>>I've been looking into milk snake morphs lately, especially the tangerines and anerythristics, and I've noticed that the prices tend to be high as compared to rat snakes and kings. For example, here http://market.kingsnake.com/detail.php?cat=59&de=272797 is a link to a $350 baby anery Honduran. I'm not debating the market price - if people can sell them for that much I wish them nothing but success. I'm just curious as to why they are so expensive relative to rat snakes (north American rats, at least) and king snakes. Are milks more difficult to breed, or are the morphs more difficult to find, or is there some entirely different reason?
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>>At any rate, thanks for your time.
Prices are the result of supply and demand.
On the supply side, some of the rat snake morphs occurred many years ago--the albino or amelanistic red rat is one of the first morphs brought into herpetoculture and precedes the hondo morphs, as an example, by a decade or decades. So there are lots more of them, thus greater supply. In addition, hondo clutches might average 8 babies, and rat snakes maybe three times that many. Again, more supply.
On the demand side, i can't address that as well as the supply. Some of the rat snakes are great animals and i know there's a group of enthusiasts and i have an okeetee red rat in my own collection, just to admire its beauty. But when prices have declined so far as they have with red rats, for ex. there's not much incentive that would motivate people to want to buy them so they could in turn breed them, because the expected return is so greatly reduced from what it was many years ago. Beauty's not the sole factor in demand. If it were, arguably normal-colored (or wild-type) hondurans, for example, might cost more than some of the morphs, certainly less than the anerys, for ex., that most people would agree are not as pretty. But newness and scarcity also create demand, so maybe that accounts for part of it.
Another issue of demand is the "need" to buy a morph in order to create an even newer double-morph: The price of anerythristic hondos had been declining for a couple years but when the albino hondo appeared people realized anerys would be the avenue to breed toward the snow, and anery prices jumped back up about 25%. Even now, there are fewer than a dozen breeding age snows in the world, I'd guess, and there's not yet a single hybino (hypo and albino) you can point at and say yep, there's one. That sustains demand for the hypos and albinos necessary to initiate hybino projects.
I'm sure others will pitch in on this subject, this is just intended to get it started.
Terry
