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Responding to email notices you receive.
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In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.
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IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed
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Posted 08/15/2025
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Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.
Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."
Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....
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Addendum: 01/10/2026
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Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....
Rat Snake Taxacollagy
- Thread starter mxracer4life
- Start date
I live in the part of the country where rat snakes and fox snakes on one side of the Mississippi river are somehow a different species than those on the other side of the river. Suffice to say, I don't see the logic in that, and the science doesn't seem to support it, in my opinion.
However. The snake keeping hobbyist is more interested in the appearance of the snake than they are in the DNA. I think that most hobbyists will, and should, continue to recognize them by the "old" taxonomy, at least for the purposes of keeping, breeding, and selling them.
However. The snake keeping hobbyist is more interested in the appearance of the snake than they are in the DNA. I think that most hobbyists will, and should, continue to recognize them by the "old" taxonomy, at least for the purposes of keeping, breeding, and selling them.
Socratic Monologue
Well-known member
Biological taxonomy is lately being decided by the degree of relatedness between taxa. Visual appearance doesn't necessarily track relatedness, nor necessarily does current geographical distribution.
Last common ancestor does track relatedness; your cousin is such because of their last common ancestor with you, not how they look or where they were born.
Like Herpin Man said, the prior systems of taxonomy that depend on morphology have value to hobbyists. For that reason they are good to know but not to the exclusion of a more accurate taxonomy that is based on genetic relatedness (since for breeding purposes getting the species right is -- or should be, anyway -- pretty darned important).
After a quick read of the blog post, I don't see the "mess" -- looks like a pretty typical restructuring with relative clarity at the end of it. The fact that visually similar animals can be different species doesn't seem confusing to me (nor does the fact about other animals that have radically diverse appearances within one species) but I don't assume that speciation has anything really interesting to do with gross appearance, especially in a family that is very morphologically homogeneous to begin with.
I didn't see a link to the papers that made the changes, though; there's certainly much more to it than the blog post outlines.
Last common ancestor does track relatedness; your cousin is such because of their last common ancestor with you, not how they look or where they were born.
Like Herpin Man said, the prior systems of taxonomy that depend on morphology have value to hobbyists. For that reason they are good to know but not to the exclusion of a more accurate taxonomy that is based on genetic relatedness (since for breeding purposes getting the species right is -- or should be, anyway -- pretty darned important).
After a quick read of the blog post, I don't see the "mess" -- looks like a pretty typical restructuring with relative clarity at the end of it. The fact that visually similar animals can be different species doesn't seem confusing to me (nor does the fact about other animals that have radically diverse appearances within one species) but I don't assume that speciation has anything really interesting to do with gross appearance, especially in a family that is very morphologically homogeneous to begin with.
I didn't see a link to the papers that made the changes, though; there's certainly much more to it than the blog post outlines.