Matt,



Good point. Not only could the gene pool be quite small, but there's another problem too. Most breeders don't know for sure where their snakes came from. Heck, I don't even know for sure where my Chinese ssp. came from. In fact, they are probably from several different locations. And the fact is the ssp. we say we have is probably based more on a few characters that we can point to, rather than any locality data.



That is one thing I took into consideration when I got my first taeniura, a pair of Taiwans. I was fairly sure they actually came from Taiwan. But today I wouldn't even be sure of that. The reason..people cross breed the ssps. w/o knowing for sure what they have.



The reason I sold off my Taiwans is not because of locality, but rather they were very large snakes and in order to have multiple projects and conserve space I needed to work with the smallest Asian snakes I could get. Thus I switched to t. taeniura..the Chinese. I don't have the "blues" for the same reason. This is a fantastic ssp, but just too big for my small Herp Room and resources.



The thing I'm most afraid of for the species is that people will pick up snakes they don't have locality info for and might not even know which subspecies for sure. Then they will breed them, or worse yet, will cross with another ssp, and make offspring that cannot be assigned to any ssp. These reasons, plus the fact the blues get so big, are why I'm not working with this ssp., but I still really like it for many reasons. If I were going to start with blue beauties, I'd find a breeder who would give me good info, such as how big they get, pictures of the adults for coloration, scale counts, etc. I would decide based on what I think a blue beauty should be like physically.



I would like to know if anyone has ever given this ssp. a classification, or if it is still just called, taeniura ssp? In a book I have on the snakes of Thailand, by Merel Cox, he just calls all the beauties from the north, east, and central regions, t. taeniura, after the Chinese beauties. Schulz calls the blue beauty, taeniura ssp. I haven't seen any updates on this since. I think the blue beauty should be given a subspecies status. It is pretty distinct over a large area. And recently, folks have been calling them Vietnamese blue beauties. I assume that's because they can be found in N. Vietnam, and there's been some imports from there in recent years. Would love to hear any updated info on that.



Well, gotta run for now.



TC

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