Reptile & Amphibian Forums

New Corn Snake Discovered
SAN FRANCISCO, California, December 2, 2002 (ENS) - A new species of snake, Slowinski's corn snake, has been discovered in north-central Louisiana and eastern Texas.
The new species was named Elaphe slowinskii in memory of the late Dr. Joseph Slowinski, who was curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Dr. Slowinski was bitten by a venomous krait in Burma on September 11, 2001, and died the next day at the age of 38.
The new species is related to the Eastern corn snake, found east of the Mississippi River in the southeastern U.S., and to the Great Plains rat snake, found on the Great Plains from Texas north to Utah and Nebraska.
Dr. Joseph Slowinski discovered at least 18 new species of reptiles and amphibians during his abbreviated career, and had been bitten at least eight times by poisonous species before the bite that cost him his life last year. (Photo courtesy California Academy of Sciences)
Slowinski's corn snake was discovered by Frank Burbrink, a biologist at the College of Staten Island (CSI) who specializes in snakes and reptile evolution. Burbink, 32, had considered Slowinski as a mentor since the two researchers met while Burbink was doing fieldwork while earning his PhD in zoology from Louisiana State University.
The same fieldwork led to Burbink's discovery of the new snake, which previous researchers had mistaken for other more common corn snakes. Burbink determined that it was a separate species by comparing the DNA of the three snakes species.
Slowinski's corn snake is now recognized by the Center for North American Herpetology, raising the number of known U.S snake species from 140 to 141.
"People seem to be pretty excited about it," Burbrink told the "Staten Island Advance." "There's not too many [new snakes] that are being found."
Burbrink said this is the first new snake discovered in North American in decades.

If you take two, say, rat snakes of the same species and breed them together, they're going to have babies that look pretty much like them.
If you take two jungle corns and breed them, some of the babies will look like corns, some will look like kings, some will look like their parents, but there's no guarantee. It would be pretty tough to say that the offspring of two jungle corns are the same 'species' as their parents.
So I guess a species is a genetically distinct group of animals that can propagate more animals that are similar to them.
That's all my opinion, of course.
Given enough mixing, I guess a population originally comprised of jungle corns would be a species under the above definition.
But you imagine if they made a new species every time a guy bred two different carpet pythons together or whatever? .

Because, as Erin said, the hybrid can't consistantly reproduce itself. Meaning it can't make another baby that is like it. With loads of intergrading and breeding back you start to get some consistency. F2s are gonna come back irratic and NOT a new species.

Definition of a species....

species: NOUN: 1. Biology a. A fundamental category of taxonomic classification, ranking below a genus or subgenus and consisting of related organisms capable of interbreeding. See table at taxonomy
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Sonya

The explanations above are off the mark.

A captive-produced hybrid is not a new species because a species is a group of animals -- in the wild -- who are reproductively isolated.

Captive animals are pretty much irrelevent to the whole idea of species, which is defined in terms of wild populations.