Nathan,

There is no emoticon to express how sorry I am if you took that part of my comment personally, or even perhaps too seriously... like a certain other New Englander on this forum, my sarcastic sense of humor (I was at least half-kidding) doesn't always come across so clearly in this format. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that your contributions to milksnake herpetoculture are of the same magnitude as Williams' contributions to milksnake taxonomy. However, just as some of us armchair taxonomists may question Williams' methods or conclusions, there are some folks who see the term "albino sinaloan" as something of an oxymoron. I happen to know that Doug is one of those people, so that line immediately preceding the winky face (meant to express levity) was intended as an acknowledgement of his point of view. Honestly, I can see both sides of that argument, and as I said in my original post, I don't think that there has been any willful misrepresentation on your part. Having said that, though, try searching Google for "albino sinaloan". The top result should look very familiar to you. I don't see anything in that 2006 ad explicitly stating those snakes are anything but sinaloans. Of course, you've always told the truth when asked, but I think that if you were a bit more up-front about it, then you would be completely above reproach.



The point I was trying to make is that I think it's unfortunate that most, if not all of the big names in the milksnake world chose to sell off their Colombian milks after finding out that they were intergrades, as if that somehow makes them damaged goods. What really puzzles me is that the same breeders proudly produce a wide variety of Honduran morphs, whose anery gene most likely came from a stuarti intergrade, whose hypo gene came from a snake purchased as a "coral snake" from a Miami importer, and whose amel ancestors were sold as polyzona in Europe. I just think that maybe if these micropholis x andesiana had some interesting recessive genes, people might not be so quick to write them off as "mutts" or "crap". My fear is that, now that you and the other biggest and most reputable breeders have chosen to divest yourselves of these snakes, they're just going to disappear into the woodwork, just like the pure micropholis did decades ago.



Anyway, thanks for the compliments and for keeping it civil, hope you have a nice weekend as well.



Thanks,

Nate

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