I completely understand your confusion. Unfortunately as a marketing ploy new names are made up when it comes to the different color morphs. This is not a new thing it has been going on for years. My favorite one was when "Xenopeltis Unicolor" commonly know as an irridescent earth snake was dubbed a Sunbeam snake or Irridescent kingsnake to increase the sales of that animal.
When it comes to the pit morphs I get a little less forgiving and therefore try and call an animal exactly what it's breeding or color looks like. For instance many folks sell the whitesided bull as a white bull and I believe it to be misleading, we refer to them as white sided and it seems to have caught on. The same goes for the salt and pepper morph we work with out of the trumbower line.
In the Trumbower line there is also two distinct types of white sided animals, one is normal or nearly so on top and stark white sides, the other is a morph that displays the same stark white sides, but the top is a normal pattern with very reduced or ghost like colors and lots of yellow. See the picture below for group shot of some of those we are talking about.
I think that the biggest problem we have in the pits is that we have all gotten caught up in the production of morphs and then try to group them as some of the other snakes in the hobby have done, IE: corns with the snow, blizzard, anthy, hypo etc etc. look. Heck the corn folks have even gone as far as to have a "Okeetee" morph which is not a locale animal but rather a preconcieved notion of what animals from that part of the range should look like. A far cry from some of the corns we keep that are bloodlines directly from the hunt club itself, but look nothing like a "Okeetee Morph". I hope this trend reverses itself.
Enough of my thoughts, for me the bottom line is to call the animals exactly what they are and to be as descriptive in that name as we can be even if it is not as commercially attractive.
John Cherry
Cheryville Farms
