Dude you are not getting it.

Wild populations are full of variation. That is key to evolution. All your field observations tell us is that locality has a lot of diversity, and the hypermelanistic gene is prevalent in that locality.

It makes perfect sense; your observations are congruent with the hardie-weinberg principle.

What you are observing is many different genes at work.

Hypermelanism is independent of those other traits you described. However it is very possible that that gene is physically located close to other traits, and they are commonly inherited together because of their locations on the chromosomes. See linkage disequilibrium.

Kind of like white skin, blond hair and blue eyes are commonly found on the same individual, but every once in a while you find a black person with blue or green eyes and literally every combination inbetween. Those are different genes.

There is not some magical gene that has many phenotypes, they are independent genes, that can be associated with each-other due to their presence in the population AND their physical location to one another within the genomes of the snakes.

Look at this variation.



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"We are challenging the soft bigotry of low expectations" George W.

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