just wanted to post this!

I found this little female Copperhead while cruising roads last Saturday. it has almost a full stripe! It could be genetic. Anyway, I just thought it was cool. who else has pictures of copperhead morphs?

http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h2...E0800-orig.jpg

Unfortunately I've yet to come across any that are anything but normal, but that is one good looking snake. I'd have been half tempted to keep it and attempt to prove out its pattern being heritable!

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Originally Posted by gsarchie

Unfortunately I've yet to come across any that are anything but normal, but that is one good looking snake. I'd have been half tempted to keep it and attempt to prove out its pattern being heritable!

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the crazy thing is, I have found one other one with even more of a stripe in the same area. also a female!

When you look at it, how large could the range of a copperhead be? If it is heritable, than it makes sense that there may be other snakes that carry the trait in close proximity.

When I was a kid I lived in a rural part of Michigan. There was one pond that had blue colored Green frogs. Not all of them were blue, but I found a quite few there. It was a condition where the frogs lacked the yellow pigmentation as part of their makeup. Thus, they were blue. But I only found them around that particular pond.

If you are experienced or feel comfortable enough with a venomous snake, it may be worth dinkering with.

I would look for more, for sure, however I would limit how many I collected to just a couple or a few. I would also release them back into the wild after I had some progeny to work with or after a couple of years (the time it should take to breed a male back to momma to see if you get a 50-50 ratio of normals to stripes. This is because to me it is a question of bio-ethics. By collecting the snakes you are taking a certain amount of a unique gene out of the population. If there are few enough snakes with the gene, you may take out enough to push the population across the threshold of where the normal genotype becomes fixed and the striped genotype is lost. However, it may not simply be recessive and there may be a spetrum across which you have everything from fully striped to completely normal snakes.

Thanks again for the great picture.

god i just love coppers, here is a few i had in the past, (i no longer work with them).

Blood and Sweat:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...us/copper1.jpg

Blood
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...s/d23a7ee9.jpg

Sweat:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...s/7284514e.jpg

this lill guy was a total camera chum:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...Picture_12.jpg

I agree with gsarchie about how many you collect. It would be a shame to lose the trait from the wild.

I would also suggest that any females you collect be immature and grow them up to breeding size. I met a guy here in Georgia who had a WC Copperhead that he used for exhibits and eductaion. He said that it had not been with another snake for 5 years and yet it gave birth to a single offspring. So, sperm retention is obviously an issue if you were to use a sexually mature animal. You couldn't really be certain the offspring were a direct decendant of the pairing, other then the maternal aspect of course.

...or automictic parthenogenesis. Posted this somewhere else to, in the spider debate thread I believe. Since all members of Agkistrodon are ovoviviparour this could well have been what happened with the one in GA, but only if the offspring was a male.

http://home.pcisys.net/~dlblanc/arti...enogenesis.php

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Originally Posted by gsarchie

...or automictic parthenogenesis......this could well have been what happened with the one in GA, but only if the offspring was a male.

http://home.pcisys.net/~dlblanc/arti...enogenesis.php

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WOW! I stand possibly corrected.

He did not say what the sex was nor did I think to ask. But that is cool. Kind of like when Sam Neil finds the eggs in Jurassic Park.

Nice find!

I would love to work with this trait and see where it goes. the snake resides at a friends house in SC near where it was caught. I can't have venomous in the county I live in in North Carolina, so what venomous I have, are in the other state (about 45 mins away. I miss living in SC.

I will look out for more. it may be nothing at all, but its still exciting to see. I certainly wouldn't keep a lot of them. I'm all for seeing them in the wild. I actually used to breed timber rattlesnakes and would release the babies in areas where I had heard that someone had killed one. haha

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Originally Posted by banjopicker2004

I actually used to breed timber rattlesnakes and would release the babies in areas where I had heard that someone had killed one. haha

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I did some work with the guys in college. We had 10 animals (originally) that were radio tagged. We would go out and collect data on their location twice a week while they were outside of their dens in the warmer months and use that to establish things such as the size of a snakes home range and movement patterns from the den. I would love to have one of these someday, as they are, in my opinion, on of the most beautiful snakes that I've ever seen. The picure is of one of our big males.

http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/f...g/DSCF6984.jpg