SMR Archive

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This 2014 ♂ male Lavender Tessera is now 18″ long, eating frozen/thawed pinky mice.  His $285.00 price includes    _$OLD

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After factoring out the shipping cost, I’m practically giving this beautiful 2014 female Pied-sided (aka: P/S) Bloodred away.   She is 18″ long, eating frozen/thawed pinky mice, but she will usually bite the wrong pinky, if you get my meaning.  She HATES HUMANS.  Buy her at your own peril.  Her $100.00 price includes    _$old

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This 2014 male Bloodred Tessera is now 17″ long, eating frozen/thawed medium pinky mice.  His $265.00 price includes    _$old

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This 2014 female Striped Tessera is now 17″ long, eating frozen/thawed medium pinky mice.  Her $215.00 price includes   

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High contrast 2014 female Snow Tessera corn.  A grandparent of this one was a Salmon Snow, so I think that lavender color we’re seeing next to the markings could be much more pink with maturity?  She is 18″ long, eating frozen/thawed medium pinky mice.  Her $275.00 price includes    _$OLD 

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I love how many color “clusters” this Palmetto exhibits.  I also like the way the black and red look, so close to each other?   . . 

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Okay, not snakes, but these are certainly a part of maintaining them.  Just two months prior to needing small mouse pinkies, I replace older mouse breeders with young adults.  The result is many and small pinkies.  About half of the pinkies in this daily harvest were under 2 grams in weight.  I use CO2 gas to euthanize the pinkies prior to freezing.  This time of year we harvest between 300 and 450 pinkies per DAY.  Not bad for 88 mouse cages.  

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A beautiful example of Extreme Reverse Okeetee, demonstrating the albino photo-inverse coloration of an Extreme Okeetee.  The goal of most breeders is to selectively breed toward the elimination of color inside the saddles.  

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The hobby name, Kisatchie, was unofficially assigned to the newest Ratsnake species to be described in the United States, Panterophis slowinskii, reportedly because the “holotype” was collected near Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana.  This doesn’t mean that it was the first of its kind to be captured, because I was catching lots of these in 1971 in East Texas and Western Louisiana.  The common name assigned when this species was described is Slowinski’s Corn Snake, but I personally don’t use that name because is contains the word CORN, and this is officially NOT a corn snake.  In 2002, Frank T. Burbrink presented sufficient evidence to establish that this snake, Elaphe slowinskii (now, Pantherophis slowinskii), found between the natural ranges of Corn Snakes, Pantherophis guttatus and Great Plains Rat Snakes (aka: Emory’s Rat Snakes) was sufficiently dissimilar to those species to warrant distinct species status.  Surely this species originated from the ancient natural intergradation of Corn Snakes and Emory’s Rat Snakes?  In order to preserve their genome in captive specimens, since this snake is soundly dissimilar to those two founding species we hope breeders will resist crossing Kisatchies with Corns or Emory’s Rat Sankes.  One thing I noticed when first photographing Kisatchies over a decade ago was that no matter how I filtered my strobes with opaque covers, the light heavily bounced back from these snakes.  Obviously, unlike their Corn and Emory’s cousins, Kisatchies have more iridophores in their epidermis.  

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Update:  Cotton Candy Corns produced by Graham Criglow.  Larger of the two was featured back in December, demonstrating his transformation from shocking pink to deep coral (almost orange) at maturity.  The other is a 2013 hatchling acquired from John Finsterwald, who got it from Graham as a hatchling.  See SOTD 12-01-14 for more history of this beautiful morph.  We should have 2015 hatchlings for sale this summer.