Reptile & Amphibian Forums

just found this girl LTC Wild Brooks from the deep S. Fl.from a collector who sold half the pair(the male) and she caught my eye and palpating reveals she is gravid TOO!since being housed w/ the wild male.The pic is poor but she is the light cream colored real McCoy. last wild ones i came across was 4 years ago and were 2 males .What a score!WooHoo Chris

I hope you get a good clutch, can't wait to see pics Tom Stevens

Chris

Nice ! Put me down for a pair if you would . Was the male as nice as she was ? How long ago where they collected ?

Keith
-----

I'm sorry to ask this, I know it's a stupid question I'm sure and there's no other way to ask it but making it sound mean, but what is so "rare" about this snake? It's a beautiful snake and I'm not trying to offend ANYONE, sorry if I did. I'm just thinking, if this snake is rare, then my hypo brooksi must be too.

What does LTC stand for?

well most of the time, a snake is rare just because two odd species were bred and there arnt too many of somthing. btw, i have a brooksi too and she looks similiar
-----
i have one Brooks Kingsnake, hopefully breeding in the next couple of years! yaaahhhh, only if i can find a male though lol, but im still looking for a male lol

I do not want to type a novel here but here's the scoop. A Hypo, or just about ANY morph of Brooksi is common in the hobby. Lot's of us work with them. If you went to South Florida for a year and looked every day you would be lucky as hell to find a bright yellow Floridana in the field. This is why a lot of people still call these bright yellow ones Brooksi, instead of Florida Kings. Finding a Florida King is not too difficult, finding a Brooksi is practically impossible. So the fact this guy found a gravid female for sale from wild collected stock is a great thing, search the net....and I bet you can not find one. Hypo Brooksi are a dime a dozen, I own them, love them and actually have 15 Brooksi. They're great snakes, but why this one is rare has to due with the fact that it is considered a recent find from the field, and not from a collection. There will be some new Brooksi morphs popping up soon, and those will be rare for a few years....but these snakes reproduce quite easily in captivity and will be readily available to many of us. Tom Stevens

wow, i only have one, not 15 butya, i agree, they are great snakes. but i have a question, how do you cool a snake down to 55 degrees for them to hibernate. i live in Georgia, so it would be hard.
-----
i have one Brooks Kingsnake, hopefully breeding in the next couple of years! yaaahhhh, only if i can find a male though lol, but im still looking for a male lol

I live near Austin TX, we always have mild winters. I cool my snakes in the garage. Tom Stevens

Thanks for the clarification Tom, you da man. So now let me ask this (reminder: still learning), what creates a Hypomelanistic "Brooksi"? Is it heterozygous with a normal Brooksi or what? I'm just trying to learn more about my snake, and of course other snakes. I'm acting like a sponge!!

Morphs happen by either simply appearing by chance from a captive breeding with either a sibling to sibling breeding or offspring to parent breeding. Or a single wild caught snake is found by a very lucky person. Once a single morph exists it can be bred to any snake, not only ones it is related too and will create 100% hets for that morph. This is why when a snake is "new" it is usually fairly expensive. As Rainer said he paid something like 700 bucks for a Hypo Brooksi when they were new. Now years later that they have been mass produced you can get one for as low as 50 bucks. The most fun of it all is you can breed that morph to a DIFFERENT morph and all those babies will be double het for the 2 morphs. Double hets create even harder to come by Morphs like Ghosts and Snows, and your odds are only one in sixteen, so those morphs hold their expensive pricetags even longer. You should buy a cheap book like the Corn Snake Manual. It will have a ton of info useful with learning about morphs, breeding, and lots of great pictures. The info is very similar for Kings, so it would be a good reference guide.
Tom Stevens

Wow, thank you so much! I've been looking for a good snake book to buy and various pet stores and such, but I haven't been able to find one. I guess I should go to a major bookstore and see if I can't find something there.

Thanks again.

Try scrolling down the entire page of Kingsnake.com and you will see many business's listed. There's even a link at the top of this page that says Books. I order a lot of stuff from BeanFarm dot com. Though some pet stores are good with Reptiles, your best bet is stay away from them. Order your mice from a breeder, your snakes from breeders, and your supplies from reptile specialty online stores. You can order the Corn Snake Manual directly from the author at Corn Utopia dot com. Tom Stevens

This is how scarce they are:

>>I'm sorry to ask this, I know it's a stupid question I'm sure and there's no other way to ask it but making it sound mean, but what is so "rare" about this snake? It's a beautiful snake and I'm not trying to offend ANYONE, sorry if I did. I'm just thinking, if this snake is rare, then my hypo brooksi must be too.
>>
>>What does LTC stand for?
-----

RATS
1.0 Corn snake "Warpath" (KY locale)
0.0.1 Corn snake (KY locale)
1.0 Black rat snake "Havok" (KY locale)
1.1 Black rat snakes "Reaper and Mystique" (MO locale)
1.0 Albino Black rat snake "Malakai" (Dwight Good stock)
1.0 Everglades rat snake "Deadpool" (Dwight Good stock)
0.1 Greenish rat snake "Rogue" (Dwight Good stock)
0.0.1 Great plains rat snake (TX locale)
1.0 Grey rat snake "Punisher" (White oak phase)(Dwight Good stock)

Good luck and Happy Herping
Brian

The male i did not see ,it sold first!,they were aquired from a small reptile warehouse here in Miami the owner and friend who sold the male said it was the same as the fem. and he knew the collector and said they were 3 maybe 4 years in his collection.and i asked him to relay me more locale info etc....thats all for now thanks for lookin.Chris

Great that you were so lucky.
Email me please
markk16 at msn dot com
Thanks.
:Mark

markk15 at msn dot com
:Mark

I stayed in the Everglades NP in the spring and found 2 dors. If you want to map it out, they were found about 5-10 miles north of Flamingo(any more south and you'd be swimming to the keys). One was a juvi, the other a young adult.
-----
Anthony Chodan

www.gradeareptiles.com

From what I have heard, my vote is yes they are that hard to find. Bill Love used to have something on his site back when they worked with Brooksi. He said expect many mosquito filled days in the swamp before you ever come across a true Brooksi. Of course that is not word for word...and I do not think they have anything about the Brooksi on the Corn Utopia site anymore. If you scroll down a few posts I recently posted a pic of my nicest sub adult normal Brooksi. She is well over 3 foot but has a lot more growing to do. Still....there's more yellow on her than anything. Floridana have a lot of dark ground color. You found DORs that were bright yellow??? I woulda cried. Tom Stevens

Beautiful! That is truly a rare find! Perfect markings, great coloration, and new genetics!!!
Nice score.

heres one w/ a lil' help of sunshine(shade)7/6/05

thats a great looking w/c. I used to get my yellowest ones from Lee Abbott before the hypos came along. I used to pick through his clutches of normals to choose the ones that would lighten the most. I had some screemers. I wished now I held onto them. I haven't seen any as yellwo since. I remember Tim Ricks bought an adult (Abbott)screaming male from me about 8 years ago.

Tim if you are reading this what happened to that snake? I want it back

had 2 w/c males a couple years ago Tim Ricks got one and i kept the youngest one, here he is today

Here's my normal female. When I think of Brooksi this is the image I see in my mind. I have many others that are not so vibrant yet still obvious Brooksi but I think these are the ones everyone would like to have. Tom Stevens

I wouldn't call that a brooks, hahahahahahahahaha. When I was young, we only called the blond ones Brooks kings, they were from Homestead, the rest were just south Fla kings.

The blonds or Brooks did not have all that dark stippling on the edge of the scales. Have things changed that much. Thanks FR

I have looked at what many people had to offer in the way of normal Brooksi over the past 3 years and it was hard to find any that were not het for something. I must also say that when asked a little about thier history most of the people I spoke too in Florida had a "who cares?" attitude LOL. Got any pics of the ones you are talking about Frank? I would love to see them. Tom Stevens

Maybe the floridana has geographically infiltrated the nice yellow lines that used to be common place.

I remember the "brooksi" being more blond/yellow as well. If memory serves me right itt was when people started calling them "South Florida kings" instead of brooksi that the yellow dissapeared. LOL! ...This was also the time people had the hypo morphs and the natural blond looking ones vanished in peoples collections. Weird.

Glades Herp was selling their Canal stock up until 2000 as were the Loves and Krysko had some nice normal Brooksi as well. They didnt dissapear its all you mutation crazy guys who lost sight of how cool normals are and how hard good ones are to obtain. I strove for years to get awesome looking normal Brooksi while everyone was drooling over the Hypo's. Dont get me wrong I had Hypo's as well and loved em but to me a nice normal will beat out any mutation any day hands down.

Keith
-----

but to me a nice normal will beat out any mutation any day hands down.

That may be for you but when one has been there and done that the hypos really take the cake.

Thats all!

ok FR take another look at New Pic!!! (image)thats a blonde check her belly markings (minimal),And the Male still has some growing to do as you prop know the more they grow the blonde ground color expands(reduced saddles) imho any lighter they would be "WhitePhase" btw the male is from Homestead /Florida City.Peace Chris

This guy was less than 3' in length when this picture was taken. He actually escaped not too long after, and I haven't seen him since.

but I also think the others posted are as well. A Brooksi look is subjective in my opinion. You can get animals like this one from a clutch and out of the same clutch get animals with more black like Chris' wildcaught animals.

Keith

-----

What I was trying to say was that most pics of Floridana in the field look more like this. Not many people seem to like these as much as the nicer yellow type. That is a sweet snake Keith.
Tom Stevens

No way man thats a beauty. I love the yella bands on him. Looks like he aint short on appettite either lol.

Keith
-----

where can i find one like that

...that's a nice snake. Have you proved him/her to be just a "normal"? That is, have you bred that to a hypo?? I have seen a few like yours that were indeed het/hypo.
The ones we used to get/find way back (in "Brooksi" territory)were less starkly colored yellow and more of a dull cream --sort of. lol!
Now the ones from up my way, near Tampa, Riverview, and Apollo Bch. had that deep yellow to them. Often they were darker overall (especially when compared to yours pictured) but what yellow was present was deep yellow/orange--sort of.
Some of this can be seen I think in Len's "school bus" kings.
I no longer have any of them and I sure wish I did.
:Mark

I would like to go on "the list" right now, please for a pair!!!
Todd Hughes

i aint countin my chickens or taking reservations.
because of Murphy.my ghost project this year went south with 2 pairs 1 pair axan x hypo layed mostly slugs maybe a good one or two in there,then pr 2,F -axan het hypo x M -hypo het axan the male dropped dead after his first breeding,and the fem layed 2 good then now is egg bound still! after a vet bill & 2 syringes of Oxytocin. how do you spell JINX LOL ill try to remember you guys but remember 8 egg probability i might keep em all.Chris