2016 hatchling 1 year update

I've spent a great deal more time analyzing this year's hatchlings and I now think that I know what defines my morph. So, let's review some of last year's snakes (in no particular order) to test what we've learned:

(if this is your first visit, you might want to read earlier posts to figure out what I'm talking about)

16-02-07

This 2016 hatchling photo is pretty bad but you can see the broken eye stripe and severely distorted dorsal pattern which should indicate my cadmium morph.

Same snake, one year later and the dorsal pattern is gun metal grey instead of charcoal black and the ground color is very yellow with a silver wash. This is my cadmium morph.

This one had a fairly solid stripe through the eye and a mostly regular dorsal pattern. Many of the dorsal spots are washed out in the center but on the surface this looks like a typical rat snake.

One year later and the ground color is very yellowish but here's a trick. If you look at the white appearing between the scales along the back you realize that it forms two longitudinal stripes from head to tail that appear to be hidden under the scales and other colors.  This is an indicator of a typical rat snake!

16-02-01

2016; solid stripe through the eye but the dorsal pattern is questionable. IMHO, it's not broken up enough. Should be a typical rat snake.

There's those hidden white stripes again. Based on the weird ground color, I don't doubt this animal will be cool looking but I'm putting this in the typical yellow/orange range. We'll know how yellow in another year.

16-01-01

Now, here's a little guy with a good example of a broken pattern. See how the dorsal markings look like jaguar spots? They are irregularly shaped, washed out in the center and often alternating along the axial line of the body? This will be a morph.

That's what I'm talking about. Morph city!

16-04-01

This little guy caught my eye when it hatched. The dorsal markings are oddly defined. Nice crisp dark outlines; fading slightly at their centers. The ground color is weirdly uniform. It looks cartoonish. If you stare at nature for very long you realize that most of it is fairly pixelated. This is why distant objects fade to blue in the atmosphere and caterpillars seem fuzzy. Our eyes are only designed to see so much detail so when something stands out as being sharply defined we tend to notice it.

year 1: the colors have changed but the contrast stays the same. You can barely make out the white longitudinal striping. I know that this is a typical rat snake but if you look closely at the scales you'll find that a normal snake's has many tiny specs of color on each scale. This snake has noticeably fewer. What a neat aberration. I wish I could get a good pic of this.

16-05-05

Typical, normal, boring rat snake. Oh how I long for the unique and freaky fashions of the recessive types.

other than a light ground color and a nice prevalent longitudinal white stripe, who cares?

16-05-04

If you've been paying attention than you'll see that this snake might be something cool.

Hey! Look at that! The dorsal pattern is fading out already, there's a nice silvery color filling in between them. The only note is that the longitudinal white stripe is pretty clear on this animal. Maybe I'm making too much of the white stripe.

16-05-03

Perfect example of the "jaguar spot" comment I made earlier. Specifically look at the contrast between light and dark on the tail andcompare it to the middle of the body.

Every time I see one like this I go back and look at the pics I've posted of typical rat snakes. Consider that we're one mis-folded protein away from a zombie apocalypse and then think about how lucky you have to be to get this shift in patterns and colors.

16-05-01

:eyeroll: Another boring, stupid, boring, normal, boring, everyday snake just like the ones that get in to your attic and eat the squirrels.

I spend my hard earned $$ to feed this run-of-the-mill animal and then come home after a long day at work to clean its cage!  Why, I ask you?

16-01-03

Hey now! Here's a keeper!

compare the solid dorsal markings on this animal to the ones from the previous snake. These are deeply concave. They look like thick X's or hour glasses. The previous snake's dorsal markings are weakly concave and look like more like saddles.

16-06-03

Lots of nice colors and contrasts on this one but...solid eye strip and uniform dorsal markings. If you've been paying attention, you know what I think of this one.

Let me be the first to say that this is a gorgeous yellow phase Texas rat snake. In this pic, you can see the grey color on the center line and tips of the yellow scales, you can make out the longitudinal white stripes, and (my personal favorite trait) there is a copper color appearing on the nose. The neck & tail have developed more bright orange while the center of the body is much lighter. Even the eyes have a striking quality.

16-03-02

Broken head stripes: check

Broken dorsal patterns: check

Lets see how this plays out.

Well, what do you know. I think I've figured out what I'm talking about, finally.

Over the next 2-3 years these snakes will get more colorful, and uniquely patterned. Sometime around 7-10 years old they will get darker and less vibrant. Such is the way of reptilian coloration. 

morph update

So, now that I've compiled some data, compared animals and done some google searches it occurs to me that I have a couple things going on with my snakes.

To start, here's a pic of a typical Texas ratsnake caught right outside my house a few weeks ago. This is what they look like around here. (Notice how it's not biting me and crapping everywhere? Maybe they aren't all nippy or maybe I'm special.)

In other parts of the state the dark ground color (the color between the spots) is more yellow or orange. I am getting quite a few of these yellow phase/orange phase animals. This is probably the result of the original male from my breeding program who was the unusually yellow offspring of two typical yellow phase animals. But, for it to carry on it should be something that was recessive in the original typical NE TX female and has now been passed on to many of the babies. They frequently vary from lemon yellow to pumpkin orange.

note: I sold this orange snake a couple years ago.

regardless, these yellow/orange snakes are identifiable as being typical because they still show a consistent, typical pattern of spots along the dorsal surface (back).

The defining attribute for identifying my morph as hatchlings seems to be the breaking up of the stripe running through the eye and a consistently broken pattern on the dorsal surface (back)

what I'm looking for in my morph now a severely broken pattern that fades out with either a silver or yellowish color washing over everything.

So, the problem becomes what to do with all the yellow/orange phase snakes? Well, I guess, when it cools off this fall I will have to sell some snakes.

Final note: I have noticed that some of these snakes are typical, high strung, aggressive rat snakes and others are cuddly little bunny rabbits (by comparison) I need to note this trait for my breeding tree to see how the offspring compare.

2017 Hatching updates

2017 babies are hatching!

As this year's babies hatch I'll be documenting/photographing them and comparing them to last year's babies. The next few weeks will be chock full of fun. A quick side note: someone finally explained white balance to me so the pics should be better and the colors more accurate.

June update----I see your true colors

The Thawmaster!!

I only feed frozen/thawed rats & mice. You can argue about that if you like but it's the most efficient way for me to pursue this hobby so I don't want to hear it. For me thawing is essential. For years I've just used a pan of water which had to be filled & refilled with warm water from the sink that wasn't too hot (don't want to cook the mice) but wasn't too cold so that the rats and mice could be close to a natural body temp when fed to the snakes. Tiny pinkies and large rats thaw at different rates and on feeding night I have to repeatedly stop the other things I'm dong to check up on my thawing rodents. BUT NOT ANY MORE! Because I have built the Thawmaster! (I'd trade mark it but it's just a heated water bath built with stuff from Amazon)

I rounded up a 150W heating element, a PID temp controller, a submersible thermocouple, a power cord, and some miscellaneous fittings. Then I just drew it up in CAD, plasma cut the stainless steel sheet metal parts, broke them and TIG welded the whole thing together! Voila! anyone can do it (if they can TIG weld and have a plasma table & press brake)

I know I'm being an ass but an industrious person could use a metal wash tub, pop rivets & JB weld to build basically the same thing.

I didn't document building the tank but here's the leak test. All good.

Then I wired everything up, figured out the programming and tested out the heater. (note: the K-type thermocouple that came with this PID controlled was NOT stainless and quickly rusted, so I replaced it with one that can handle the job.)

I mounted up the controls and ran it to see how it would hold temp. There's regularly a few degrees of variation on this completely un-insulated water bath but it's amazingly accurate for the <$100 total price tag. I was also worried that I might need a pump to circulate the water but it does amazingly well without one.

Here are some pics from right now as I type this. This is my finished prototype and it has runs 6 nights a week for the last month with only one problem which was caused by the thermocouple I replaced.

final note: I put my rodents in ziploc bags and the little mice & rats do just fine but the big rats have sharp nails that always poke holes in the bags so you always get some leakage. Dead rat water that is regularly heated to 100 degrees is a text book example of somewhere to grow horrible bacteria. I change the 6 gallons of water twice per week after thawing large rats and I wash the whole thing out with soapy water at least once per week! I need to find something better than ziplocs. Maybe something washable and reusable.

...but that is a problem for another day.

Snake omelettes?

After my terrible showing with last year's eggs I decided to make 2 changes.

1) I fed more frequently

2) I didn't cool my snakes for as long

The hope was that more food would yield more eggs in females and the short cooling would preserve more sperm in the males.

It's hard to argue with success!

April 21: Female 2012-01-04 / Male 2010-01-02 (10) eggs (0) slugs

April 23: Female 2014-01-02 / Male 2014-01-08 (6) eggs (4) slugs

April 23: Female 2013-01-03 / Male 2014-01-01 (9) eggs (2) slugs

April 24: Female 2013-05-02 / Male 2014-01-04 (13) good eggs

April 27: Female 2006-01-01 / Male 2013-01-02 (19) eggs (0) slugs

April 28: Female 2014-01-03 / Male 2014-01-08 (3) eggs (6) slugs (this as her first time laying)

The youngest snakes (particularly the 2014 males did the worst. Snakes who were at least 4 years old did very well. A lot of factors lend themselves to this, for example how much you feed and how large the snakes are. There's a large body size difference between the 2014 snakes and the 2013 snakes and this translates to success in breeding. (I was once warned by an actual herpetologist that breeding females who they are too small can shorten their lives and stunt their growth so I have always waited until they looked like adult snakes but the breeders I know insist that 2-3 years is all you need and then get to making eggs!)

I still have 3 more females that have not laid yet and I face the problem in 90 days of what to do with all the babies that hatch but that will be this year's challenge and I am starting to plan for that now.

A few folks have contacted me about buying snakes and I certainly need to sell some but I needed to document what I've done and be able to tell people what they are getting. If you look through the pics most of my adults aren't much different than typical Texas ratsnakes from South East and Central Texas so I really wanted to document how these babies change over the first couple years of their lives. I am seeing a spectrum of ground color running from silvery/grey to lemon yellow to pumpkin orange and the dark dorsal patterns vary from typical to almost completely washed out. But which will be which when it's a bucket full of grey babies?

If I've learned anything about life, it's that when you think you know what's going on, start to document & chart it and you'll quickly see that you only knew part of what was going on.

More pics soon!

Easter Eggs!

Well, it's actually the week after Easter but the eggs come when they come. This is the first batch. (2012-01-04 female and 2010-01-02 male)

(10) healthy eggs! Things are already better than last year! 

Colors & Patterns Update March (OK, April...)

Spring breeding

It's time, once again, to make matches and hatch babies. In an effort to do better than last year I have started to compile data.

First I needed to see who I have in my breeding pool and what their collective breeding history is. To do this I got a little compulsive. I posted pics of all current snakes and their lineage suing various color wires to track the original breeding pairs. I wish I could have used 2 colors per individual and tracked which half of each set of genetics went where but I have no way of knowing so it's one color per unrelated set of genes (hard to see in the pic). It's not ideal, but it's as accurate as I could get with simple observation.

This was an eye opening graphic of how inbred these animals are. To test the simple recessive traits I need a larger unrelated breeding pool and the ability to raise many more animals. To be honest, I'm not willing to commit to that.

However, this did show me who had not bred, or who had not yet been paired for breeding so this year I concentrated on the "unknown known".

I warmed early, fed more and waited for all the females to cycle through a pre-ovulation shed. So, I'm hoping for good results. The only "iffy" pairing involve the youngest snakes.

In related news, I am working on the quarterly update for the 2016 color change comparison but several of the babies where still in shed. I hope to get that done next week end. Until then put this image of my 2010 male next to any Texas rat snake you've ever seen.