Another Male Sorong-type...

[Rob Hill/Geckos Anonymous]

This is my male from Shawn Gray at Sunbaked Serpents. This one came to me as a yellow yearling and I got to watch pretty much the entire color change process which was awesome. He was a yellow neonate and he began changing at about 17 months old and the change from start to finish took 11 days. Luckily he developed quite alot of nice blue.

Thanks for looking. Cheers!

And please, let's see some pics from some of you other arboreal enthusiasts out there. I know alot of you have pictures and awesome snakes, so let's see them

 

[Clay Davenport]

All very beautiful snakes Rob, I am a big fan of chondros myself.

What interested me though was your descriptive method. I haven't been closely following the trends in the chondro community for some time, so this may be commonplace now, but you are the first person I have noticed refering to a chondro as a "type" as in Biak type or Sorong type, as opposed to inferring locality information.

I really like this approach. I have always had problems with locality labels used for chondros. To me, the use of a locality label should be limited to the offspring of two snakes where the originating locality is unquestionably the same, and at any point down the line should one be bred to a specimen of a different or not fully known locality, then the label must be abandoned.
It is my belief that many imported chondros were designated a locality description either at the exporters facility or after entering this country based on their outward appearance. While many may have been accurate, there was invariably alot that wasn't, and this rendered the label useless for it's intended purpose.

Using the locality name to infer a certain look by adding the word type rectifies this situation in a sense. There are some who are interested in the locality regardless of the appearance, and others who want the appearance associated with a certain locality. This suits both needs. The "type" descriptor does not claim exact locality, so as not to mislead the purest of the purists, but at the same time is descriptive of the appearance based on a generally accepted format.

I just wanted to mention that, since I hadn't before seen a decent approach to a situation I have always felt bore certain terminal flaws.
The same can be said for several other types of snakes that commonly bear locality tags since dealers realized that the addition of one could increase their marketability.

 

[Rob Hill/Geckos Anonymous]

Clay,

thanks, but I definitely didn't originate the idea of adding "type" after a locality name. However, as you said, there are not a big number of people using it. I am bad about it sometimes, though, and will slip into just calling something a Biak instead of a Biak-type.

But as you said, too many people just throw it around that because an animal looks like the generally accepted locality phenotype, it originated from that locality regardless. Look at the kingsnake classifieds for examples of this. I see ads all the time of people selling "Biak locale" or "Locality pure arus" and other similar trite. I have no problem with someone saying that it is an Aru-type or just plain saying Biak, but when they ad such taglines as "locale specific" and "locality pure," 99% of the people do not have what they claim. If you were to actually have true locality animals, they would have to be documented as to where they or the parent animals were collected originally(even though WC chondros are supposedly illegal to import, but that is another matter I will address in another thread). Also, thanks to the "locality craze" going on in the chondro market, many people are more prone to buy animals that sport the tags of "locality pure" as opposed to those that just say "type" or "unknown locality."

The unfortunate problem is that due to the amazing variability of chondros, an animal could be locality documented, and not match up with the accepted phenotype(there was an excellent example and discussion of this regarding Merauke chondros several weeks ago at chondroweb.com in the breeder forum). So you could have some of the animals being marketed as "Aru locality" that are in fact from Mainland Irian Jaya, but since they look like what Arus are SUPPOSED to, that is how they are being marketed.

Oh geez, I've ranted on this whole thing in an inappropriate forum. lol Nothing new about that

Thanks for the compliments Clay. Although I don't have any super high-end animals yet, I am very happy and proud of my chondro collection thus far and hopefully I'll be a proud chondro-poppa in the next few months

Cheers!