snakegetters
Aunty Venom
Okay, now this just isn't right. I think there must be a little gnome in my house that is sneaking into the snake cages with an orange paintbrush.
I have been raising a young Eastern green mamba for three or four years since it was hatched from Carl Barden's parent stock. It was an unusually light colored animal that never turned a really nice deep green like all my other specimens. Visitors often joked that it was not a green mamba, it was a yellow mamba.
Yellow mamba has been slowly turning orange. Not a bright orange, more like a yellow rat snake color. The head and upper body shade from very pale green to yellow, moving to more yellow-brown-orangey tones closer to the tail.
I've seen mambas that were sick or trauma injured go off color, but this is a magnificently healthy specimen in awesome body condition that has never been sick or missed a meal in its entire captive bred life. The color looks nice and vibrant, not dull or off. The snake is in excellent shape. It looks quite handsome. It's just a green mamba that isn't green.
I don't know if this is a genetic aberration, a locality color variant or an artifact of captivity. This snake gets the same good nutrition that all my other snakes do. It gets radiant heat rather than a cage lamp, so the lack of sunlight/UV might concievably have something to do with this. But I've had wild caught mambas in captivity for the same length of time that are kept under identical conditions, and none of them have ever changed color. The adults I got around the same time that were a deep emerald green have kept their rich dark green hue. There is no difference in their husbandry conditions.
Fortunately he should be pretty easy to photograph when I have a bit more time. He'll follow a dead mouse on hemostats anywhere and then sit still to eat it. The trick will be getting all of him into the picture, since there is rather a lot of him and the color changes fairly dramatically from the head all the way down to the tail.
Ray, Scott, you guys have rolled your eyeballs over this yellow beastie before - it's the one right in front of the door in the large Neodesha. It's gotten even odder looking in the past few sheds. The orangey-brown hues on the lower part of the body are a lot more pronounced.
Anyone else ever seen this happen to their greens?
I have been raising a young Eastern green mamba for three or four years since it was hatched from Carl Barden's parent stock. It was an unusually light colored animal that never turned a really nice deep green like all my other specimens. Visitors often joked that it was not a green mamba, it was a yellow mamba.
Yellow mamba has been slowly turning orange. Not a bright orange, more like a yellow rat snake color. The head and upper body shade from very pale green to yellow, moving to more yellow-brown-orangey tones closer to the tail.
I've seen mambas that were sick or trauma injured go off color, but this is a magnificently healthy specimen in awesome body condition that has never been sick or missed a meal in its entire captive bred life. The color looks nice and vibrant, not dull or off. The snake is in excellent shape. It looks quite handsome. It's just a green mamba that isn't green.
I don't know if this is a genetic aberration, a locality color variant or an artifact of captivity. This snake gets the same good nutrition that all my other snakes do. It gets radiant heat rather than a cage lamp, so the lack of sunlight/UV might concievably have something to do with this. But I've had wild caught mambas in captivity for the same length of time that are kept under identical conditions, and none of them have ever changed color. The adults I got around the same time that were a deep emerald green have kept their rich dark green hue. There is no difference in their husbandry conditions.
Fortunately he should be pretty easy to photograph when I have a bit more time. He'll follow a dead mouse on hemostats anywhere and then sit still to eat it. The trick will be getting all of him into the picture, since there is rather a lot of him and the color changes fairly dramatically from the head all the way down to the tail.
Ray, Scott, you guys have rolled your eyeballs over this yellow beastie before - it's the one right in front of the door in the large Neodesha. It's gotten even odder looking in the past few sheds. The orangey-brown hues on the lower part of the body are a lot more pronounced.
Anyone else ever seen this happen to their greens?
