WebSlave

Possibly interesting story about the various neotropical triangulums. Way back when, I got VERY interested in them, and tracked down every publication I could find about them. This was in the pre-internet days, of course. The more I read about the methods used to identify the subspecific strains being labelled, the more outlandish the arbitrary divisions seemed to me. So I started calling people who worked with them and asked questions about how someone would KNOW what it is they have in their hands with no other information available. The most common response was that locality was the only reliable key. Collect them yourself, or obtain specimens from trusted collectors in the localities where something you are interested comes from, or else it is just an unknown identification.

Yeah, that sounds like pretty good advice, doesn't it? Except I had importers tell me (not mentioning any names) that all of the triangulums coming from Central America would come from central shipping points, that might change several times even in a year, based on which country at the time had the easiest exporting laws and fees to have to negotiate with. So EVERY snake collected for export, including the triangulums, were collected all over from Mexico down to northern South America and transported to the exporting country of the moment all bundled together with everything else collected everywhere else with NO locality data at all noted nor preserved for individual specimens. Once the shipments landed on US soil and the importers picked through them, THEY would decide what to label and sell as each specimen based on nothing more than what it might look like to them. So it was all just a grab bag. And the animals sold that way were every bit as accurate as just putting name tags on a wall and throwing darts at them. IMHO.

Some of you might even remember when the amelanistic line of the milk snakes hit the market. At first they were called "Amelanistic Central American Milk Snakes (Lampropeltis t. polyzona), which nearly overnight suddenly started being called "Amelanistic Honduran Milk Snakes (Lampropeltis t. hondurensis). Which, in my opinion, was nothing more than a marketing strategy. Hondurensis was an easier sell than polyzona, I guess.

So who knows what is what with these animals?

It was all this BS (IMHO), combined with my project working with Costa Rican Milk Snakes (Lampropeltis t. stuarti) which never would breed for me, and the Amelanistic Honduran/Central American Milk Snake project that ended when the female died the year she was big enough to produce, that I decided to just get out of the milk snakes completely.

I did really like my hondurensis, truth be known. Big impressive animals. I recall once having a baby that was reluctant to come out of it's shell after pipping. So I put the egg in a container and then threw in a pinky mouse, and that snake THEN decided it wanted to come out when it grabbed the pinky and wolfed it down. They certainly were not shy about feeding!

Oh yeah, one year while at one of the reptile shows in Tampa, FL, I made a deal with a guy to sell him any of the gray banded king snakes at the end of the show that I didn't sell at retail. Well, I didn't sell any of them. Truth be known, the Tampa show was always a very poor show for us, so that was no surprise. So at the end of the show, I gave the guy a good price for the entire lot. After the money had changed hands and while bagging them up we got to talking, and he told me these were like money in the bank for him. Every year he would accumulate as many young gray bands that he could, and drive out to SW Texas and meet up with gray band collectors who swarmed to the area. There he would sell the hell out of his "fresh wild caught" baby gray banded kings to collectors that weren't having any luck and didn't want to go home empty handed, with locality info and all.

Maybe rumors and BS, and maybe not.

Didn't really matter much to me, since I wasn't interested in locality specific gray bands myself. And who am I to tell someone how to run their own lives? Actually, truth be known, I am not a big supporter of the concept of "localities" anyway when it comes to identifying anything living that can freely move in and out of any area that doesn't have physical barriers around it.

FWIW...