Rich and his Hyper-Xanthic leos . . .

. . . Rich, I've always been curious about your desciption of this morph. I know that Xanthic means high amounts of yellow - but are your's also "Hypo" - a lack of melanin?

I'd really like to see a picture of your's if you have them. I wish more people produced and sold Hypo and/or super hypo hi-yellows (as i assume you do). They are very striking!!

Thanks

Monte... Besides being the owner of Montezuma's Reptiles I recently purchased Walkabout Reptiles. My focus has mainly been on producing high yellow patterned geckos, patternless, Hypo yellow and hypo yellow patternless. With the introduction of nearly 300 additional breeders you better believe I am turning out quite a few Hypo- high yellows. I am still in progress of integrating the 2 web sites but am slowly taking pics of available geckos. If interested let me know.

Hey Monte and Gene!

Nice pics!!! I've got this fellow for sale, and quite frankly I don't understand why he hasn't sold yet... I think he is awesome! He hatched out with a really cool looking zig-zag pattern on his back - kind of like a bolt of lightning, but turned hypo! Both of his parents are true jungles... marbled/striped tails and broken neck-bands, with aberrant patterning.

I love the color on that one, but shipping to Iowa now is not an easy thing to do! Oh well, maybe next year.

Actually I think it is funny as hell.....

Back at one of the Orlando Expos, Connie (my wife) had a couple of her really super looking high yellow leopard geckos on display at our tables. Virtually no black marking on them, and very brightly colored. You know how leopard geckos get when they are happy, and Connie coddles them all and they preen for her.

Anyway, all day Saturday we had people walking up to our tables asking us what "phase" those leopard geckos were. We kept telling them that they were just pretty high yellows and nothing special about them. Well after a full day of this (and believe me, this happened a LOT of times!), we got kind of tired of it. So after dinner Connie and I were over at Doug and Mikki Barr's room laughing about this when I got the "lightbulb over the head" event to take place.

That's when the term "HyperXanthic" hit me. All it really means is "really high yellow". So on Sunday, Doug made us all up some labels saying "HyperXanthic" that we put on our display animals and he did likewise on some of his own. And that solved the problem. People would then walk by, look at those "HyperXanthic" leopard geckos, and just say "Wow! HyperXanthic! Cool man!". Ended the explanations we had to go through all day on Saturday. They were happy, and we were happy.

So basically now, we just treat the HyperXanthics as "picks of the litter" animals when we sell them. It was never even implied that it was anything genetic, nor even very predictable. We have had babies that hatched out being nearly completely black that turned into awesome yellow animals at maturity. So trying to pick out the babies is rather tough to do. That's why we didn't sell "HyperXanthics" until they were a couple of months old.

Anyway, I don't know what all people are calling them now. Connie is more interested in breeding for personallity rather than appearances lately so we haven't bothered trying to keep up with the latest fad names. She breeds leopard geckos together now to see how they "act", not how they "look". And she is getting some interesting results. It's amazing to see leopard geckos actually leap out of their cages just so they can sit on her hand or run up on her shirt! Or when it is feeding time, how an entire colony of adults will line up in a row and wait for her to feed them one by one.

I swear if they were on the floor they would follow her around the room like little puppy dogs.

montezuma: Thanks for posting that pic, I had been wondering what the hyperxanthic meant for a while now. Kevin Hanley lists hyperxanthics on his business card, but I guess the term isn’t used very much. I live in Arizona too, and can’t wait to see what you produce and have for sale this year.

Rich Z, it’s a trip to hear the story behind the coining of a term like that. I think it’s really cool that Connie is breeding for personalities. It should be interesting to hear the results of this project.

. . . het for happy. LOL

On a side, totally OT note, I was writing on KS about my stripes, saying that I bought them from Rich at Serpenco, but just as a reference, nothing big. When I posted it, it said (Bleep). What's the deal - they won't even let Rich's name on there? Wow.

Yeah, they usually do the

S
e
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p
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trick, or say use the term "bleepenco". Random beef that started a few months back. I still don't understand any of it. People these days...

-Dave

JeffB has banned just about all of my domain names from being mentioned in his forums. Most of the story behind that can be found in the Web Watch section in various threads, for anyone who is interested......

The thread that starts off the entire story is:
Adam Block thread

You are welcome to read about it, but please don't drag that discussion over to this forum.

Thanks.