LOL!,...me too Jeff!. There is such a delay in the response time of my camera between pressing the button and it actually TAKING the photo that it's virtually impossible to time it correctly!..LOL!. I just kept taking pics and anticipating a bit of time after his last tongue flick, and eventually I got a couple. But it sure took a while.

Yeah, the tongue color will surely vary between specimens, but yours and Allens are about as nice as they come in my opinion, regardless of there being some black, or not. I would venture to guess any given clutch can have different colorations from genuine orange/red parents with red tongues as well.

Seeing so much variation of all types within clutches of all different kinds of snakes over the years, it only makes sense to me really that this would be the case with the tongues too.

A good example would be my two 100% locality Yellow Ratsnakes. I sure wish I thought of documenting the tongues on more specimens over the years, but I do know that this male Yellow had a bit of red on his tongue, although most of it was black. There is NO WAY on earth that it could have ANY Everglades influence in his lineage watsover being that it was captured 9.5 miles from the actual Atlantic Ocean just inland of Melbourne, Florida smack in the middle of central Florida on the extreme east coast. This is exactly 30 miles south of where they launch the Space Shuttle in Cape Canaveral.

There is no Everglades, Gray, Black, or any other influence there from anything else whatsoever. These are 100% as pure Yellow rat as they can possibly come from anywhere else in the entire country.


~Doug





I captured this female below just 10.5 miles southeast of where the above male was captured. I wish I would have documented her tongue before I released her though. Note the less vividly colored iris. It is a much paler tannish/pink compared to the very orange/red iris of the male from the same general area too. Again!....variation..LOL!




~Doug


-----
"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

my website -serpentinespecialties.webs.com

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