"As far as "care sheets" go, Applegate's online book is "reliable and trustworthy"

Yes, that's right Tim, it is a good book for their care/husbandry needs. But if anyone has the book, don't think for one second that the so-called "Guatemalan milksnake" on page 51 is the real-deal. That is a very high RBR count bicolored polyzona x abnorma that was very likely an import animal that originated from northwestern Guatemala where the two subspecies intergrade heavily. It's not even close to an authentic L.t.abnorma phenotype.

I don't have ONE SINGLE milksnake book here that doesn't depict totally BOGUS subspecies photo representations of some kind in it. I have two books that depict a good friends Stuart's milksnake that is captioned as a genuine Ecuadoran (L.t.micropholis), a perfect "text-book" young adult Conant's milksnake (L.t.conanti) captioned as a Black milksnake (L.t.gaigeae) of all things, a very obvious stuarti x oligozona intergrade depicted as a Pacific Central American milk (L.t.oligozona) and many other very poor photo examples of the subspecies. Some of this stuff is absolutely comical to be honest. This is another major reason that there has been so much confusion over the decades about several of the 25 different subspecies of miksnake (26 if you include the Coastal Plains milk(L.t.temporalis), especially some of the Latin American forms.

So to anyone reading this that is thinking about getting into different subspecies of milksnakes, I strongly suggest to them to proceed with extreme caution and do some very SERIOUS homework on them before they acquire any. The down-side of all this is that unless people are refered to very knowledgeable and trusted breeders to begin with that have KNOWN GENUINE stuff, it can take many, MANY years to find out what is what for yourself when it comes to certain types. In short, simply going by an ad in the classifieds, or just going by what is put on a deli cup label by just anyone, you might as well be flipping a coin in the air as to what you actually end up with many times..



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


serpentinespecialties.webs.com

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