Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hope you don’t mind I used your picture, oldherper.
Since this pic of his Texan is one of the better face close-ups of an erebennus I’ve seen, I decided to use it for comparison to an eastern. On the left is oldherper’s young Texan, and on the right is one of my easterns.

Notice the facial scalation differences. This info was taken from the diagram in the Peterson field guide.

This is good to keep on file as evidence if you are keeping Texans in areas where easterns are off limits (GA, FL etc) and also if you are keeping easterns in TX.

Like Doug said, sometimes it’s hard to see these things with the naked eye, especially with a dark colored snake. So…the camera with a good macro comes in handy!

That makes it esay to see, doesn't it? I was trying to explain that to a guy at the Atlanta Reptile Show last weekend and drawing lousy pictures for him (if I ever really saw an Indigo that looked like my drawing, I'd run). If you say "The 3 superlabial is cut off from contacting the post ocular by the 2nd and 4th superlabials." they just look at you like you have 3 heads. I'm going to print your picture (if it's OK) as well as mine and keep them for a good visual reference to explain that.

of course it's ok! That's why I did this.
You know it's funny, I always have trouble decribing the ground color of my TX indigos. When you look at the picture of your female alone...I'd say "black"

But when you see it next to the eastern...it's very different.
I just can't come up with a name for that color.

I say it's like dark brownish / greyish / blackish...
I think we need to invent a new color.

We could call it "erebennus brown".

Great Posts! I imediatly went out to check my "unicolor". Temporal and supralabial connect. unfortunatly, my printer would only do one of the photos so I saved it to disk.

Ok....Now on the color....Texas Grey?

Frank
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"The luxury of not getting involved departed with the last lifeboat Skipper..."

Thanks for the great comparison shot Dean! That may come in handy on my next suprise venomous inspection from F&W
Chris

In addition, the Texan one appears to have 1 more superlabial. Is that going to be the same with all Eastern vs Texan comparisons?