Posted by:
Kevin Saunders
at Fri Nov 5 15:32:28 2010 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Kevin Saunders ]
I'm interested in tracking down literature on rat snake intergrades. I know it's a subjective topic, but specifically the so-called "greenish" rat snakes of the carolinas and the gulf hammock rat snake are of interest to me. I know one reference I'm after is Neill, W.T. 1949. Herpetologica 5, p.1-11. Any others I should be on the lookout for?
Of course I welcome any discussion on these forms as well from those who've encountered them firsthand in the wild. I guess mainly what I'm interested in is the stability of the morphological characteristics of these rat snakes (how variable they are and whether or not it fluctuates with distance from species/subspecies boundaries).
I've heard some say that Gulf Hammock rats look different from yellow x gray crosses and it's my understanding that "pure" yellow and "pure" gray rats are sympatric with them. I've also heard that in some areas there are only greenish rat snakes without any "pure" yellow or black rats. It seems to me that the range of greenish rats is much larger than the range of Gulf Hammock rats, though I've never seen any maps that illustrate the range of these forms. Since I've never lived in the Carolinas or Florida, I can't claim personal experience with either of these although I would be interested in hearing what those with hands-on experience have to say?
I occasionally see something about black rat x gray rat intergrades and black rat x Texas rat intergrades, but it seems like it's harder to delineate boundaries and intergrade zones between these. Still, that's a topic I'd be interested in learning more about as well. Thanks.
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 Intergrade information request - Kevin Saunders, Fri Nov 5 15:32:28 2010
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