Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I know I haven't shared that many pictures during my years on this forum, but I'm gonna make up for it right now.

Ok, so here's the deal. Two years ago my Albino Blotchless Yellow Ratsnake male mated with my Whitesided Everglades Ratsnake female, resulting in 11 hatchlings out of 11 eggs. Only 4 of them fed well on FT pinkies from the start, but fortunately turned out to be 2.2 and also the most colorful. The others insisted on live prey. So these are the ones I held on to, sold the rest.

Anyway, since they were only 2 years old, and still rather smallish after this year's hibernation, I didn't expect them to breed until next year, so I did't separate the males from the females. Imagine my worries when the females stopped eating and I felt the eggs in their abdomens. Anyway, all went well. One female laid 11 good eggs, the other 9 good eggs (no slugs!). All eggs hatched between the 18th and 26th of July, resulting in:

6 normal
3 albino
3 whitesided
1 blotchless
2 albino blotchless
1 albino whitesided
2 whitesided blotchless (!)
2 albino whitesided blotchless (!)

I've never seen last 2 combi morphs before, but if anyone ever has now would be a good time to come forward. Anyway, here they come:

Been there, done that, but still quite nice.

I just love this fractured dorsal pattern.

Cool snakes, all of them. I like the whitesided the best. What do the parents look like? Forgive me if you posted their pics I must have missed it.

dg

Thanx, Dwight. No you didn't miss anything, I haven't posted any pictures of the (triple het) parents yet, nor do I have any decent pictures of them. But I can tell you that they look just like those South Florida Yellow Ratsnakes. Rather orangish Yellow Ratsnake with contrasting black stripes, can't be that hard to visualise. BTW, I did post a picture of one of the grandparents, under "albino blotchless Yellow Ratsnakes". The male is on top.

I said the male is on top, but I just checked and, well...

I actually like this one most of all. I wish I had more of them.

Back to square #1, LOL.

I never cared much for albinos, but man do I like this one.

This is what I was aiming at al along, and I think they're amazing. They are so different from what I imagined them to be.

I did not expect this to happen (with a propability of only 1/64, I statistically would have to hatch 128 eggs to get 2 of these), but somehow the Mendelian laws of inheritance didn't stop lighting from striking twice.

Very nice!,...

Yes, it's always interesting that Mendellian statistics and theoretical probability often doesn't mean "diddly" when it comes to what ACTUALLY can and WILL be produced.

I can't wait to see what will happen with my many Lampropeltis this year!

best regards, ~Doug

pic of rossalleni to keep with ratsnake theme..LOL!

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"Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open mouth and remove any doubt!"

Thanx. Nice Honduran, BTW.

n/p
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"Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open mouth and remove any doubt!"

I agree Doug. I have produced many things that came way early into a project. A few times it worked against me too taking way longer than I had hoped to produce a specific morph. You just never know.... I think this Rat Snake project here is awesome! That must have been a lot of fun seeing all those different morphs pop out.
Tom Stevens
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TomsSnakes.com
twitter.com/TomsSnakes

That's for sure, Tom!.....one never knows. Which I'm sure you'll agree is a big part of why this great hobby of ours is always interesting..LOL!

take care, ~Doug
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"Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open mouth and remove any doubt!"

Yeah, it certainly was fun, among a lot of other things.

Thanx, Tom.

Fantastic! Are we supposed to pick favorites? Well, I'm not; they are all sweet.

Congratulations! Just curious: what else do you have in the works?

Thank you, "fliptop". My personal favorite would be that one "regular" blotchless specimen. Picture doesn't show, but it is already gaining lots of red ventrally and laterally. The whitesided blotchless specimens is what I was aiming at, but I was quite suprised to see it resulting in an all white snake, rather than the extremely clean patterned whitesided snake I imagined they would be. I think they eventually will become a radiant yellow snake all over, which would be cool to say the least. The albino whitesided blotchless snakes for instance were snow white right after their first ecdysis, but are already gaining lots of yellow. So I guess I'll just have to push myself to keep posting pictures periodically as they mature.

Another project I was working on was the axanthic brindle Black Ratsnake. I recently had 27 hatchlings out of 27 eggs, about half of them brindle. Since it takes about a year to reliably pick the axanthic ones from the normals, I decided to part with them, thereby enabling myself to focus on my albino / whitesided / blotchless Yellow Ratsnake project, which I find more interesting to be honest. I only have so much time, and it's not like they're gonna make me a million dollars. Maybe next year.