FaunaClassifieds - View Single Post - Central American Milksnake Found in Florida
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Old 03-01-2021, 08:13 AM   #11
Socratic Monologue
Quote:
Originally Posted by WebSlave View Post
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.
That is certainly plausible. Now those snakes are two distinct species -- L. t. polyzona is now Lampropeltis polyzona, and L. t. hondurensis is now Lampropeltis abnorma -- making the mess that much worse.

Quote:
Originally Posted by WebSlave View Post

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.
That's a good point. The locality data is just another piece of information, and isn't necessarily definitive as to ID, but it can be interesting and useful information. Some locales (or groups of locales, anyway) are at least morphologically distinct, as in rosy boas -- the mid baja locales are quite distinct from the California coastal locales, in spite of those two groups being the same species. In some species of dart frogs, the animals from each (arbitrarily decided, like Helen mentioned) locale visually blend into those of the adjacent locales in more-or-less known ways, and so can be taken as basic (if not conclusive) evidence of which frogs are moving where.