Quote Originally Posted by loonunit View Post
So I'm noticing these are all females, and I seem to recall the spider was, too. Could this be partly a hormonal thing? Like the equivalent of a hormonal blue green tree python?
In this girl's case, that would kinda sorta make sense as she had laid about a month (? have to check with my friend on that) before. However, I had another one do a similar thing earlier last year that was actually a young male. His was slightly different, though:




I think that perhaps the reason this female looks so "ghost-y" while he had more of a high-contrast look could be because she was a "burgundy" before, with less black pigment to begin with.

I had read that it was a metabolic stress thing ... I could hypothesize that it happens if a sufficiently stressful event happens to the snake while it's synthesizing new pigment for its next shed cycle. But that doesn't explain why it ONLY happens to the brown pigment and not the black. I also don't know enough about the exact physiology of shedding and pigment synthesis to carry that hypothesis too far ... Time to crack open some textbooks, I think ...

For those who mentioned IMG, I had thought that the snake only ever got darker, not lighter ... Am I wrong? Do IMGs sometimes start out normal, blanch out and then darken up from there?