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.
Part of a brood of the progeny from the pairing of two Common corn snakes — both Het for Blizzard (Amel & Charcoal), Anery, Sunrise, and Palmetto. The Charcoal Palmetto on the right with lots of freckling is the one featured on SOTD a few DAYs ago, but you will notice that there is a second Charcoal Palmetto in the center of the image. This one demonstrates an arrangement of “freckles” that is rarely seen in Palmettos (perhaps one out of 15). I cannot imagine that the destinations of melanophores and chromatophores have such a simplistic destination mechanism, but it APPEARS as though many of the scale colors that were meant to to be randomly distributed throughout the body (but never on the ventrum) are clustered together in two different locations (with a third grouping near the tail – not visible in this pic) see red arrows. When we see this phenomenon in the fully-colored Palmettos, it is rendered in what Martin and TJ Baker call “splashes” of color; mostly red and orange. I like that term, and plan to use it when describing Palmettos with such clusters of color.
Also seen in this image are Common, Charcoal, Blizzard, Amel, Anery, Snow (maybe Snow Blizzard), and Sunrise Amel non-Palmetto siblings. The “black & white” non-Palmetto in the upper-left quadrant of this image could be an Anery, since the grandparent Blizzard of this brood is het for that color mutation. I will surely have to rely on the appearance of the eyes in Charcoals to distinguish between Anery and Charcoal Palmettos and non-Palmetto Charcoals and Aneries. In certain light theaters, many Charcoal phenotypes almost appear not to have a pupil, since there is so little contrast between iris and pupil. This “Anery” mutant has the typical body color contrast of an Anery, but the eyes of a typical Charcoal, so it may be an Anery Charcoal. We have produced many like this that indeed did turn out to be homotygotes of both color mutations.