It is interesting that you breed two of the species that have the most poorly defined "morphs" - nasicus and colubrinus.

I think the name should fulfill two criteria:

1. It should be in some way descriptive of the animals appearance. Personally I don't think "flame" tells you anything about the animal. Flame is just a marketing gimmick that the barkers came up with to sell more snakes. I think the name nuclear is even more ridiculous.
How about "high orange" for a descriptive name? Or "low blotch count"? That tells me what I'm buying.

2. The morph should be diagnosable, i.e. you should be able to look at an animal and be 100% sure it is that morph. Amelanism is a good example of a diagnosable morph. The problem is there is nothing to distinguish how "reduced" the pattern has to be to qualify for the name (or how "high" the orange or "low" the blotch count). How many times do we see someone post a snake and ask "Is this xxxx morph?" The reason is that no one can define the boundaries and a morph name means more $$$.

Western Hogs are a classic example of this gone wrong, IMHO. Just how "red" does a hog have to be to be "red phase"? And how green to be "green phase".

I think coming up with a new morph name every time the offspring don't look like one or either parent is the problem, not the solution.

Is this animal high orange? Flame? Dodoma? Nuclear? whatever?



It wasn't specially bred or anything. I simply went through the bins at Crutchfield's shop in Florida and picked out the nicest (least blotched/most orange) of hundreds of baby KSBs they had. And this was before the Dodoma line was imported into the US.

And just for reference, here's a typical wild caught Tanzanian snake from back in the day -




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Chris Harrison
San Antonio, Texas

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