Reptile & Amphibian Forums

One of my female Tangerine Hondos gave me a very small clutch this year, only 5 eggs. They took 99 days to hatch! That's Drymarchon incubation times! The babies are enormous, though. Here's the odd thing. Both parents are Tangerines. 3 of the babies are Tangerines, 2 of them are tricolors (sort of). They have white bands instead of orange between the black bands, except the first band at the nape of the neck is orange. They are cool looking, but I haven't seen this from 2 Tangerine parents before. Anyone else?
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We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh..almost forgot. The other (wider) bands that are normally red on a tricolor are orange on the two "different" babies, like they would normally be on a Tangerine.
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We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Ralph Waldo Emerson

>>Both parents are Tangerines. 3 of the babies are Tangerines, 2 of them are tricolors (sort of). I haven't seen this from 2 Tangerine parents before. Anyone else?

Neither tangerine nor tricolor is a simple recessive. I think of them as the opposite ends of a continuum. I always tell people that you can get the occasional tricolor out of a pair of tangerines, the occasional tangerine out of a pair of tricolors, and that if you breed a tang x a tri-c you'll probably get some tangerines, some tricolors, and some in-betweens.

(definitions: tricolors are red and black and the narrow inner rings range from white to cream to yellow to gold to sorta-orange. tangerines are two shades of orange or reddish-orange, the wide and narrow colored rings approximating each other in color. I consider an "extreme" tricolor to be one with white narrow rings, with the increasing color in those rings representing the move into the "middle ground", you see examples posted here every once in a while of what people call "tangerine albinos" but they're red and gold or red and orange snakes, again i'd consider those in-betweens, not tangerines, arguably a kind of tricolor. imho.)

TD

Yeah, I think I got the "in-betweens" here. The wider bands are not red like a Tricolor, but orange like a Tangerine. I guess I've just been "lucky". When I had two Tangerine parents, I got Tangerine babies. I've never gotten a Tangerine from Tricolor parents, but I've only bred tricolors once or twice.

Normally, mine hatch in an average of 65 to 68 days, too. I wonder what took these so long? Nothing different about incubation techniques, they were incubated at 83 degrees in vermiculite.
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We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Ralph Waldo Emerson

...would like to see em! TJ.