Hey Terry

Interesting post - I'd like to comment on the bluish phase. About twenty of so years ago, when mostly WC was all that was available, a shipment arrived in the UK that contained a large group of the blue background bimacs, they were a lot cleaner looking than the one in your photo without the dark centers to the scales and had cherry red markings (blotched with no dark striping and mostly dumbbell shaped blotches). The importer told me they were from the Jiangxi province, how true this is, I don't know. These were very popular at the time and for several years whilst bimacs were in favour, and were the main colour available over here. As the 'morph' era ascended on the hobby, they sadly were one of the species that got forgotten and its now near on impossible to obtain any CB bimacs here. I saw a large import of bimacs a few years back and none of them were of the bluish phase. most were pretty generic blotched striped. Last year there were some imported into Europe and some of our friends invested in them, of the photos I saw most were of the blotched variety and had some nicely coloured bold blotches with clean backgrounds, but no locality details. I was really taken with one pair and invested in some of the babies produced from them this year.

Couple of pix of my babies - looking very dull in there juvenile colouration which hopefully will lighten up as they mature.







It would be great to have specific locality lines of Bimacs available in the hobby, and identify unique characteristics in them, like we have with the Diones. The Blues and Blondes are real pretty. But I can't see it happening unless someone collects and exports themselves. But I guess what we could do is line breed for unique characteristics ? The 75% blondes that Toby has, show some of the colouration of the blonde in the background - be interesting to see what the babies of this pair look like, whether any of them have the bleached look of the original.

Slightly off topic - but talking about colouration - I have heard mention that males tend to be more colourful than males - is this an observation that you or anyone else could confirm within the clutches that you've hatched over the years ?

one more thing then I'll stop with the rabbit - on the striped bimacs, I believe there is actually a genetic (simple recessive) stripe in captivity in a private breeders collection in europe - quite different to the wild stripe phase.

Happy New year to one and all - Sue xxx
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