Reptile & Amphibian Forums

2003 "Bartlett Stock" male.

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n/p

....but they've always been grossly overpriced, and are not terribly attractive, at least in comparison to it's majestic mainland cousin. They are more a snake appreciated only by the true students of the genus like yourself, and there are not enough folks like you. Reminds me a lot of Northern Pines that are not black and white; the true Pituophis folks such as myself and a very few others have a deep respect and appreciation for these animals, with all others being pretenders.

Bart Bruno

As I alluded to in my other post on this tread I really don’t believe there is a direct correlation between an appreciation of natural history and captive breeding. Keeping in line with the forum one of the most interesting aspects of eastern kings to me is their adaptability. They thrive in swamps, marshes, grasslands, forest, as well as areas heavily utilizes by humans for agriculture, recreation and even residential developments if they are not too intensive. To accomplish this they manifest a wide range of behaviors as well as phenotypic expressions given the relative simple nature of their pattern. All this is part of what makes them fascinating. That said I like jet-black beauties with wide clean white bands. I find this particular high contrast phenotype the most attractive and locality aside, these are the characteristics I look for in my breeding stock. As it happens, I keep and breed kings from Currituck County NC where a good measure of the population exhibits the qualities I look for. This doesn’t mean however, that I’m a pretender or that I lack appreciation for the full spectrum of phenotypic expression. It simply means that in my herpetocultural efforts I’m going to work with what I find most attractive. In general, I think people prefer clean high contrast patterns, which explains some of the early interest in localities. Okeetee corns and Jersey pine barren pines are two examples. In both cases there is the expectation that captive-bred neonates look a specific way even when those who have hunted these localities know well that not all wild Okeetees are screamers and not all Jersey pines have china white ground color. If there are pretenders out there it’s the guys who line breed along locality lines for specific phenotypes that are no longer representative of the founding populations.

The reasons that OBX Kings are under appreciated are multi fold. First and foremost they suffer from the perception that there is a significant phenotypic different from mainland kings. While they can be highly speckled, most are not. The example you posted shows great promise but is the result of years of selective breeding on Carl’s part. The real interesting aspect of the OBX King is its natural history not its phenotype. IMHO, natural history just doesn’t equate to the marketing of captive-bred animals, certainly not when the price disparity was so great. Time was when people were asking 400 a pop for a locality OBK King when at the same time you could barely give a mainland eastern away. I would imagine that this generated a lot of negativity when a large portion of the OBX animals grew up looking little different. This to me is an example were enthusiasm for locality set an expectation that was unfounded which when unrealized negatively affected the market. Now that prices are more in line with nice OBK animals moving well at 100ea and other locality animals moving for as much as 75ea I think you’ll start to see OBX Kings becoming more popular.

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