Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I don't know what happened to the original thread, but I wanted to give my 2 cents.

I personally have no desire to have a snake that is a 10th generation captive born snake. All of my current collection is either wild caught animals or animals that I personally produced from wild caught, exact locality pairings. To each his own, but if I am going to keep a captive born animal, it needs to be from the same cut if at all possible, or at most a mile or two apart. I have some black gaps snakes on breeding loan that are F1 snakes that originated from about four miles from where our male was found. I also have two wc females from the same cut. While the cb females are much nicer looking snakes than the two wc females, I plan on keeping mainly offspring from the latter pairing (I am sure that I will keep at least one female from each of the captive born females). To most people, I think that they would be fine with this pairing (and I am too) but I would much prefer them to be from the same cut.

The 10th generation and Black Gap brings me to another thing that is bugging me. Every Gap baby that I see for sale looks identical, super speckled with little orange (and not to mention, they could have some Stillwell Cut ancestry in there somewhere). What once was considered a very unique animal, is now the norm and for me very boring. This takes away what is special about the Black Gap locality and that is diversity in color and pattern. When was the last time you saw a captive born blairs from Black Gap? The blair morph is a very common phenotype from that locality in the wild, and yet is sorely underrepresented in captivity. I hope to remedy that next year.

My 2 cents,
Bryan Box

The 10th generation and Black Gap brings me to another thing that is bugging me. Every Gap baby that I see for sale looks identical, super speckled with little orange.............
thats an interesting observation bryan, in the late 90's early 2000's when i and troy and brad produced quite a few gaps from 100% w.c., with all verified parents, most were blairs or alterna phase with some broken alternates, i just laugh when i see the "cookie cutter" speckled gaps, all looking the same i see advertised now.

Jon,

Unfortunately many of these wild-type phenotypes were not selected for people's breeding stock and we now have "designer" Gaps. I have come to the point that I would be almost disappointed to find a Gap that looked like those aforementioned "cookie-cutters". I know that there are some of those more typical blairs and alternas out there, they are just not the ones that are "mainstream". I am afraid that there are a lot of people who think that all Gap snakes are supposed to be speckled.

I discussed this for years until I was red in the face. When the locality craze was just catching on, I was noticing that people would collect in areas that routinely turned out dark snakes. Then one night they get a screamer light-phase blairi. Some years down the road and many dark snakes later, they get another beautiful one. They breed the two brightly colored snakes together and now they are selling "Such 'n Such Locality Gray Banded Kingsnakes!" The babies are nowhere close to typical look of snakes from the area but they were pretty and they sold.

Same thing happened with Boa constrictor constrictor. People picked specimens from Peru, Brazil, Guayana, Suriname, etc., that exhibited the traits they desired, ie, pink groundcolor, "fire engine-red tail," widow's peaks, etc. Now they had a collection of snakes that all looked alike and not at all representative of their respective home regions.

Cheers,

Terry Vandeventer

Brian I have often wondered if you ever bred that king mountain you got from me ?????????
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Archie Bottoms

Hey Archie,

I never could find a female, so I ended up giving it to a friend. At that time I had what I called the bachelor's pad. I had males from many different oddball localities but no females. It is nice to see you posting on here. I hope all is well with you.

Bryan

I never found another before they closed the mountain and put 200 windmills on it.I am doing well Thanks for asking.I miss my mountain tho.
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Archie Bottoms