Hey there Mitch --



Congrats on your PhD work. My own DVM work was, obviously, mostly a generalized study of veterinary medicine in several different species. My PhD work, on the other hand, was an interdisciplinary course which involved both lots of molecular genetics and also a lot of animal behavior. My doctoral research involved stress and behavior in Amazon parrots -- thus the user name ("Amazondoc" that I have used for years. None of that, unfortunately for the purposes of this discussion, involved detailed taxonomic studies.



There is an old saying, somewhere or other, to the effect that you only know for certain that a conclusion is true if you are dragged kicking and screaming to it, resisting all the way. IOW you must test all the assumptions and examine all the data points, not just blithely agree with what you have been told. As a researcher yourself, you should appreciate this necessity. And right now I am especially sensitized to this principle, given my recent experience with that supposed "piebald corn" that turned out to be a garter snake.



Speaking of that "piebald corn", here's exactly what the breeder said when he first posted a pic of the snake. And I quote: "I am convinced it is a corn. There were normal corns from the same area to match it with. The head on this one matches the other corns and the patches of “normal” look like corn pattern." Now, this guy has lots and lots of herp experience. He has been a curator of reptiles at both a nature center and a wild animal park, he's the president of a herp society, and he has bred herps for years. So -- should everyone have just shut up and believed what he said?



You say I am "unappreciative". I am not. If you'll go back and look at my posts, you'll see that I have thanked every person who has provided actual data beyond "it's a milk because I say so". But appreciating and thanking people does NOT require acceptance of everything they say, either.



One comes to true knowledge by testing the claims presented to you. If you don't want your claims to be tested, then by all means feel free to ignore any of my posts. Nobody is requiring you to answer any of them.



As for the specific snake involved -- yup, there's something like a 99.99% chance that the snake is a milk. But the discussion is about more than that specific snake's specific ID. It's also about things like learning ID techniques, appreciating how much this mutation resembles the known ultramel corn mutation, appreciating that hatchlings may be harder to tell apart than adults, appreciating the limitations of photographic IDs, and testing whether folks really know as much as they think they do. If you are not interested in any of these subjects, then once again please feel free to ignore my posts.



And thanks for the outline of the last supralabial. I am still a bit confused about it since it *appears* to be well beyond the caudal extent of the mouth, but I know that's got to be it. And, as I've mentioned before, it can be harder to see such things in a photo than with the live snake in front of you.
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0.1 Peruvian rainbow boa (Amaru)

2.0 Brazilian rainbow boas (Arco, Olho)

0.3 Honduran milksnakes (Chicchan, Chanir, Hari)

1.0 Thayeri kingsnake (Coatl)

0.0.1 Mexican black kingsnake (TBA)

2.7 corns (Cetto, Tolosa, Uce, TBA)

1,000,000.1,000,000 other critters

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