at Tue Oct 9 12:45:51 2007 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by sballard ]
While it is always best to have some locale specific info, there are certain phenotypic characters that do define most subspecies. I agree that some are harder to define than others in the absence of locality info.
But the term "Honduran" shouldn't be a hobby term.....although that is probably what it has turned into with all the crossing of polyzona, stuarti, hondurensis, etc. "Mutts" would be a better term 
Way back when, there were the old breeders who captively bred various subspecies. Their "Hondurans" look different than today's "Hondurans". I have a certain phenotypic image of what hondurensis should look like, based on Williams' definition of it and pictures of locale specific animals in books.
The range of hondurensis encompasses the north and eastern halves of Honduras and Nicaragua. It is not a small area. Being subspecies, they can have a large intergradation zone and do naturally intergrade with stuarti and abnorma. Just two, not several. And yes, many times importers bring in intergrades between hondurensis and stuarti that have been collected in those intergrade zones and are labelled as whatever country they were imported out of. But that is where certain phenotypic characters can come into play to get a better idea of what those snakes actually are.
But in order to do that, breeders need to know what those phenotypic characters are...and while some do, a lot do not. There are still milks that show up on the classifieds that are misidentified because "that is what they were called by the seller" previously. Then they get bred together and throw really odd-looking offspring, but still labelled as "what they were sold as". Same goes for selling intergrades as "pure" when the breeder already knows that the adults are either not pure or are intergrades themselves.
Have you ever bought a Stuart's milk that was labelled as an Andean? How would you have felt if you bought that off the internet and then unpacked it at home to find it was nothing like what you thought it should look like? Would that then have just been a "hobby Andean"? No, it would have just been misidentified, plain and simple.
Scott
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RE: Here we go... - sballard, Tue Oct 9 12:45:51 2007