Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I don't have any corns but have seen some pics of some amel stripes that look pretty interesting. My question is that some look pink while others look like a dark orange. Is there that much difference in them or is a lot of it the flash/camera? Does anyone have accurate pics of adults?

Thanks
Anthony

No expert, I'll try a shot at this.

Amel/albino is a genetic trait to a "corn" simple.

But apply it to a corn from Virginia, an Okeetee, Miami, or other natural locales, and colors can be extremely highly variable.
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Thanks for reading.
Big Tom

www.herpzilla.com

As the other responder said there is alot of variation.

Basically you are looking at a combination of two traits.

1) Striped = pattern morph and will always be basically the same regardless of the snakes ancestry(aside from recieving the striped gene which is a simple recessive)

2) Amelanistic = color morph , namely no black pigment (melanin) and will look different depending on what the snakes ancestry is.

This second one is where the regional colorations the previous poster mentioned come in. Basically think of how the snake would look if it wasn't amel and then remove the dark pigment. ie in okeetee corns the black ring arround the saddle would be white, the yellows would be much brighter/more pronounced, and the orange and red areas would be brighter/lighter. However if you took something like a amel miami corm you may end up with something closer in color to a 'candycane corn' because of the miami gray background color.

These regional background colors are not linked to a single gene but rather to many many genes and so can not be predicted in the mandelian genetic fasion. They are like skin tone in people, the children will likely have something similar to the parents but nothing is garunteed. A very close friend has four brothers and one parent mostly hispanic while the other is mostly german. Him and his siblings show the full range between with multiple having classic hispanic coloration while one of the five is as pale as pale can be and several others somewhere in the middle.

I would just ask to see pics of the parents if you are unsure how they will turn out from baby pics. Or if you want to get an idea for how amels look as babies compared to adult coloration lookup baby and adult pics of candycane, reverse okeetee, and normal amels. This should give you a good cross section of the possible color range in amel and from that you could make an educated guess as to how any baby amels you look at will turn out as adults.

Hope this was helpful.

Sean.