Posted by:
rtdunham
at Fri Jun 18 13:20:42 2004 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by rtdunham ]
Hi Tim,
I've gotta post pix sometime of a few of my big Hondurans. Not record lengths, but big animals.
Anyway, on the subject of lengths in the wild, and average lengths, etc., we need to remember those are REPORTED lengths. I was just reading a book (The Gouldian Finch, Fidler & Evans, Blandford Press, Dorset, UK, 1986) that noted first that in the wild, the yellow-headed color phase of the Gouldian :
"...is rare and is said to occur in no more than about one per five to ten thousand birds (NOTE: the yellow head is a simple recessive and apparently a recently-occurring one; there's speculation it is slowly increasing in its proportion of Goulds in the wild). "It is probably over-represented in museum collections simply because collectors tend to keep unusual examples in preference to common ones." (To dispel any doubt this possibility is a real one, consider this: one of the authors visited Australian museums and of just over 100 skins, three were of the yellow-headed variety, several hundred times the proportion that would be expected from field study results; three other surveys of samples in the field of about the same size yielded NO yellow-headed birds. So clearly the museum samples represented a grossly unrepresentative survey.)
Imagine how this can also influence sizes reported for snakes.
peace
terry
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RE: Facts or Myths Concerning Breeding Snakes in Captivity, please give thi - rtdunham, Fri Jun 18 13:20:42 2004