Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi everybody,

I have tried finding a reliable, trustworthy care sheet for milksnakes, and a bit of information about them before I purchase one. I even searched through the archived forum posts, but even though my queries gave me hundreds of hits, 99% of the results I found didn't answer my questions. So I apologize if most of this is common knowledge for regulars.

Which subspecies of milksnake routinely become the largest in captivity. Actually, I would like a complete list of average lengths for the most common pet species and their absolute total maximum size. Maybe that's asking too much.

What are the major differences between Nelson's Milksnake and a Sinaloan Milksnake. They look identical to me, and some places simply say the Sinaloan is bigger. If that's true, how much bigger and what is the average size for either of them? How much overlap is there? Are there really differences or is a small snake a Nelson's and a big snake a Sinaloan and really they're genetically the same?

The root of these questions is that my wife and, who currently have 1 corn snake and 1 ball python, would like to add a milksnake (or kingsnake) to our collection. We're limited on space and of course personal taste in color will play a role. We just don't want to buy a snake anticipating a certain size and then find out we were wrong. Ideally, we would like an animal that could comfortably live its life (or at least the first 4-5 years) in a 20L (30"x12"x12" tank. Bigger tanks are always better, but she and I are both in school (read living in a small apartment) and won't be graduating (read moving to a larger location) for some time.

Any and all (free) information would be totally awesome!
Thanks and have a good day!

Hey Captainjack,

the care for a milk snake is very similar to your corn snake so there is not too much to learn. A warm end of the enclosure in the low 80s with a cool end at room temp should be fine. Milk snakes are secretive and need several hide boxes to choose from and generally they like tight hides. I use aspen as a substrate but newspaper would work too.

The largest milks you can get would be the black milk or the andean milk. Both regularly attain 5-6 feet with some getting larger. Other tropical milks like the honduran can get large too but generally are in the 4-5 foot range. North American milks are smaller and depending on ssp, will attain anywhere from 2feet to 3 1/2 feet in general.

The reason you can't tell the difference between a nelsons and a sinaloan is that they have been mixed so much in the hobby. The pure forms are very hard to come by but if you saw the pure forms, you would see the difference. if you do a forum search on this you should get some hits, this topic is discussed frequently.

One line of sinaloans that is in the hobby and is pure sinaloae is the Cosala Mexico locality sinaloans. Depending on the line, these will get to 4feet and are quite impressive. Here is a picture of one of the Cosala animals I have with one pic in hand so you can see the size of an adult female.

I hope this helps,
Dave

DNS Reptiles Milk Snakes

I read your post shortly before having to run off this morning... glad to see Dave put up some pics of his Sinaloans in the intervening time so you could see what some outstanding locality animals looked like... saved me the trouble of having to link to one of his posts.

If there are care sheets out there for the basic needs of each individual subspecies I've yet to find them either... rather a shame but I don't think you could get any three people here to agree on just what the basic needs are anyway... not that the people here are responsible for all the info "out there" of course!

Here's a few useful... at least I hope so... links to three pages that will help in your size comparison query.

http://www.pitt.edu/~mcs2/herp/Lampropeltis.html
http://milksnakes.org/
http://www.kingsnake.com/king/ssp.html

Gerry

Gerry, I think you can MOST people here to agree on the basic needs, but I know a couple will jump into the mix every time with some "extreme end of the spectrum" suggestions. Not that I think those suggestions are wrong, but I think they are hard to attain for many people. 2 cents thrown in. LOL

Joe

You are probably correct... all too often I let "the few" color my opinion of "the whole"... a bad habit I try to correct but as you can see it is not always with the greatest success.

Gerry

Thanks for the info

As far as "care sheets" go, Applegate's online book is "reliable and trustworthy."
www.applegatereptiles.com/articles/bookcover.htm

Tim
Third Eye

"As far as "care sheets" go, Applegate's online book is "reliable and trustworthy"

Yes, that's right Tim, it is a good book for their care/husbandry needs. But if anyone has the book, don't think for one second that the so-called "Guatemalan milksnake" on page 51 is the real-deal. That is a very high RBR count bicolored polyzona x abnorma that was very likely an import animal that originated from northwestern Guatemala where the two subspecies intergrade heavily. It's not even close to an authentic L.t.abnorma phenotype.

I don't have ONE SINGLE milksnake book here that doesn't depict totally BOGUS subspecies photo representations of some kind in it. I have two books that depict a good friends Stuart's milksnake that is captioned as a genuine Ecuadoran (L.t.micropholis), a perfect "text-book" young adult Conant's milksnake (L.t.conanti) captioned as a Black milksnake (L.t.gaigeae) of all things, a very obvious stuarti x oligozona intergrade depicted as a Pacific Central American milk (L.t.oligozona) and many other very poor photo examples of the subspecies. Some of this stuff is absolutely comical to be honest. This is another major reason that there has been so much confusion over the decades about several of the 25 different subspecies of miksnake (26 if you include the Coastal Plains milk(L.t.temporalis), especially some of the Latin American forms.

So to anyone reading this that is thinking about getting into different subspecies of milksnakes, I strongly suggest to them to proceed with extreme caution and do some very SERIOUS homework on them before they acquire any. The down-side of all this is that unless people are refered to very knowledgeable and trusted breeders to begin with that have KNOWN GENUINE stuff, it can take many, MANY years to find out what is what for yourself when it comes to certain types. In short, simply going by an ad in the classifieds, or just going by what is put on a deli cup label by just anyone, you might as well be flipping a coin in the air as to what you actually end up with many times..

~Doug
-----
"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

My opinion... what Doug said... without trying to be tactful.

With no slight intended to the Applegates... the book is very limited at best... far too generalized... I'll leave it at that.

Gerry

I agree with both your points, but as a "care sheet" goes, I think it provides better and more comprehensive information than most other care sheets out there.

Tim