I acquired this little guy at a local expo. I couldn't resist; he has a perfect dorsal and ventral pattern. However, I'm not sure if he's pure or not (the person who sold him to me seemed a little eager to get get rid of him, however maybe they were just itching to make a sale!). Something about him just throws me off. I'm no milk snake expert, so I figured I'd ask those who have a lot of experience with them!
The only thing I think he could be hybridized with is a Honduran; he has a bit of color on the tip of his nose though I have seen some online pics of Pueblans with that as well. The clean belly pattern also seemed unusual, unless I'm used to seeing some very "dirty" Pueblans!
One piece of evidence I have for him being pure is a quick statistical analysis I did; I looked at online pictures of "Honduran" and "Pueblan" milk snakes (just googled the two) and found images where the whole body was shown. I then counted the number of yellow bands up to a semi-arbitrary point above the cloaca and tallied these into a quick table. I then ran a Kruskal-Wallis test on the numbers to see if there was a significant difference; with a sample size of 7 for each subspecies I found that there is a significant (P<.01) difference between the number of bands on Hondurans and on Pueblans. The mean for Hondurans was 17 and the mean for the Pueblans was 13 (12.7). Counting the stripes on my little guy in the same manner, he has 13 stripes.
Here are some pics:
http://s28.postimg.org/6wozgsopn/IMG_1847.jpg
http://s28.postimg.org/q326jz57f/IMG_1848.jpg
http://s28.postimg.org/n557q9xjv/IMG_1849.jpg
http://s28.postimg.org/5gdgynlsr/IMG_1851.jpg
Thank you all for any input!
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