Show & Tell
Laid in February (last month) these eggs are from a het Scaleless “corn” that exhibits the “throw-back” coloration of their Emory’s Ratsnake ancestry? All Scaleless “corns” in the hobby toDAY derive from the original pairing that rendered the first Scaleless “snake” from the inter-species crossing of Emory’s Ratsnake, Pantherophis emoryi X Cornsnake Pantherophis guttatus. Therefore, all Scaleless corns in the hobby toDAY are descendants of an Emory’s Ratsnake Pantherophis emoryi via the inter-species paring of that first Ratsnake Pantherophis emoryi X Cornsnake Pantherophis guttatus marriage. Being relatively few generations since then, we occasionally see “corns” with a distinctly gray ground coloration, not unlike most Emory’s Ratsnakes (aka: Great Plains Ratsnakes), and decidedly UNlike most wild-type corns (except for some Miami locality and Miami Phase corns found in the extreme Southeastern regions of their Natural U.S. habitat). Next year I hope to breed this female to a wild-type Emory’s Ratsnake to eventually create Scaleless snakes that have olive green markings on a gray background (essentially Scaleless Emory’s Ratsnakes that will, of course, be just as inter-species hybrid as toDAY’s Scaleless corns). Green markings are uncommon in SOME parts of the Emory’s Ratsnake’s Natural range in the wild, but in my decades of collecting Emory’s Ratsnakes in at least eight states of the U.S., I’ve seen many more of them with green markings than brown. S