Miscellaneous indigo stories discussions topics

or seemingly impossible to attain caudomaculatus to your list Gerald. I'm not aware of ANYONE that has those yet. I'd put 'em on my list but . .. . well, just don't think It'd ever happen :-) Not sure how we'd go about even getting them.

D. m orizabensis are on my wish list as well.. I do know of a German keeper with D. m orizabensis specimen, so there may be hope yet, as I have remained in constant communication with him!!
Another on my wish list would have to be Leptomicrurus scutiventris, the pygmy coral snake of the Amazon..

Jeff Snodgres

Is that one of those with the extremely bizarre ring pattern arrangement ? I forget where, but I've seen some pics of some specimens that the ring color order just didn't look right. Would be a very interesting animal.

orizabensis and caudomaculata would be nice, for sure. But, to my knowledge, there are none of either in the U.S. caudomaculata is only known from the holotype specimen that W. Wuster described, and maybe one or two others that were collected during that study.

orizabensis is supposedly very similar to rubidus with the main difference in appearance being that more of the venter is light colored, as I recall. Hell, rubidus is almost non-existent in the U.S. I think that Jeff and I have probably half of them in our collections.

Another cool one to have would be margaritae...only known to science from 1 (one) specimen.

Both D. caudomaculatus and D. margaritae are known only from holotype specimens, so far as I am aware...
However, I do believe W. Wuster made mention of having to use extra caution in his lab not so long ago, as he mentioned having a species of cobra which was phenotypic of caudomaculatus. From that statement, I was under the impression he had collected mors "live" specimens, other then the holotype, which was found DOR..
I am upo to 4.5 adult and sub-adult rubidus now, with another 1.0 on the way. As Gerald mentioned, I believe we hold the vast majority of such specimens.

Best regards,

Jeff Snodgres

I just took another peak at WW's Indigo systematics page. There is now a photo of a "live" D. caudomaculatus!! I suppose WW found more specimens!!
Here's a link:

http://biology.bangor.ac.uk/~bss166/Taxa/Drymar.htm


Best regards,

Jeff

Yeah, I thought I remembered reading that but wasn't positive. It's interesting to me that this species occurs in such close proximity to two other species of Drymarchon which have been thoroughly documented in that region (Venezuela, I think?), yet no one has described them until now. How many others could be in Central and South America in very limited ranges and haven't been described yet?

I'm not sure he's found anymore. Maybe he has??
The close up pic of the head may be a new one but, the pic of the coiled snake near the top of the page has been there a while & that definitely appears to be a live snake to me. :-)

Eric

That picture of the live one, and it looks quite alive to me, has been around a while. The page does confuse me a bit as the animal pictured doesn't look like Road Kill to me.

Doug Taylor

Here's the scoop. The one that Wolfgang found in 1997 was a road kill. It was the holotype. He subsequently was allowed to examine two additional live specimens in a private collection in Venezuela. He personally did not collect any live specimens. He said that local Herpetologists did not really consider them unusual, which would lead one to believe that they are not terribly uncommon in that area.

There are photos on his website of a live specimen and of the road kill (holotype). One of the photos clearly show the distinctive head scalation for the species.

Pretty cool stuff!