Very well stated once again Terry!. This is exactly how the Honduran issue began decades ago, and all the way up to more recent times. I explain alot of this in-depth on my site's home page as well. Let me add just a bit to your already great explanation of how this all came about.



It didn't start from intentional crossing at all, the Latin forms of milksnakes have always been tough to accurately identify on the best of days, even for the most well-seasoned field taxonomists/biologists.



Then when you consider that countless numbers of milksnakes were captured and imported from many different locales over those years, transported to whatever shipping port worked best(and cheapest)politics-wise, and labeled them as whatever someone wanted to say they were(regardless of what they actually were)to coincide with where they were "supposed" to have originated from, there is no wonder at all that there can be some mixed lineage involved with these snakes. Certainly all the milksnakes ever imported from Central America could not all be genuine L.t.hondurensis, it just isn't possible. Even Bill and Kathy Love's original "tangerine dream" was acquired from a store in Miami, and was thought to be a coral snake of all things..LOL!



Here is a quote about that animal directly from Bill Love.....



"Kathy and I bought the original 'Tangerine Dream' L. t. hondurensis for $25 from Aurora Castellanos (her Honduran import business was called Viva Animales, in Miami) around 1986. It was under deep shavings in a small aquarium in her narrow venomous herp room in her shop (which I asked to see because I was interested in eyelash vipers). She was convinced it was a coral snake. She said they came in as extra 'junk' that she really didn't want, and was probably tickled to 'ream' me for that much to be rid of it. I knew instantly that it was a Honduran milk; that was the only thing I ever thought it was. After we hooked it out of the cage (because it was 'venomous') and bagged it, we moved past her hot room to look at other herps she imported from family members in Honduras. That's when my companion -- renowned herp artist Marty Capron of Kansas -- asked if the 'coral' I bought was what he suspected it really was, and I replied 'yes'. Marty immediately said "I wonder if there are any more of them hiding under the shavings in th cage". I was so excited to get the one I saw tucked behind the water bowl that I never checked for others in the cage. Marty uncovered one more milk - a tricolor phase baby L.t. hondurensis, which he bought for $25 also. Aurora definitely didn't recognize juvenile milks for what they really were, but since she paid for corals, she made the proper mark-up on them, and I didn't feel bad that I ripped her off.



"We eventually bred it to other hondurensis that we got from Viva Animales and other importers who were getting hondurensis in in quantity at the time. We chose the most attractive females we could find. Aurora imported only from Honduras, but I suppose it's possible even her imports (or those of numerous others) could have come from broad areas that included other races of L. triangulum."...........end quote.



So the bottom line is that they never originally got crossed on purpose at all, it all stemmed from lack of knowledge and not being able to distinguish the Latin subspecies from the very beginning. Heck, it is still the very same way today as a matter of fact. There are VERY few people that can accurately identify the Latin subspecies of triangulum. This is WAAAY different than someone intentionally throwing a Cal. king in with a thayeri to produce what they think is a cool cutting edge must have "Franken-snake"..





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

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