>>I have been collecting Great Plains Ratsnakes and Southern Plains Ratsnakes from the wild for nearly 20 years or more. These two little hatchlings do not resemble any ratsnake that I have caught or purchased. At first I believed them to be Emory but as I second thought I believed them to possibly be Slowenskii or Meahllmorum. They could possibly be a cross between Meahllmorum and Emoryi or Slowenskii.
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>>BTW, these guys are at my local petshop who occasionly will ask me to identify tricky snakes and I was not unable to be positive on these.
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>>What do you guys think?
>>-John Lassiter-
John, thanks for posting. This raises some interesting questions and points. It also gives me a chance to talk about my snakes some more.
First, let me say that buying from a pet store leaves a lot to be desired, as far as I'm concerned. Do they ever know what they have for sure? You'll probably never know the locality of those snakes, and maybe not even the subspecies positively.
Secondly, since they came from a private breeder, I think you said, they could be anything. They sure don't look w/c. But the breeder did say they were "emoryi", correct? I would tend to lean towards, emoryi, unless we can show otherwise. But then the breeder may not distinguish bt. the northern "emoryi" and southern "meahllmorum" subspecies. So, it could have some meahllmorum in it too. BTW, the intergrade zone for emoryi and meahllmorum is huge. My guess, is it's likely an intergrade.
Third, the snake is very pale. It almost looks like it's hypomelanistic. I'm going to look at a couple of my snakes in comparison and tell you how I used them to come to my conclusions. Here is a pic of my Brazos Island male (meahllmorum) from s. TX. Notice the head pattern which is very similar to your snake's....
Your snake has a much larger number of blotches than the typical meahllmorum, however, and the ventral pattern is probably closer to emoryi too.
The next photo is of a hypo het corn X meahllmorum. Notice the more numerous blotches, than typical for meahllmorum, the large amt. of black around the blotches, and the typical meahllmorum head pattern. She also has a pretty busy ventral pattern. But her color is much darker than that on yours....
Your snake has very little black around the blotches, not typical of "slowinskii", I believe. All the characteristics point to an emoryi, or emoryi X meahllmorum cross, imo. It could very well be a snake from the very large intergradation zone bt. these two subspecies. Of course, other possibilities include crosses bt. subspecies by the breeder, or even hybrids bt. a guttatus complex snake and a common ratsnake. But I don't see any TX ratsnake characteristics in your babies.
One more thing is that these babies have a lot of contrast, very light ground color, and I believe are carrying one or more mutations, like hypomelanism, or even some others. I wouldn't trust just my instincts to make a project out of these, but might have them just for fun, if I thought they were beautiful enough. It's up to you.
What do you think of them? It's very hard to judge a snake from a picture. For one thing you can't see any behaviors or movement on the part of the snake. Other things might be important too, like your talk with the pet store person, who the breeder was, or even the cost of the animals. Anyway, good luck with them if you get them.
Hope I helped a little...TC
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Ratsnake Haven: Calico and hypo Chinese beauty snakes, Mandarin ratsnakes, Chinese twin-spotted ratsnakes, South Korean Dione's ratsnake, Great Plains ratsnakes and corns 
