Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Sorry for the bad two posts below. Try this link instead...

have gotten many different opinions and was asked for new photos so here you go. Any info you have would be appreciated. I have included two early photos (marked "shipping" which show how much these animals have grown. They are beautifully colored with amazing temperments, easiest snakes I own to handle.

Cheers,

Norm Hill
Seattle
Link

...I would put a good chunk of change on them being Childrens.
I can tell you for sure, they are not stims and most certainly not Spotteds....unless you have mixes. But even still, they look like pure Childrens to me.
-Yasser
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>>...I would put a good chunk of change on them being Childrens.
>>I can tell you for sure, they are not stims and most certainly not Spotteds....unless you have mixes. But even still, they look like pure Childrens to me.
>>-Yasser
>>-----
>>

Hey Yasser,

I want to your setup. Do you guys ever invite people over to see the animals? Plus, I would love to see your Stimsons...I assume you are right, but I swear these are bigger and a little different at least from the Childrens I have seen at shows.

Cheers.

norm hill
Seattle

For what it's worth--I have 1.2 childreni from different sources. Yours look exactly like my male, who I know for a fact is from VPI lineage.
Regards,
althea

>>For what it's worth--I have 1.2 childreni from different sources. Yours look exactly like my male, who I know for a fact is from VPI lineage.
>>Regards,
>>althea

Hey Althea,

Thanks for the email. Maybe I just have very good quality animals here...they came from a great source (an top quality Emerald breeder) and that is why they look different to me from the ones I have seen at shows. Thanks for the remark. Please post a pic of your animal if you can.

Cheers.

Norm Hill
Seattle

I breed both childrens pythons and Pure stimsons and I can say with near certainty that they are in fact childrens pythons, Stimsons generally hava larger darker blotches , in addition the eyes on many stimsons are set higher on the head, stimsons typically have lateral striping and most also have some dorsal striping, another reason not to doubt they are childrens is economics, why would someone sell you a much more expensive pair of baby stimsons and tell you they are actually much less expensive childrens. What you have to watch out for is the reverse of that situation, real stimsons pythons are not that common and are considerabley more expensive than their more common cousins. hope this helps.

Nick
Inland Empire Reptile Breeders

Note that I placed my ID in quotation marks. You don't know the lineage or the geographic origin, so all anybody can do in the case of any Antaresia without any history is give you their best guess.

My best guess is also placed in quotation marks because of the history of those animals. So far as I know, the only lineage of A. childreni in the US dates back to three pairs imported by Hank Molt back in the early 1970s. One pair went to Dick Goergen in NY, one to the Houston Zoo, and the other to Steve Segal in Florida. Of course, back then all four species today recognized in the genus Antaresia were identified as "Liasis childreni." These particular three pairs of animals were bred as "red-desert-phase Children's pythons" in order to distinguish them from the spotted pythons that were common in captivity. That was Goergen's name for them anyway, but they are not red and not from a desert.

I happen to know the man in Australia who sent the snakes to Molt those 30 years ago and I was told that all six of those animals came from the general vicinity of Mt Isa Queensland in what is today recognized as an area of intergradation between typical stimsoni and childreni. So I place "quotation marks" around my identification of the snakes as childreni, because they do not look like Northern Territory textbook.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that when "stimsoni" started being recognized by US keepers in the mid-1990s, snakes from this lineage, purchased from VPI and other breeders for $25-$75 dollars were repackaged and sold to unsuspecting collectors as "stimsoni" for $1000 each and more. So, many of the snakes in this lineage are probably breeding with the Alice Springs stimsoni that came into the country at that time.

Your snakes in those photos look identical to the pure strain of snakes descended from those original NW Queensland animals. I have kept snakes in that lineage from 1978 to the present. Tracy and I hatched over 1000 of them in the 1990s, so we've seen a few. Our original animals include Goergens breeders and Segal's breeders.

Are they really "childreni"? I don't know--who cares? They are the closest thing to "childreni" that have ever been in US collections that I have seen and of which I am aware. Unless in very recent years some actual nothern Australian A. childreni have been smuggled in (and I've not heard even a rumor of that happening--why bother?) this lineage is the only "childreni" that we US keepers have ever had. These animals do have a fading of the pattern that comes with age, a childreni trait, and we are very comfortable refering to them as childreni.

They do readily cross with spotted pythons, and over a 30 year period they have been crossed with spotteds to make a variety of appearances. Interestingly, the hybrid crosses do seem to have reduced fertility--so anyone who has odd-looking "childreni" or "maculosa" that don't seen to lay very many fertile eggs, maybe those are some of the hybrids that are around.

Those are nice animals you have, very good looking. They are superb little pythons for people to be breeding. They are about as hardy as pythons get, they are easy breeding, and most of the babies hatched today will feed on pinks.