Posted by:
Bill S.
at Thu Nov 6 16:49:37 2003 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Bill S. ]
The following text was posted a while back by Mike Wilbanks and should answer a lot of the dwarf retic questions.
B.
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I basically break the morphs down into 4 categories, Jampea, Kayuadi, Super Dwarf and Dwarf morphs. First the Jampeas, Al and Cindy acquired some of these several years ago. After a few years of acclimating they bred them and produced offspring. Now these babies are breeding and should produce this year. The adult female Jampea average size seems to max out at around 10-12ft. There are a couple examples of larger females, but there are also examples of much smaller females. So I would say that it is safe to say that they get around 10-12ft. Still a reasonably big snake, but definitely a DWARF. Also, they grow much more slowly than the normals.
Kayuadis were first imported in 1999 by Bushmaster. They stay very small around 9ft. We don't know as much about these because they haven't been around as long.
In 1999, Bob Clark and I imported a group of animals from Indonesia. The exporter told us that they were collected from a Tiny island around Jampea. He told us that the island was unnamed. This left us with a dilemma. We had no locality and everyone wants a locality. I wrote the exporter e-mails and asked him about the island and if there was some name so that we could have a locality. He insisted that the island was tiny, uninhabited and un-named. A little after we imported our animals, Bushmaster started bringing in some dwarfs from Kayuadi. I wrote the exporter emails and said that these animals looked similar to the Kayuadis and asked if they could have been collected from Kayuadi. He insisted that none of this group was collected from Kayuadi. In our Super Dwarf group were some gravid females. They were tiny, around 6ft. Previous to this, we didn't think that female retics could reproduce at this tiny size. On the old "Python Forum" I posted pictures of Bob holding one of these gravid females and we called it the “Super Dwarf”. We decided on this descriptive name because we did not have an island name. Since then, I have seen the name Super Dwarf used to describe Kayuadi. They are very similar and it is possible that they are the same, but I have never been comfortable calling the Super Dwarfs Kayuadis unless the guy that collected them tells me that they were collected form Kayuadi and he told me that they definitely were not. Only recently I see this other island name Kaloatoa. That locality was never given to me and I have never heard of it until recently. There are subtle differences between the Kayuadis and Super Dwarfs, but they are very difficult to tell. I have the group that I originally imported. It has been almost 3yrs and they are still TINY. I am sticking with the name Super Dwarf for these particular animals. It describes them well and separates them from the larger dwarfs. It is possible that the exporter was just trying to protect the locality of the Super Dwarfs to keep them from being collected. If he comes out and tells me a Locality, then I would name them after the locality, but for now, I will just keep that name. Bottom line, locality data that is not reliable anyway and it is not that important for us that are breeding. What people are interested in is having a smaller retic and they will be able to have it with these small races.
To date the Dwarfs Morphs are a cross between a Jampea and normal. They will be smaller. How much smaller no one can say for sure but we are moving in the right
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Dwarf Retic Explation from Mike Wilbanks ... - Bill S., Thu Nov 6 16:49:37 2003