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My little parthenogenic eastern. She's 5 months old now and about 14 inches in length... has almost doubled in size since hatching. It still amazes me how patternless her belly is and then turns all black at the tail.

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PHWyvern

So tell us the history on this. Parthenogenic Easterns? That's the first I've heard of L.g.g. being parthenogenic. That's pretty cool! Nice looking little one too. I like the yellow, very nice!
-Phil

>>So tell us the history on this. Parthenogenic Easterns? That's the first I've heard of L.g.g. being parthenogenic. That's pretty cool! Nice looking little one too. I like the yellow, very nice!
>>-Phil

Yes she does have a very nice yellow to her. There are a few spots where some pale orange peeks through the yellow in places, but I expect that to disappear as she gets older.

At work we have a female eastern kingsnake that was part of a confiscated collection (41 snakes including 2 illegal eyelash vipers) from a guy back in 1999 who was being evicted from a rental house and later was charged with animal cruelty over conditions some of his animals had been found during the eviction process. After all the court stuff, the guy apparently never petitioned to get his snakes back so Animal Control gave them to us to find homes for. The two vipers had gone to a zoo as they are illegal in our state. We kept a few snakes for ourselves and distributed the bulk of the rest to other educational facilities and the leftovers went to a local herp rescue to find homes for them.

We do have a locality specific eastern male I had intended to breed to the female in 2004 once he finished putting on some growth to match her size, but in the summer of 2003 she laid a clutch of infertile eggs of which ended with a prolapse and emergency surgery. I had figured her breeding days were over after that - even the vet said not to make an attempt to breed in the future.

To my surprise, on May 20, 2006 she proceeded to lay 10 eggs. She had not shown any signs of being gravid.. eating right up until the week before she laid eggs.

I was resigned to the fact that it would be another infertile clutch. After all, we have had her 7 years and she had not been placed with a male snake in all that time with us. We believe the guy whom the snake was confiscated from had been breeding his snakes as he had several adults of breeder size (easterns, thayeri, gbks, mbks, hondurans, and pines) and there was a small number of hatchlings (gbks, mbks, and thayeri). There were no records given to us about the snakes histories so we do not know if he had ever actually bred the easterns.

Anyways, 4 of the eggs were slugs. The other 6 looked pretty good. Just for the heck of it, I set them up in a container with vermiculite and incubated them. After a while some of the "good" eggs developed strong blood vessels that could be seen when candled. However as time continued to pass, the blood vessels started weakening and fading and then the eggs began to mold one after another. Only one egg actually made it to hatch on July 21.

At hatching, she was a fat sassy short thing...musking and tail buzzing and snapping. She measured around 8-9 inches. The only odd things I could really find with her had to do with the lack of pattern on the belly and the scales on the underside of the tail.. instead of having clean rows of divided scales beyond the anal plate... they flip flop between divided scales and undivided scales.: 5 divided, 3 undivided, 2 divided, 4 undivided, 3 divided, ~10 undivided, 4 divided.... very weird. The snake also has a lot of black lengthwise striping down the sides right above the belly line. It's like the black color meant for the belly just pooled up on the lower half of her sides lol.

She does have a very big appetite... quite a voracious thing - not uncommon to scarf down 2-5 pinks a week and be cruising around looking for more.

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PHWyvern