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A friend of mine bought this snake years ago as a "milk snake"
. He always assumed it was a tricolor Honduran...but when I saw it I was not so sure. Any thoughts?

np

Looks like a tricolored honduran milksnake.

Dean, I don't supposed any locality data exists for this guy, does it? Just giving it a quick glance, it looks like it could have some stuarti influence in it to me. I have seen other stuarti with a broken, incomplete snout band, and this snake's band looks pretty thin like many stuarti have. Also, the wider black bands adjacent to the narrow whitish-yellow resemble stuarti to me also. Of course, locale info would be a plus.

Scott Ballard

Not that Stuarts aren't sometimes very dark but this snake is almost a dead ringer for Polyzona which is typically dark with an thin or incomplete snout ring.
Here's a miserable pic of a hatchling Polyzona known to be from Vera Cruz.
Jeff

No local data avail.
A friend of mine bought it from someone who didn't know what it was maby 4 or 5 years ago...I think at a reptile show.

He was thinking of pairing it up, (assumiung it was a hondo) but I told him I didn't think it was a tri-color hondo...at least not a pure one.

Can he do scale counts or anything ?
I'm almost wondering if it isn't a hondo x sinaloan or nelsoni

Dean, Jeff is right in that an incomplete snout band usually is a trait of polyzona. I have seen probably 2-3 stuarti with that also. However, with that animal being an adult (I think you said it is 4-5 years old), a polyzona would have white body rings that would be almost, if not totally, obscured by black tipping, making the animal look bicolored red and black...at least in the polyzona I've seen. In your mystery milk, the white body rings are still pretty clean and distinguishable, which is why I thought it had stuarti influence. It really doesn't look like a hondurensis to me either. If it is stuarti, it is an overall dark one (like Jeff made reference to), particularly the shade of red.

To answer your question, the scale counts are pretty close in all three of those ssp. of milks. Again, the absence of locality data is what makes some of these really hard to I.D.

Scott Ballard

Hello,
Well sorry about the metric system, but I have no time to calculate from centimeters to inches .
I think, if it´s an adult animal (after 4-5 years this should be) the size gives us another hint. If it´s only 120-130 cm I would tender to stuarti, if it´s a bigger one around 150 cm we have to rethink about polyzona or maybe an strange looking honduran.

Gerrit
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n/p