Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I borrow this animal from the local herp rescue (www.forgottenfriend.org) every now and then to use in demonstrations. He calls it a gopher, but isn't sure what kind. The snake is most likely a male, and definitely over 6ft. It is also very calm for any snake, let alone a pit. What is this snake?
Thanks in advance,
Zach
PS I'm guessing a Pacific Gopher, but they don't seem to be that common in the hobby anymore.

Hello Zach!

Your "rent a snake" is a defnetly a bull snake - Pituophis catenifer sayi - a pretty impressive dark blotched individual.
An animal of the Northern distribution of this ssp. I think.

Bernd

The snake is most likely a male, and definitely over 6ft. It is also very calm for any snake, let alone a pit.

Pits have a bad rap. Some really are nasty - but not all are.
My female Pac Gopher was WC as an adult and I've had her just over a year now. Not once has she tried to bite me or even struck at me. My cats however are different story, she definitely demonstrates extreme aggression towards them - but never to me, even when I plucked her from the wild.

My male Pac Gopher was collected as a 14" neonate and the same thing - he has never attempted to bite me nor hiss at me. Only time I've heard him hiss was towards prey when he didn't feel like eating.

Anyway - I'm not a pit expert but your pit is definitely not a Pac Gopher. I still see pac gophers in the trade - though I don't recall seeing any wild type (what I've got) at the Sac show last year, only morphs. I did however see wild type bull snakes.
-----
I decided my old sig was too big.

Funky, I couldn't help but do a doubletake and laugh when I read that your male Pac hissed @ his prey when he "didn't feel like eating". There aren't too many Gophers I've known to feel that way.

reako45

When I found him - he ate everything, and took f/t. He quickly became my garbage disposal. However - I think I overdid it, and gave him a fuzzy I shouldn't have while he was in blue. He regurged.

Since then - he hasn't taken f/t. And he also won't eat in blue. When he has clear eyes and refuses, he's noticeably opaque within 24 hours.

So that over feeding resulted in a change in feeding behavior - he wants them live and he won't eat in blue.
-----
I decided my old sig was too big.

I totally agree about the pacific gophers. All of my experience with them is with wild caught individuals but I never had a bad experience. I have caught, handled, and kept all ages from hatchlings up to 6ft adults and never been bit by any of them. The 6ft adult I kept actually got my mom over her aversion to snakes eventually. I was a kid and had a tendency to let him cruise arround the house freely since he always came back to his feeding tub when he was hungry.

As far as not seeing the wild type at the Sacramento show I can explain. Basically no one wants to deal with the native species propogation permit here in CA. People deal with it for Cal Kings but not many, none that I know of, deal with it for gophers. But you do see people working with albino's though because if they have pink eyes then they are exempt from the permit requirement.

I should be recieving some pacific gopher's this season but won't have babies for the show for at least a couple years.

Sean.
-----
1.1 BRB
1.1 Triple Het TPRS's
0.1 Silver TPRS
1.1 Amel Bloodred Corns
0.1 Abbott Okeetee Corn
0.1 Blizzard Bloodred Corn
1.1 Thayeri Kingsnakes
0.1 Reeve's Turtle
0.2 Amstaff's
1.0 Pudytat

I have an RA permit and 1.1 legally collected WT - I don't think my male will be big enough next year, he's about 100g now - but I will brumate him this winter and give him the opportunity next year - but I suspect he won't do the deed until 2010 (which will probably be my first year vending at a show).
-----
I decided my old sig was too big.

It looks like a Bullsnake similar to the ones I've seen from Iowa, definitely a sayi (for the record, I still recognize the Bullsnake as melanoleucas as opposed to catenifer, should really be its own species as Dr. Stull suggested long ago). As to the sex of the animal, post some clear tails shots and I'l tell you what you have.

Bart

I couldn't agree with you more Bart. Take care.

Jeremy
-----
Jeremy Pierce
Shade Tree Exotics
shade-tree-exotics@att.net

Bart......Ok for the sake of debate I will take the devils' advocate stance.

I agree that when standing in a corn field in the midwest looking at freshly caught sayi you would probably not think, "I have a catenifer here". Those eastern sayi are phenotypically all about melanoluecus. However when you drive west out of your normal collecting grounds and happen upon a big sayi in central new mexico what then? This group has always been problematic in that sayi intergrades with affinis and affinis intergrades with several of the other western groups. Is affinis in your sayi species complex (Pituophis sayi affinis) as some authors have suggested or is it part of the catennifer complex? Should affinis simply not be recognized and be classified as just another form of sayi? It is really not a simple solution. The most receint genetic work indicates that sayi is rightly placed in the catenifer complex but what of the fact that some ruthveni were found to be more related to sayi than to other ruthveni? Tell me an illinois sayi "looks" more like a vertebralis than it does a western melanoluecus, right?

Personally I grew up under the "Roger Conant regiem" and I am therefore more likely to default back to a three species taxonomy with P.melanoluecus, P. deppei and P. lineaticollis representing the genus.
It is in large part the complexity of this genus which I find attracive. Go to the ITES (intergrated taxonomic information systems) web site and look up Pituophis. You will see just how hotly contested the classification of this group of snakes has been since the 1700's!!!

And despite not ever having the pleasure of seeing a wild P.m.melanoluecus let alone the large numbers that some have seen I am still maintaining that some of the images of western northerns and ruthveni and eastern sayi bear a striking resemblence. Are there historic intergrade zones that have been lost via agriculture? Was there a historic connection that has been fractured via glacial activities over the past say 20,000 years?

Pituophis is a group that lends itself well to the study of biogeography. We will have trouble making sense of the "taxonomic snapshot" we are seeing today unless we look at the history of the group.

I think some one told me receintly that one researcher wants to group the pits in with the rats and completely dissolve the genus pituophis!!!

thanks for the saturday morning food for thought Bart....................

photo by R Nixon

Is that a sonoran? nice looking snake.

BTW, any chance you're going to Daytona? buy ya a beer,lol...

daveb
-----
in the light, you will find the road...

What I heard is that Pantherophis would be done away with and its members added to Pituophis.

Stupid idea - there are enough phenotype differences (4 prefrontal scales, divided vs single anal plate, head shape, etc.) IMHO to keep them distinct.

I doubt that merger will happen.
-----
I decided my old sig was too big.

Stull considered affinis to be a subspecies of sayi. There is clearly a broad band where sayi and affinis merge and overlap but my question is do these snakes represent intergradient populations or are they hybrids? The lines between what constitutes a species is blurred and depending on which definition is followed they could be either. Where affinis merges with other more western forms of Pits is much more sketchy from what I hear. It is problematic since affinis shares some physical characteristics of both sayi and deserticola and annectans to the west. Clearly these are closely related groups of snakes but how best to define them? Stull considered affinis to be the most generalized form of Pituophis and most likely the ancestral species in which all other forms evolved and radiated from. Morphologically sayi is distinct from catenifer and clearly represents a more specialized form than the western catenifer which are very much generalists.

Interesting discussion!

Phil

great point!

In northern Az I have seen several very obvious affinis /deserticola animals. We are talking about some very general attributes like rostral scute widths, dorsocervical patterning, caudal patterns, and saddle counts. Also, I have seen many animals in person and on this forum that are obvious deserticola / pacific gopher (catenifer ) intergrades. Are the classic concepts of species and subspecies too outdated to be applied? Are we seeing a group that was isolated for a period of time via climatic conditions but not long enough to establish solid distinct species and now we are seeing a re-melding of these groups?

I am told that bimaris and anectans co-exhist on the northern baja with very infrequent crossing. And I have seen an animal collected somewhere in Mexico that exhibited a deppei affinis look. I tried hard to track down the locality info on that animal but the grad student who collected it moved on to become a MD and could not remember.........

Grismer suggested that vetebralis and bimares are the same animal and coined the term "pattern class" to describe them however that most receint genetic work by Rodriguez-Robbbles indicates that they are distinct.

I was talking about this very topic with KJ a few weeks ago and he made the point that from a historical perspective if given a big sayi from the Kankakee sand hills and a pale sayi from south western texas you would probably have seperated them as two distinct species or at very least a suspecies.....

This is all very interesting. The definition of what a species is seems to evolve just like the animals themselves. The sayi example you cited is a good one. With such a vast range it would be expected for there to be a degree of clinal variation. The Kankakee/ south Texas bull analogy demonstrates this well. These snakes may well be the same species but are clearly different snakes. This based not only on coloration but also scale row counts, head scalation and ecology. The same can be said for the northern pine snake where not only is there a fair degree of variation of morphometric characteristics but also separation of populations. One thing that has always intrigued me is how long have these populations of pine snakes been isolated from each other.

Phil