Reptile & Amphibian Forums

http://market.kingsnake.com/detail.php?cat=34&de=133973
certainly looks pretty...
Jess b

They are indeed! I call them silver Taninbars, but some do get almost white with age. A friend of mine acquired the first pair about 7 years ago. The male was all light silver with almost no trace of banding. The female was silver with light gray bands. Babies from this pair were gray with chocolate banding. They would fade as they aged (some more than others). My friend had sold all of his babies from his first breeding. The 2nd year he saved all of the offspring. The next year he did not produce any, and I purchased a pair of yearlings from him. The third year he bred his to each other, and back to the father, while I bred mine. Between the two of us, we produced almost 60 baby silver tanimbars that year. He had females that produced litters as high as 18! As newborns, the new offspring looked about the same as before but lightened up even better than previous generations, with a few of them loosing most of their pattern, looking much more like the original father who had died just before the babies were born. Apparently these guys naturally exist in this color phase in the wild. I have seen imports that were the same silver and gray color as these that we worked with. I also saw one that was imported into Germany from Tanimbar, and later sold to a British buyer. It was a very grumpy small female that had the same lack of pattern as the original father that my friend had. I sold my original pair, and all of my offspring. One of the babies was purchased by another friend and looks very much like the skink in the ad. I am pretty sure I know the origins of the skinks in the ad. I am glad to see how PM Herp is advertising them. There is another person that is marketing them as Hypos. That is like calling a Hogg Island Boa a Hypo. Hypomelanistic means that the animal has less melanin that would be normal for that animal. Because the vast majority of Tanimbar Island BTS (both silver and gold) in the wild have little or no melanin in their coloration, it is incorrect to call them hypos, as this is normal for this subspecies.

N/P