Category: SOTD

Show & _Tell

2017 Scaleless corns that we held back, to be future SMR breeders.  The Tessera is possibly het for Caramel and Amel (therefore, BUTTER) and the parents of the other one were both het for Scaleless Sunglow Motley.  Since we can see the extra color demonstrated in the non-Tessera above (presumably from the RF (aka: RedFactor) gene mutation), next project is to put that RF gene into Scaleless Tesseras and Amel Scaleless Tesseras?  Well worth the wait, eh?  

note:  ALL Scaleless corns in the hobby toDAY (including SCALED corns that are carriers of the Scale-less mutation–aka Het Scaleless) are descendants of the original pairing of a Corn Snake to an Emory’s Ratsnake (aka: Great Plains Ratsnake).  Therefore, all Scaleless corns (and their scaled siblings) are inter-species hybrids.

Show & _$ell 

{product id=1895}

This 18″ male 2017 Super Salmon Snow Motley corn snake is currently eating frozen/thawed pinky mice.   If you buy this snake and the depth of color is not greater than demonstrated in this picture (that I have altered to diminish the saturation of color–cuz you would not believe the real pic of this snake), I will buy it back, paying all shipping and processing fees.  His $225.00 price includes    

Show & _Tell

Freshly out of brumation last week, this 2015 female SMR-line High-white Reverse Okeetee corn is owned by Catherine Turley.  Shocking yellow.   . . .

Show & _Tell

Don’t know why some of these appear to be so predominantly blue when they first hatch, but change to orange with maturity.  The parents of this Scaleless corn are both eXtreme Okeetees; one Scaled and one Scaleless.  Love the orange head.  So far, three of this brood look just like this one.   . . .

Show & _Tell

Female Snow corn, owned by Catherine Turley.  This one is close to the BONE WHITE Snows we saw more of a couple of decades ago in this hobby. Except for subtle color tones, this is one of the whitest I’ve seen in a long time.  This color scheme is not rare among WhiteOut (Blizzard Bloodreds) and Avalanche (Snow Bloodreds), but I see no markers for Diffused/Bloodred in this corn’s pattern.

Show & _Tell

This seemingly innocuous image of a corn “wearing” her water bowl, prompts me to share the details of this not-so-uncommon SMR event. All of my adult corn snake cages have such a bowl, into which I set a plastic deli cup for water. I don’t have to wash the ceramic bowl very often, but an unforeseen advantage to such a watering system is that less than one female per year lays eggs in water–in the absence of having a damp Sphagnum Moss nest box. No, I don’t leave such water bowls in cages of females that are about to lay eggs. After introduction of the nest box with damp Sphagnum Moss, I leave a small water bowl in the cage, large enough to hold an adequate level of fresh water, but too small to lay eggs into? In the case of the females that exhibit that they are about to lay a same-season second clutch of eggs (approximately six to eight weeks after their first clutch of the season), since I do not re-introduce males to those adult females, if they exhibit small oval bulges where their eggs are, I often do not give them a nest box. This is because, most of the time, when they appear small, they’re usually infertile. Check out the next pic to see what usually happens if I make a misjudgment about egg sizes?    . . .

Show & _Tell

This adult Striped Sunkissed corn snake is owned by Catherine Turley.  The inheritance of this pattern stripe-LESS “mutation?” within the Striped Complex is not fully understood, but if you bred this snake to a visually striped corn snake you’d get 100% Striped mutants of varying pattern exhibitions (striped, stripe-less, and aggregations thereof).

Show & _Tell

Finally . . . . !  This has been a tough nut to crack.  I started this project via pairing a Scaleless corn to a Sunglow Motley.  It’s bad enough that we usually only average about 13 eggs from our mature, veteran het Scaleless females (surely because the eggs are big, from their Emory’s Ratsnake ancestry), but factor in the reality that the average number of Scaleless corns is roughly 3.5 per brood, and the odds of getting Scaleless corns with more than one other gene mutation are not yet desirable.   Since there are 4 gene mutations in this project (Amel, Motley, Scaleless and Red Factor), the average number of target morphs (in this case, one snake possessing all four gene mutations) is ONE in 32—plus one in 4 on Red Factor ? 

Show & _Tell

Adult male Lava Tessera corn snake.

Show & _Tell

Adult Miami Okeetee corn snake, owned by Catherine Turley.