Reptile & Amphibian Forums

In you initial breedings of the black phase thayeri, how much of the founder stock you test bred to was milk snake phase? Of the clutchmates that were non black what percentage were MS phase.

The original was an extreme leonis phase, as were all of its offspring. I never bred milksnake phase into it.

And there was good reason too. I field collected the vast majority of my thayeri. Whats very odd is, I never field collected a milksnake type. I only found Milksnake types at night on the road and in a particular area.

Which means little now, but at the time, we did not know there were all different types. Also, I am not sure all the different patterns occur in one population. In fact, at the time, we were not sure they were the same type of snake.

It would more like Joe was saying, one locality was mostly a range of one color pattern. Yet, another locality had a different range. For instance, one area had thin banded to medium banded, with a range of ground colors. Another area had medium banded to wide banded, with a range of ground colors.

There was one big exception, I collected a gravid female by DR. Arroyo. It too was a leonis, but half its offspring were milksnake type. The sad part was, it was a really ugly snake and so were all its offspring. hahahahahahaha.

I also found some of the very first Ruthvens kings. I think I found the fifth thru the 35 Ruthvens. And let me tell you, there was a huge huge huge variation in those as well. Some were milksnake and some were greeri like, with super narrow red bands and wide lite ground color. I have not seen a narrow banded(red) ruthvens king since those I saw in the field.

Again because so little was known, I did not know the importance of what we saw. Another funny example was, the first one I found, was greeri like, the second one was milksnake like. I put them in the same bag. A few minutes later, I looked in the bag and they were eating eachother. So I had a brief thought they were different kinds of snakes. But then we found so many, we had a sample of everything and all inbetween. Cheers

Interesting. Thanks Frank.