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The pictures and analysis

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Posted by: Rextiles at Sat Aug 14 23:47:59 2010   [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Rextiles ]  
   

First off, I would like to thank Jon, Greg and Brent for playing along.

I initially held off on showing the belly pictures because I wanted to get unbiased views based on the dorsal patterning alone just to see what everybody thought. To be honest, I'm still not 100% sure what this hognose is, but I'm placing my bets on it being a "low key" Anaconda as Greg and Brent have suggested as well.

This animal comes from a pairing of my Anaconda male to a het Albino female. Out of the 19 eggs that hatched from that clutch, 10 are easily definable Anacondas with this 1 being the oddball. If it is an Anaconda, and I believe it is, then that would make it 11 Anacondas out of 19 hatchlings with an Anaconda hatch ratio of ~58%.

I would like to reiterate what I previously said in the fact that I think there's more to defining an Anaconda than just the "markers" that others are going by alone. I think my anomaly here will help in determining if those markers really hold up.

Here are all 3 pictures of my anomaly:

Top


Bottom (1)


Bottom (2)


Now, let's base this animal against the some of the "markers" that we use to define an Anaconda.
#1 Overall reduced or aberrant pattern - No
#2 Reduced neck pattern - No
#3 Black belly - Yes
#4 Narrow black belly - No
#5 White outer edging on ventrals - Yes

I would presume that most people would suggest that this animal is in fact a normal when compared amongst other normals just going by the dorsal view alone. Only the keen eye would pick out the other factors by looking at the ventrals.

For comparison, here's one of the sibling Anacondas which I think is a classic Anaconda phenotype.

Top


Bottom


Unfortunately I could not get better belly pictures as this little guy just would not sit still. But it's worth pointing out that if you look really carefully at his ventrals you will notice that he seems to have a bit more speckling than is typically found in Anacondas. Obviously this is far more apparent in real life than a picture taken through a plastic container. I am not sure if this will go away after a few sheds or come out more. What interests me is the fact that this is without a doubt an Anaconda but he has a more than normal amount of speckling on his ventrals (at least based on my Anacondas and Superconda). The anomaly's belly is a far more solid black with maybe 2-3 very very small speckles.

Let's use the same 5 questions against this classic Anaconda:
#1 Overall reduced or aberrant pattern - Yes
#2 Reduced neck pattern - Yes
#3 Black belly - Yes, but about 95-98%
#4 Narrow black belly - No
#5 White outer edging on ventrals - Yes

So, let's try to compare the 2 against each other.

#1 Do both snakes have an overall reduced or aberrant pattern? No
#2 Do both snakes have a reduced neck pattern? No
#3 Do both snakes have black bellies? Yes, but the anomaly has a 99.9% black belly while the Anaconda has probably a 95-98% black belly.
#4 Do both snakes have narrow black bellies? No
#5 Do both snakes have white outer edging on their ventrals? Yes

To be honest, I just don't know what to classify my anomaly 100% as (although I'm pretty sure it's an Anaconda) but I'm going to keep it for future breeding projects to try and prove out exactly what it is we're dealing with.
-----
Troy Rexroth
Rextiles


   

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