Reptile & Amphibian Forums

To live within the geographic range of any of the Pituophis is a special privilege. The opportunity to find one either on your property or within minutes of your home, even more so. Here's a male 2008 Sonoran from the area in SW Arizona where I live. Caught him in the middle of town as a neonate and raised him up to the five footer that he is now. Neat personality too - gets perky when I enter the room where his enclosure is. Used a plain old quarter in the top photo as a size reference. There's something about that combination of straw yellow/brown and reddish saddles edged in black that I just love. Could be a holdover from the days when I lived in corn snake range...

And here's a female 2010 that I picked up on an ATV trail near home last October. She's a little less than three feet long currently.



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"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

Have yet to find a pure adult Sonoran. Stull traced the roots of "pit" radiation to affinis. Whether or not that is true, they certainly seem to close the gap between gophers and bulls.
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See all my snakes at SerpenTrack.com

From where you live, you'd probably have to get at least as far inland as Indio to get beyond the intergrade zones in southern CA and into the definitive range of affinis. Further south and east of there is better. Over here n AZ, affinis is our only gopher save for a sliver of northern AZ that lies within the range of deserticola.

As for relatedness, the affinis do seem to bridge the gap between bulls and the other gophers morphologically. I would love to see a micro-satellite "tree" chart of all the Pituophis to see where they truly rank in relatedness. Very expensive and would be difficult to get funding for the number of samples that would have to be collected and analyzed to generate a really good tree but very interesting to at least a few of us. Would lay the foundation for a really good update (book) on the Pits that we are all hoping to see someday

I understand that a study of some magnitude was completed within the past 10-15 years but the establishment of micro-satellite markers is absolutely cutting edge and am sold on the results of relatedness that this technique is capable of generating. Something to pursue in my retired years perhaps...
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"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

Those are both very nice. I also like the colors on that male a lot.

Thanks, they are a joy to have!
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"The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."