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This is a wild caught male black rat found in a farming area in Maryland a few years ago. I raised up females specifically to breed with him and just got 10 good eggs. He looks like an albino but with normal color eyes. I'm anxious too see if I get visual hets.

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Mark Kennedy

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Mark Kennedy Reptiles

Fantastic find! Best of luck and hope to see a nice follow-up once they hatch out.
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See all my snakes at SerpenTrack.com

Super cool! Best of luck with this project and I'm excited to see the results.

Thanks guys I'll let you know what I get.
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Mark Kennedy

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Mark Kennedy Reptiles

Wow! Now that is interesting! Please post pics when the eggs hatch...
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-Toby Brock
Southwestern Center for Herpetological Research

Thanks Toby I will
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Mark Kennedy

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Mark Kennedy Reptiles

>>This is a wild caught male black rat found in a farming area in Maryland a few years ago. I raised up females specifically to breed with him and just got 10 good eggs. He looks like an albino but with normal color eyes. I'm anxious too see if I get visual hets.
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>>Mark Kennedy
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>>My Email
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>>Mark Kennedy Reptiles

to describe a bit more detail,

The snake has a ground color that is an off-white/marble and slight lavender tinge to the skin (kinda opalescent looking with the way the shades all blend). The blotches color seems to vary depending on the temperature and snake's mood ranging from pastel pink (mostly when in shed) to a dusty rose/red and coral orange. The tongue is a purplish-blue color. The eyes have a normal black pupil with the iris a normal brown with gold flecks and a blue outer rim.

We don't think it is an albino or hypo...photos we've found show either clear red eyes or just "slightly normal" eye color but with a dark ruby pupil. This snake is definitely all normal eye color and black pupil.

Yes, I noticed all of the very things you are mentioning when I first saw his post, and I totally agree with what you are saying.

1) A true amelanistic animal would typically have absolutely ZERO melanin anywhere on the entire body (including the eyes).

2) A hypomelanistic animal would display a reduction in the overall animal's melanin content to varying degrees, and even less commonly, greatly reduced to the point of affecting the eyes giving them a very deep ruby/bloodred coloration.

3) A tyrosinaise-positive (t-plus) animal would typically have more of a lavender/purplish, or sort of milk chocolate/deep lavender hue and would typically display deep ruby-red eyes.

My newly-discovered locality-specific "moonshine" morph intergrade "greenish" ratsnakes originating from the northeastern corner of S. Carolina are surprisingly variable looking too. The lightest individuals seem to be virtually amelanistic looking, while others (generally the females from what I understand) tend to be the darker phase with corresponding dasrker eyes. When I first got mine, the female seemed to have jet BLACK pupils. But many months later I was looking at her one day and to my surprise were actually a deeper ruby-red coloration, and not black at all. They seemed to be lightening up from what they looked like as a hatchling.

I think from everything I have seen, studied and researched regarding the dynamics of how chromatophores operate, as well as what genetic terms tend to apply best for a given phenotype, the particular morphs that I have are probably best described as a form of T-positive albino rather than a hypo. They display a purplish/lavender hue that is indicative of the melanin "precursor" protein catalyst that is visible within the cells, but doesn't allow proper production of actual melanin, or at least VERY little of it. Producing "some" small amounts of melanin in T-plus forms is also fairly common too, just like a hypo can vary anywhere from a 1 to a 10 in Honduran milksnakes. For example, the "extreme" hypos I work with being the full-blown 10's.

If the pupils in yours are truly black (as they do appear to be), it seems that this really doesn't fit any of the three above genetic terms I described because of the irises AND pupils still being a normal coloration. However the body background seems to be missing ALL melanin and only the other remaining pinkish/red pigment remains (erythrin).

All I can come up with for lack of a better genetic term for yours is that it is likely a form of "paradox" amelanistic that for some bizarre reason still allows melanin to be produced within the pupils themselves, but nowhere else. Is there any light "smokey" darkish over-spray look on it anywhere at all?. If not, I would think it is an anomaly "parodox" form of either amel, or t-plus.

It will be very interesting to see what you come up with, but if it is a genetically ihheritable trait, it will still take growing up normal hets and breeding them back to this animal, and sibling to sibling to make any morphs. It will be VERY interesting to see if ALL the morph hatchlings display the same black pupils, or not.

Anyway, very cool snake. And I look real forward to seeing some morphs in the future...

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

* "This hooby has the worst types of people I ever met"
* "What is it about the snakes that attracts these idiots?"
* "Everyone thinks they are a know it all"....Rainer (Bluerosy)

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Good post Doug thanks. No dark areas on him. This reminds me of the group of ball python morphs that make white snakes. It may prove co-dominant so there would be visual hets. Or he is the visual het and there will be a super! lol Just have to wait and see.

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Mark Kennedy

My Email

Mark Kennedy Reptiles

Cool!,......just try to keep in mind that the odds of it being a co-dom colubrid morph and not a recessive trait is extremely slim. But anything is always possible until it is known to be otherwise..

It's more likely that you will have to raise hopeful heterozygous normals up and see what happens when they mature and are bred back to the original morph and each other. There are very few colubrid morphs known to the hobby that are truly co-dom, but there are certainly a few exceptions. Boas and Ball Pythons are a very different story though.

Definitely an interesting snake and future project!

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

* "This hooby has the worst types of people I ever met"
* "What is it about the snakes that attracts these idiots?"
* "Everyone thinks they are a know it all"....~Rainer (Bluerosy)

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Doug, I think that you and I have had this discussion in the past but I think it's worth repeating for other folks. The eye pupils only appear black They are not black because of melanin. I'll just quote the wiki article here and leave it at that.

"The pupil is a hole located in the center of the iris of the eye that allows light to enter the retina.[1] It appears black because most of the light entering the pupil is absorbed by the tissues inside the eye."

Note that it says, "appears black."

In a simple explanation, with albinism, the pupil appears pink because the lack of coloring in the iris allows light to escape and thereby shows the red of the blood in the eye.

I rarely interject but every so often and feel a need to add a point.

Yes, that's true. It seems that it is about the iris coloration rather than the pupil itself as to what coloration they appear to be. I also understand that The actual color of the eyes in animals with less melanin is yellow, but it appears as blue or grey because of light being reflected back by collagen. Collagen inside the iris scatters and absorbs all colors apart from blue or grey, which bounce back through the top layer of the iris.

It's very interesting, because I have noticed irises side by side in certain snake morphs that basically "appear" to be not much different than another specimen's irises, yet display quite different "looking" pupils. Hard to know just what exactly is going on in each case, but light wave reflection, refraction and absorbsion is quite an interesting natural phenomenon.

cheers, ~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

Thanks for that ...always had me scratching my head when someone mentioned "pink" pupils.
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See all my snakes at SerpenTrack.com

Mark
I thought you might find this piece interesting.
Just a little paper I wrote on reptile pigment about 7-8 years ago. This is just a small bit of it. There's a little info here about eye pigment as well...

Almost all of the colors we see in snakes come from color bearing cells called Chromatophores. There are three classes of chromatophores in snakes. 1. Xanthophores, 2. Melanophores and 3. Iridophores. These three types of chromatophores have different pigment functions. The Xanthophores produce the yellow to red pigments. The Melanophores produce the brown and black pigments. And the iridophores react with xanthophores and melanophores to reflect other hues of color(like green and blue.) The xanthophores and iridophores reside in the dermis layer of the skin just beneath the epidermis. The melanophores can be in both the dermis and epidermis. The epidermis is a layer of about 30 (mostly dead) skin cells deep on top of the living dermis layer. The Chromatophores are arranged in layers. The top layer contains the Xanthophores, in the middle are the iridophores and the bottom layer is the Melanophores. The Melanophores also have finger like projections called dendrites that can extent upward between and around the iridophores and Xanthophores. These dendrite fingers can sometimes send melanin (the brown or black pigment) to the surface of the dermis and into the epidermis partially covering up the pigment produced by the Xanthophores. This is why some snakes like Boa constrictors can quickly change from light to dark.

OK. Now that you know about chromatophores let's switch gears for awhile..

If you've ever seen a baby snake that was born or hatched prematurely you may have noticed it had a lot less pigment compared to a fully developed baby. Thats because all of the chromophores have not yet migrated from the neural crest to the dermis of the skin. So, what's the neural crest? Let me explain.. Early in the embryonic development of snakes the cells that will eventually become the chromophores are being created in a region called the neural crest. I like to think of the neural crest as a cell nursery. At different points in development these newly formed cells leave their neural crest home in waves and seek out other parts of the developing
embryo. The waves of pigment cells leaving the neural crest and migrating to the dermis are called chromatoblasts. But sometimes things go wrong and there is a defective mutant gene that will not allow chromatophores to develop in the neural crest or the defective gene will prevent the migration of the chromatoblasts to the dermis. Either way no chromatophores ever reach the dermis. This condition is called leucism. Leucistic snakes have no (or very limited) melanophores, no xanthophores and only very limited amounts of iridophores and their skin appears almost completely white. However, eyes get most of their pigment from cells that migrate from a region called the neural tube and not the neural crest. So the eyes are affected very little by the leucistic mutant gene. Leucism can be classed as a genetic malfunction of the neural crest.

No matter what lighting I look at them under I cannot see any red. I have not been able to even get a "red-eye" effect from a photograph which is something usually easy to do with red-eyed snakes (and I have tried many times). As for the body background.. there is a blue tinge to the skin under the scales.

Until something can be proven one way or the other, we have been calling him a paradox albino. He was found as an adult so really cannot say what he might have looked like as a hatchling... scars on him too so he's been roughed up a bit.

Not long after getting him we were lucky enough to rescue a small clutch of wild black rat eggs from a mulch pile (front end loader unearthed them and they tumbled everywhere and were brought to me). We figured that was the best route to go to try to work on proving the genetics without any contamination. Hatched the eggs, released the boy hatchlings and kept the girls to raise up. They came from an area about 20 miles away from where he was found so whatever the outcome is I think we can consider his future babies a pure locality morph.

Very interesting indeed!....thanks for the background update.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

"some are just born to troll and roll"

That's pretty cool - I really like it!

Tim

Fantastc find!Can't wait to see the results of this project.
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"Upon Thy Belly Thou Shalt Go"