Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi,

I was wondering what methods you all have found to be the safest and most consistent in determining your chondros' sex. Also, what are some of the best sites or references that help in determining aru from soroung from biak ...etc.

thx,

M

The best method, IMHO, is probing after the animal has reached at least a year of age. I waited until 15 months on mine, and still ended up with a slight kink in the tail of one animal. Steer clear of any dealer who sells young sexed animals. It's just not safe to do and you'll have a less than attractive animal as it gets older.

As far as locality goes, unless the proper documentation is provided, or you are buying animals from a breeder with locality documented animals, there is no absolute way to determine where an animal has been collected. So, as it's been stated many times, a locality "type" can only be applied to the discription of the animal. Check Greg Maxwell's site for more info on the locality/type debate. Good luck and have fun. Just stick with captive bred and born and you'll be just fine.

Brandon Osborne

I agree that it is impossible to look at a snake and truthfully asign it a locality based on appearance. It is also a worry that such an animal's progeny could be sold as a locality specific animal. I would suggest that, unless the breeder knows the entire history of the parents, or indeed, imported them himself (in either of these cases you would not need to "identify" anything yourself), then the snake should be treated as non-locality specific
I do wonder, however, what these "documents" that people are always talking about could be. There is no official form handed out at the points where the animals are collected. All that anyone can have is a declaration made by the the exporter or collector.'
I've heard it said that "no document" means "no locality" but, given that there are locality animals being imported all the time from honest exporters, with or without a relatively meaningless piece of paper, isn't that a little extreme?.

G

Click the link.
Link

....interesting stuff. Kind of underlines the point I was making about there not being some magic "document". At the end of the day you have to examine what you know about the source of the animals. If it is sold as locale-specific, how reliable is the source? For me personally, I would not feel confident calling an animal by a locality name just because it looked like one. The post about the Basins shows why that's a bad idea.
As for the "type" thing, it's fine as a way of describing an animal but seems to be used by many simply as a way of hedging one's bets. But not all locality animals conform to their "type".
My collection consists of nine Arus, all but one of which were imported from Herpafauna in Indo'. I have several that have very little white or blue, and one which (at 4 years) has a lot of yellow. These animals cannot be described as Aru "types", yet they are definately Aru LOCALITY chondros.
The fact that the conversation was about Meraukes was interesting, too. I'd heard that they were so hard to get because they were actually taken from a National Park over the PNG border. Good luck getting "documents" if that's the case!

G