>>KJUN, I hatched out several this year from Acadia, LA that were killer orange! Is that the area you were referring to? Or closer to TX down I-10?



No, but the first lav speck came from just east of there, and I grew up just west of there. The ones I was describing came from much further west: south of Lake Charles.



I wrote this for another reason a long time ago, but it'll give you an idea of what I found:



"When I had just got started in breeding speckled kingsnake morphs, I was collecting some summer data in southeast Louisiana and caught 3 males. The first was nothing special. The second was just orange enough for me to pointed it out to some non-herpers that were with me. The third male was slightly orange, but I probably would have overlooked the slight difference if I hadn't have caught the second one that had a good bit of orange. I, like a big dummy, let all of these go where I caught them. Then I caught a superb female.



Her ventral was extremely orange -- even the spots were orange -- and obviously gravid. Because her body was swollen with eggs, her coloration was actually purple and orange/gold. There was actually a second snake coiled up with this female in the knee-high grass, but the second one hit the taller, thicker, grass and ran. (The study site was in the second year post-planting of wetland aforestation project.) Obviously, I brought her home and kept her.



She laid 15 eggs good eggs for me four days later. All hatched (10.5 healthy hatchlings) in just less than 60 days. About 1/3 were distinctly orange (pumpkin orange), 1/3 were just slightly darker yellow-orange than normal, and 1/3 were almost completely normal. I kept the best pair of hatchlings. I traded a pairs each to 2 separate buddies and sold the rest. The female rebounded from egg-laying FAST, so I placed her with a wild-caught male from Clinton, LA. I never saw any indications that the pair breed, but I wasn’t positive that they didn’t bred. So, I considered her second clutch from that year as unknown.



About 5 to 6 weeks later, she laid 12 more eggs. One infertile one went bad within 2 weeks, and the other 11 hatched. About half had some orange (a few choice ones) and half were normal appearing. Some were even lacking almost all dark ventral belly markings. This could be due to the fact that they were incubated at cooler than optimal temperatures, though. I've traded off 1.1 to some buddies, kept the best female or two, and sold the rest. I did have trouble getting many of them to eat on unscented pink mice. The ones I kept and my friends' are growing good thanks to using geckos, though. The original female didn’t rebound too well immediately, but did come around before brumation. However, she didn’t produce for me the following year. I got rid of her the year after that when she stayed off feed for me.



I had planned on breeding my orange female speckled kingsnake to an albino the first year and a hypo the second year in captivity. I had also planned to cross the F1's together to improve the orange for crossing albinos and hypos. There wasn’t much fading of color towards the head on most of them, and they were all multispeckeled once they got a little size on them. (All hatchling speckled kingsnakes have the banding pattern.) Of course, when I took a job in Texas and had to sell off (almost) all of my speckled kingsnakes, this projected disappeared. I’m not even sure if the original F1 hatchlings are still together with breeders."

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