Unless you were "in the ring" of searching, keeping or breeding high yelloiw "brooksi" you might not know this so wort mentioning..you can find ugly looking Florida kings right under the same board as nice high yellow brooks. I thought I should mention this and explain a little on the history of breeding high yellow "Brooks" kings that originated from places like s.Dade county, the Canals ect.
Breeders back then only sold nice high yellow brooks kings from s. florida. You could not get a dime for any "Florida " looking specimens whether they came from s. florida or not. Most breedrs that sold brooksi back then had the pictures of the adults at their table proving how their dark looking babies will turn out. It was a very competitive market for high yellow brooks and back then, the proof was in the pudding .
It was from these captive bred high yellows that people like the Loves, Doug Beard and other had held back the best of the best that the reccessive traits came from. They came from sibling to sibling breedings and NOT wildcaught unreleated stock.
So the Peanut Butters, original hypos and axanthics all came from these hand selected and bred for high yellow stock animals. They were usually the best of the best becaue these EXPERIENCED breeders held back the ones they thought would make for better yellow brooks for the future market.
What we have now in these three phenotypes; Peanut Butter, Hypomelanistic and axanthic)are hand picked and best bred high yellow brooksi that was all the rage back then. Knowbody really bred the dark florida morphs. At least not the breeders that these snakes originated from. These breeders were also Florida natives themselves so they knew what makes a nice yellow brooksi and knew either where to get the original stock from or collected them themselves...
For instance on the Peanut Butters. A friend of mine bought a pair of nice high yellow siblings from Kathy Love for a friend of his back in Calif. This Calif friend of his asked him to pick out some nice high yellow brooks to send to him back home. So my friend picks out a pair from kathy Loves table which she said would turn out nice and sent them to his friend in Calif. This Calif resident raised them up and produced the first Peanut butteres. Since he did not know what to do with them he graciously sent the snakes back to my friend iwho lived in Florida for further inspection. When my friend received them he realized theese were not just hypos but something different (at that time the first hypos just appeared on the market and were $700. each). So my friend went back to the Loves and told them of this new morph he had. They said the Hypos were poppoing up all over the country from their "unkown" hets they unknowingly sold as normals. So the Loves assumed they were hypos sight unseen and wrote them off as that what they thought he had. So my friend went back to the Loves table the following year because they assign a numbered code to each baby they sell telling who the father and mother is. each of their snakes (yes they keep incredible records!) and as it turned out he found the correlating numbers on that years table and promptly snatched them all up. Those were the base animals that started the Peanut butter line and that is why they did not pop up in other people collections like the hypos and axanthics did.
ANyway, my point is.. yes you will see ugly brooksi in the s. Florida range. But these 3 morphs all originated from highly selectively bred brooksi that were unbeknownst morph carriers to the breeders selling them.
Now on the other hand the BHB anerythristic, Lavenders and the T negatives all came from dark ugly North Florida stock and not south florida brooksi.
So this is why these triple het morph baies I produced are so special to me. SOoo do ya get it yet Zenny? LOL! Just kidding!
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"Yeah ya told me, and ya wrote it down too. But how the hell am I supposed to remember!"
