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This past March I spent a couple weeks in South Florida taking care of some business, and I had the opportunity to do a little snake hunting while I was down.

One afternoon I met up with my friend Alan Rivero to flip a few of my old spots in the canefields south of Lake Okeechobee. We were actually hoping for kingsnakes. As luck would have it, one of our first stops in Hendry County produced this gravid female Florida kingsnake:

Alan decided he wanted to keep this one. On his way back to the car, he flipped this large, gravid pygmy rattlesnake under tin:

A few minutes later we stopped at an old spot in Glades County. While nothing was found under cover, I spotted this pale orange rat snake out on the crawl on a canal bank covered in discarded sugar cane:

Mere minutes later, we progressed to another site, and spotted an unusual looking snake on the road. A familiar shape, but the color was all wrong. The first time in a while that I've felt at all puzzled by a snake I could plainly see in the wild. I realized it was an anerythristic Everglades rat snake! I wish I'd grabbed my camera to get a picture of it as found, but instead I grabbed the snake:

Compared to the rat snake we had found only minutes earlier:

Alan was especially excited to see this snake, as it was his first unexpected wild morph. I've found a fair number wild morphs, so I've come to almost expect this kind of thing.

Just 15 minutes later we found an expected wild morph, an anerythristic corn snake:

We went out to the Devil's Garden from there, and roadcruised about 15 snakes after dark. Not a bad day...

I left the anerythristic Everglades rat snake on breeding loan with Daniel Parker of Sunshine Serpents. We have given him the nickname Ole Smokey. He was a great feeder, and docile right out of the wild. He has since proven himself to be a good breeder, siring 3 clutches this past spring.

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www.brooksi.com

Wow, what a nice find! That head and neck are just beautiful. What a cool looking animal. That's great you've gotten some clutches out of him. That normal one is pretty darn nice too. Looks like you guys had a good time. I need to get out in the field. Been too long.

Mike

Nice finds. The anery glades looks really good.

Congrats on such an awesome find. Reminds me of a Mexican Baird's. 8-)
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See all my snakes at SerpenTrack.com

Very cool finds, Nick!

That anery Everglades is awesome man. I remember seeing an EXTREMELY hypoxanthic yellow rat back in 1996 that only had a bit of yellow pigment on it's snout, but apparently nothing ever became of any in the hobby since then that I was ever aware of. He was selling the alleged hets for $250 at the time. Maybe his particular animal wasn't even genetically inheritable, who knows. If they weren't he sure made out with selling normal yellow rat hatchlings at $250 each back then..LOL!

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

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

Thanks Doug. There are a lot of things in this hobby that seem to have been lost. Though they are great animals, yellow rat snakes do not seem to have an especially strong following in trade.

Here's another anery photo I found a while back:

http://snakesnmoresnakes.blogspot.com/2009/09/photo-of-anerythristic-yellow-rat-snake.html

We are on track to creating some hets and multi-hets with this animal this season. We'll be keeping an eye out for a locality matched female before next breeding season, too.
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www.brooksi.com

I agree 100% on there being a good number of interesting lines of different things being completely lost over the years. Yeah, the market for yellow rat's is definitely much more limited as you said when compared to many other species out there. Still cool though to that more limited market.

Yeah, that other yellow there is very neat too. In my opinion if it was indeed a "pure" type Yellow rat and only produced YELLOW pigment and no red and/or orange from having any involvment with any Everglades lineage at all, then that one would probably be more accurately termed an extreme form of hypo-xanthism due to it only displaying a very reduced amount of pale beige/yellow, and nothing else but melanin. It would be interesting as all heck to see if your latest find was allelic with the one in the Lucas pic. It can be an extremely tough nut to crack between axanthism and anerythrism sometimes due to the fact that xanthophores are responsible for producing both yellow and red pigments. Only if there is a predisposition for displaying more red pigment are they referred to as "erythrophores" pertaining to red pigment (erythrins). The more I learn about this it seems the LESS I actually know to be quite honest. There are so many freakin variables involved..LOL!

Whatever the case, those are very cool snakes for sure!

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

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

I'm not too caught up in whether anery, axanthic, or hypoxanthic is the proper term. We'll probably come up with something a little more catchy. Visually this snake is not what I would expect from a hypoxanthic yellow or Everglades rat snake. It may be that you could breed this snake into a straight yellow rat snake from North Florida and achieve a similar effect.

As I see it the yellow pigment on the chin/throat probably derives from a different mechanism than the color on the rest of the body. Visually it is often a different shade of yellow than the rest of the snake. We see this in anerythristic corn snakes, and especially ghosts. Corns in their normal form often have plenty of visible yellow, yet in anery corns it only shows up in the throat region. Often anery corns have a little pink in their blotches as well. I wouldn't be surprised if my snake was expressing the same gene as an anery type A corn.
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www.brooksi.com

Yeah, The yellow coloration that comes in more intensely as certain snakes mature (as in the chins, throats and necks of normal, anery, and ghost corns you mentioned) and probably the extremely intense yellow amel nelsoni as well are likely prime examples of carotenoid retention from the prey they eat that is gradually stored. This also depends on certain individuals or bloodlines genetic predisposition for the ability to store these carotenoids too.

If you want to be thorougly puzzled, you should read some of the same articles I have on different pigment cells (chromatophores). You will walk away knowing much more, and much LESS than you ever thought you knew before..

Here's just a couple.....

http://vetherppath.hubpages.com/hub/Understanding-Reptile-Color-and-Correct-Color-Terminology

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7I.html

http://www.vmsherp.com/LCChromatophores.htm
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

We bred Ole Smokey to our beautiful hypo female. This was a tough decision for us because we had to give up producing hypos with our spectacular hypo male, at least for the first clutch (though we did breed the two hypos for a second clutch). If in fact the gene is recessive, we should be producing double het anery/hypos in just a few years. We may be able to produce a double homozygous "hypo smokey" which would be the true "ghost 'Glades." We prefer the name whiteside Everglades for the other morph to avoid confusion.

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www.sunshineserpents.com