Yes sir, Jeff, we do agree on this one. I believe I wrote this back in 1979. I said, after three generations in captivity, the captives do not represent the founders.

I was a little naive, as three generations is a questionable average. But it was my experience with lots of NEW species I was working with.

As I mentioned, I locality bred many of the original kingsnake species that are here today, like blairs, alternas, thayeri, ruthvens, pyros(I already had six generations but the time pyros were REGULATED in Az.) and of course others like greeri and mex mex. Only I did not originate those two types. Of course my speciality was Cal Kings.

By the mid to late 80's I moved to pythons, only with these, we had no idea what the local phenotype was.

Then by the early ninties, I moved on to varanids and captive produced many world first breedings along with many many generations of each species. With varanids, they also were very diffficult to maintain a consistent local pattern and color type, when line breeding. These animals migrated color and pattern VERY QUICKLY. Which means, these animals are very prone to phenotypic pressures to maintain a successful current successful population. They are genetically loose, so that something will "fit" in a changing or varying environment. This reflects why there are so many different local types of species like corns and kings, etc.

What you are seeing is, snakes like kings, corns, and many other species that have such defined local color and pattern types, is how they respond to local phenotypic pressures.

Examples are corns where every local has a corn named after it, Like, Miami corns are different then Long Key corns, which are different then Ft Meyer corns, which are different then Jacksonville corns(big dark unicolored) etc etc etc.

This is seen here with Eastern kings and Fla kings, etc etc. Yet other species like Eastern black racers, maintain a consistant color pattern over huge areas and over many different habitats.

Eastern Black racers would be easy to maintain a local color type, in captivity, that represents the wild local. For instance, if you captive bred local blackracers, and after some generations, you ended up with brown ones with black speckles, you could not call it a Blackracer. IT would be something else, like a buttermilk from texas. As they now reflect a different local. Yet with kings, we breed the beans out of them and select colors that do not represent what they appeared like in nature, YET, we are insistent that THEY ARE PURE. The question is, pure WHAT?

For instance, Thayeri have very specific local color types, even if they do vary like blairs. But the animals in captivity now, do not represent any local, or even wild thayeri at all. Yet they are called pure.

Like you, As a biologist, I have problems with that. As a private keeper, I love the beautiful colors that expressed characters from the genotypes called thayeri or other species, I just don't understand the PURE thing. Common sense says, if they do not look like the founders or the local, they are not pure anything. They are now captive toys. And toys are wonderful. Humans love to play with toys, but these toys are not representative of nature. Cheers

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