Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've been counting ALL the bands, even those past the vent, but folks have informed me that one only counts the bands up to the vent. Why is that? How did that convention get started?
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

Males have longer tails, thus more rings.

AH HA! A new way to sex snakes (those with banding, of course)
The snake in my photo is a female. I still don't really get this convention, though. In my clutch of pyros they all have different amounts of bands whether male or female. I'd need to have two snakes of opposite genders that both have the same amout of bands anterior of the vent to see if this way of counting holds up.
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

body bands and caudal bands, as well as subcaudals and caudals(rattlesnakes, longnose) are taken in the field and recorded. After the data is taken then they can be compared to the sex and see if there is a correlation.

In many species and locals, there is, not not in some species or some locals.

Its not intended for sexing captive snakes. ALthought it works son some.

How it works in captivity is not so important as most animals are crosses(not from the exact same local) and none reflect phenotypic pressures. That is, nothing selects for a certain band count. Cheers

There are also stub tailed hatchlings and from predator attacks.....
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John Lassiter
Poor planning and procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part...

...same reason you would use SVL instead of overall length....
:Mark
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Surrender Dorothy!

crimsonking.piczo.com/

Is that one of your hatchlings from this year? Very nice!
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Kent

Yes, she is. To see the entire clutch go here:
forums.kingsnake.com/view.php?id=2000086,2000463
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

Its for the same reason why you are supposed to measure a snake from nose to vent. In the wild, snakes often lose parts of their tails, so it would be impossible to get an accurate length or ring count on a lot of them.
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I understand now. It is unlikely any of my captive bred will lose parts of their tails, but I did have a stub tail hatchling occur last year.

Thanks, all for clarifying this for me.
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Bob
Pyromaniac AKA Greatballzofire
Keeping cats allows man to cohabitate with tigers. Keeping reptiles allows man to cohabitate with dinosaurs.

Sure thing, Bob. I like counting the tail and still do when recording lengths, even though its not the "official" way. lol
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