The Snake-of-the-Day headliner of this web site features photographs that we believe will interest our web site visitors. Each daily photograph will be posted at 11:00 am. central (GMT – 5) and replaced in 24 hours. Feel free to make suggestions regarding what snake photographs you would like to see in this daily feature. The animals pictured here are not for sale, unless otherwise noted, but you can find available surplus snakes for sale on the Surplus Page of this web site. We appreciate your patronage and welcome any suggestions you may have.
These two corn snakes have nothing in common, nor are they necessarily slated for future marriage. I just wanted to show two snakes in one DAY instead of making you wait one extra DAY to see the second one. The orange corn is the 2011 product of pairing a Java Striped Amel to a Striped Amel Sunrise. She displays the color rendition of Amel + Java and also appears to be a Striped Sunrise. You can barely see the depigmented scales that are tracing the borders of the dorso–lateral stripes, resembling what scarred scales look like on most albino-type corns that have had serious injury. This depigmented scale lines are not the result of scarring on this snake, but from the gene mutation, Sunrise. As hatchlings, Sunrise Amel mutants resemble Snow corns but with an over-all blush of orange color. Within weeks, the snow look gives way to that of an Amel and within one year their Amel colors are deeply saturating. Between one and three years of age, most Sunrise Amel mutants that are also Striped or Motley mutants begin to exhibit scale color-desaturation that mostly follows the edges of their mutant pattern. Classic Sunrise Amel corns are not orange like this one, but the Java “morph” obviously altered the Amel appearance to an overall orange coloration.
This 2012 Palmetto demonstrates how deeply their colors saturate in just one year of maturity, compared to the color-flecking sometimes barely discernable when they are newly hatched. This one also exhibits some red color splashes close to the head. I estimate that only one out of 15-20 have such splashes of color, but perhaps one out of eight have this much dark black flecking.