Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello Indigo and Cribo enthusiasts,

someone here in Germany want to sale 1.1 of green D. c. melanurus.

This color is great, isn´t it?

Does someone knows where the green melanurs comes from (in the wild)? It seems to be a local color variation.

Many greetings

Juergen

It's kind of difficult to tell from the photo but the coloration looks fairly typical to me. I have a couple BT's and a few unicolors that range from a golden color to tan color with an almost greenish / olive colored hue. The tail looks kind of light in the pic so it might be an intergrade. Do you have a full body photo?
I'm certainly not trying to discourage you from buying the snakes. If they're healthy, eating and fairly priced, go for it. It looks like a nice snake.
Chris

I have to agree with Chris. My melanarus look pretty similar face wise...but their tails are SOLID BLACK. That snake looks like an uni x mel.

Don't some Unis atart out with tails that are a bit darker than the body but get lighter as they become adults? If so, is it possible that the snake in the pic is a Uni?

Uni hatchlings do have darker coloration on the tail that fades as they mature. My uni yearling is already completely uniform in color so the darker coloration doesn't seem to last long. The cribo in the picture looks old enough that it should have already lost the darker tail coloration (but it's really hard to tell it's age from that pic so anything's possible).
The pic is of my unicolor hatchling back when I first received it....you can see the darker tail coloration that used to be there.
There's nothing wrong with intergrades but since he called it a melanurus I just wanted him to know it might not be all BT (in case that's important to him.)
Chris

None of my "melanurus" have the nearly pure black tail associated with the classic Blacktail Cribo. As a matter of fact, most of them that I see don't, but the tails are noticeably darker than the rest of the body. I suspect that most of the wild-caught Blacktails that come in are actually intergrades...maybe mostly Blacktail, but somewhere in the lineage intergraded with unicolor. The pure Blacktails that I've seen have a black tail, or nearly black. Mine have a tail that is 2 or 3 shades darker than the rest of the body, but not even close to black.

There is a thread above this one in which Dean discusses intergradation of melanurus in the wild.

Most of the imports I've seen at shows and the classifieds lately look like intergrades. Seems like a few years ago I was seeing more of what I would consider true BT's being imported. It probably just goes in cycles.
I would consider the BT's I got from Bobby Lee last year to be true BT's. Their tails couldn't be much more jet black. Here's an old shot of the male that shows his tail.
Chris

Hey Chris, that's the rat bastard that gave me my first and only Dry bite, he sliced me up good! LOL
He was at a shop and was really neglected. I decided to check him out and waved my hand in front of him at what I thought to be a safe distance and he got me!
A split second bite was all it took to open up my finger.
That pair I sent to you are one of the nicest set of BT's I've seen. Smokin jet black tails on the both of them.
Any recent pics???

Bobby

i almost never see true bt's either. wall to wall brown tails w/ the occasional uni thrown in.