Pics of my little house snake

[dr del]

Hi,

He just shed a couple of days ago and had just eaten two large fuzzie mice when I decided to take these as he was still active and exploring.








dr del

[jjspirko]

Beautiful Little Guy!

[Rapture]

I love their little python heads...

[MedusasOwl]

SO cute! Dagnabbit... my "wantee" list of snakes is getting rediculous...

[dr del]

Thanks folks


They are adorable little wrigglers - one of these days I'm going to try and track down a female for the dude when he's older.

talking of which..

jjspirko,

Is he one of the "olive" types? - don't want to order the wrong thing when I finally decide to pair him up.

I would aslo like to ask your advice on keeping these in rack systems - he seems to gosh-darned intrested in watching movement outside his tank.Stand at the glass and next thing you know you're nose to nose with a brown worm.


dr del

[jjspirko]

jjspirko,

Is he one of the "olive" types? - don't want to order the wrong thing when I finally decide to pair him up.

I would aslo like to ask your advice on keeping these in rack systems - he seems to gosh-darned intrested in watching movement outside his tank.Stand at the glass and next thing you know you're nose to nose with a brown worm.

dr del

I keep them in the same type of rack systems that most corn breeders use. My adults all go in sweater boxes and have plenty of room with heat tape across the back.

On the color I would call that one a brown and a nice one at that. Nice light sable color he seems to have on the bottom half. That said you can breed him to a olive phase or a red phase and either way you will get a result that is sort of a combining of the two colors.

None of the colors are simple recessive traits in house snakes. Recessive is where like with amel you breed an amel to a normal you get het amel babises and then you can predict a precentage of off spring based on known gene type.

The only simple recessive traits I have seen in any lamprophis so far are

hypo (if you find any let me know)

striped (I have only seen these in capes, L. Capensis and there are a true striped house snake as well that is a different species)

amel (again only in the capes, most are from the Zululand Phase but I hear Don at Mfezi is goiing to be getting some Transvaal phase amels)

Color is really a lot like mixing paint, if you breed red to red you get mostly reds but even that won't always breed fully true. Make sense?

Best I can see and odds are 99 to 1 anyway you have a L. Fuliginosus there. If so any other Fuliginosus will breed to him. If you get a high red female it will push the young, most of them anyway tward the red side. Selecting the redest males to breed back to the mother would get you way into the red side of things. Reds are just browns with a lot of red tone.

Confusing as hell? Not really again just think this way, replace the term "house snake" with "rat snake" and it makes a lot of sense. There are many rat snakes that are similar colors but not the same species, some interbreed some don't. That is what most people don't realize is that in Africa the term house snake is like the term rat snake here in the U.S.

Now say you bred that brown with an olive, what would you get? I don't really know because I never did it, I would expect you would get a very "sable" color much like a transvaal phase cape has.

Depending on selective breeding you could move the new generation closer to olive or closer to brown based on the selection.

The term cinnamon phase was started by Chris Harrison in Austin who started breeding very olive (almost true green) to very red animals. The offspring were soft red brown hence the term cinnamon.

So basicly you can stud that guy to any phase you want of female and he will be happy to stud off to 3-4 gals a year too, so you could get a brown, red and olive female if you wanted and start compairing the resluts. However if you want to sell them reds move the fastest of any lamprophis phase.

Any more questions just ask, Lamprophis are my personal passion and I am happy to help others learn. They can be consfusing but only because no one has done all the work already for us.

Now the good news if you want to breed them the only requirement is a male and a female, if you can breed mice you have the skill to breed L. Fuliginosus,

[dr del]

Hi,


Thank you

That was a very thorough reply and has answered my questions - even the ones I forgot to ask at the time .

I am in the middle to trying to find all the equip[ment needed to build a rack at the moment ( none of the brand names are available in the u.k so alternatives are tricky to find for some things).I will now think about designing a shelf or two that could be used to house him and a mate ( the prototype rack will be royals only with the corns etc going in number 2 hopefully).


dr del