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Though technically gravid now, the eggs she is showing (via distended scales for most of her body posterior) she has not yet been bred. I’ll introduce her to her 2016 husband any DAY now. While shedding events are often good timing markers for ovulation, I don’t wait for those when I can visibly see (or manually palpate) eggs.
Show & Tell
Fresh from a very long brumation, this adult female Charcoal Terrazzo corn snake should be ready to breed in five weeks.
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This female Banded Charcoal corn snake was bred to a Charcoal Tessera this month.
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Comparison of young adult Anery and Charcoal Tesseras. The lower-right head is that of the Charcoal Tessera. Note the virtually all-black eye of the Charcoal Tessera that lacks contrast between pupil and iris, VS. the Anery Tessera that demonstrates a black pupil on a silver iris.
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A typical adult SMR Extreme Okeetee corn snake.
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In my opinion (and that of most corn snake enthusiasts) the best Kastanies are from the German-bred line. This red-headed Kastanie was produced from that line by a German corn snake breeder.
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SMR Fluorescent Corn Snake. This is not related to Rich Zuchowski’s similar Amelanistic (albino) corn morph, Fluorescent Orange, though they look very much alike in appearance. As Rich did, we started our line with a wild-type Extreme example Okeetee bred to a classic Amelanistic. We dropped the name “Orange” from our Fluorescent morph name because we make some that have orange largely supplanted by red, but also to denote that these are not related to any of his stock. Does this make ours special? Certainly not, since anyone can make corns like this one by starting the way Rich and I did, but from there it takes many years and generations of selecting the best target phenotypes to breed to one another. I cannot think of an Amelanistic version of corn that offers more pleasing color and contrast than these. This photograph also dramatically demonstrates how most gene mutations in snakes would make them glowing targets for predators in the wild.
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SMR Extreme ReverseOkeetee. The primary distinction between classic Reverse (Amel) Okeetees and these is that most of the centers of the saddles in Extremes lack color, rendering virtually pattern-less white markings. It takes a few generations to get here from classic Reverse Okeetees, but it’s well worth it. We will be selling babies of these later this summer. Bonus Pic . . .
Show & Tell
Over a decade ago, when my dear friend, Marsha Matthews (poppycorns.com) was in the process or unraveling the mystery of what makes Coral-type Snows so much more colorful than their classic Snow counterparts, I recall her telling me that in her endeavors to see how the colors would transform via selective-breeding she went TOO far. When I asked what she meant she declared that instead of intensifying the pink and coral colors in successive generations, they virtually always became orange when she continued to cross the most colorful Coral and Pink ones. Of course, when you first see one of these that turned orange they make you think you succeeded in making perfectly pink or coral Snows, but when they mature, they are orange. There is no better demonstration of what she meant than the Cotton Candy Snow Corns Graham created from pairing a JMG Coral Snow to a SMR Super Salmon Snow. The “finished” product above is exactly what I get when I do what Marsha did a decade ago; selectively-breed the pink/coral examples one too many generations. Bonus Pic . . .
Show & Tell
We will be making and selling more of these gems this summer. These are Scaleless Anery Tessera corn snakes from the 2015 hatching season. Most have few or no scales anywhere but their bellies and around their mouths, but some–like the one showing all the black freckling–have random tiny scales that appear in some assemblage of fragmented pattern. Those black freckles are actually tiny, round black scales. Note: ALL Scaleless corns in the hobby toDAY derive from the original pairing of a Corn Snake to an Emory’s Ratsnake (aka: Great Plains Ratsnake) and are therefore technically inter-species hybrids. Bonus Pic . . .
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Another 2015 Scaleless Anery Tessera corn.
