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from wild collected eggs by Todd Hughes (antelope). Eggs from Calhoun Co., TX...
I love the yellow on these and the little attitudes as well....LOL
John Lassiter

One more pic

Way to go! That's an incredible looking baby. Do you see a reduction in spots in the dorsal area as these intergrades mature?

Todd also found an adult Speck intergrade from the same location months before these eggs were found.
The adult has lots of specks and shows slight Splendida influence.
His has an awesome yellow/orange coloration and less black on the dorsum.
I believe these to be the same thing. Many so called pure Holbrooki hatch out with dorsal pattern (crossbars if you will) and speckle out as they mature. There are a few exceptional hatchlings that hatch out totally speckled.
None are better looking in my opinion than a Holbrooki with a yellow speck on each black scale.

I have also noticed that the farther south these specimens are found the more Splendida-like they look. I have babies from Aransas Co. and Nueces Co. as well. Nueces is the farthest south county of the three and these babies are more Splendida with small amounts of Holbrooki influence. The ones from Aransas Co. (north of Nueces) are visually in between the other two counties.
I can see Holbrooki and Splendida equally in them.

I have a question.....or two
Why do most, if not all, Holbrooki morphs (lavs and albinos) have those crossbars? Why is there not a completely speckled lavender or amelanistic Holbrooki? The het whitesided Holbrooki Tom has IS evenly speckled as is the dorsum of the whitesided male.....
I can't wait to see double homozygous Holbrooki and Splendida.
John Lassiter

...I have always noticed the same thing about the lack of multispeckled holbrooki morphs! All of the ones I have seen, whether they be amels or lavender albinos, have lacked the speckled dorsum and had very prominent crossbars. ARe they in fact, not holbrooki? Have they been crossed with splendida, or nigra? I think that most holbrooki morphs(only exception being white-sides) have influence from some other ssp. That is one reason I haven't added these morphs to my group. I would love to know where the exact founders of these lines originated. I have never looked into it, so some of you may know.

I was thinking I might get keep my checkerboard(het for lavender albino) female that I purchased from Manny last year in Daytona, but the more I think about it I had rather refine my locale types and ad some white-sides later. I'm not a purist, but there is just too much fuzzy background with these checkerboards for me to feel comfortable breeding them into my collected stock.

Don't get me wrong.....I was not trying to say that the lavs or amel holbrooki were crossed with Splendida....They could in fact originate from an intergration zone or there could be another explanation alltogether.

This is what I do Matt...
I love variability so I breed Mexicana.....And now I breeding lots of getula and Hondo morphs and/or hets.......This way I will get variability within a clutch. That is how I get my "fix".....LOL

I also enjoy locality.....I do some field work in my area. I work with three locales of Splendida/Holbrooki intergrades.
I also work with other locale specific snakes.

I do plan on getting all possible morphs in Splendida and Holbrooki.....you never know, one day we may see a white sided, checkerboarded, ghost Holbrooki......Or Splendida...

John Lassiter

I just wrote a decent post on topic and went to post it and got an error message. I HATE THAT! So rather than rewrite it all just read Dean As post opening a can of worms or something like that on Milk forum. My point was for all we know the Speck is the integrade....as the topic of his post was DNA and how odd many results appear to be when things are analyzed. So I would keep the Checker Matt....it is a nice snake and can't hurt. Read Deans post and then come back here and tell me you kinda know where I was going with this....since we're on the integrade type of topic again. Thanks Tom Stevens