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Snow VS Blizzard

benjamina
07-08-2002, 12:54 AM
I've seen pics of both blizzard and snow mutations on the internet.

I have found that the white in a snow corn is actually really white, whereas in a blizzard it is a more "colorless" white.

Does anyone have a pic of a snow and a blizzard together in the same pic for comparison.

In my personal opinion I think the snows are prettier. One they have a pattern and two what pattern they do have is pleasantly colored and three they are also glossier as well. Blizzard scales tend to have slightly more a satin finish than a gloss finish.

I've seen close up pics of both snow and blizzard on VMS Herps website in their corn section, and this shows the snow has a lot more white definition than does the blizzard.

The blizzard close up shows you that the scales are in fact essentially colorless.

Regards,
Benjamina

KRIZ
01-08-2005, 12:12 PM
i dont have a pic, but snows have a pattern, blizzards are completely white. Snows have normal eyes, blizzards have red eyes, sorry i couldn't be more helpful :shrugs:

wikkedkornman
01-08-2005, 12:19 PM
snows have red eyes.

mbdorfer
01-08-2005, 02:06 PM
Indeed, Snows have red eyes.
Here's mine again, Yes Snow, there is no Anery B in her blood.

wikkedkornman
01-09-2005, 12:46 PM
you sure there's no charcoal in that snake? looks like a blizzard to me. is it really that white or is it the flash? where'd you get it? great looking snake nonetheless.

mvervest
01-09-2005, 01:27 PM
It looked a blizzard to me too .

mbdorfer
01-09-2005, 06:57 PM
We've been through this before.
I bought her cause she looked Blizzard
Yes, the flash bleached her out slightly
She is a whitish pink color with just a hint of pattern
I got her from a local breeder that I trust totally.
I suppose there is a chance of the B gene in there, but he says no and that''s good enough for me.

cornsnake00
01-09-2005, 09:17 PM
Comparison?

starwarsdad
01-10-2005, 12:35 AM
I have no trouble believing that that is a snow. I can see a faint pattern.

E. g. guttata
01-10-2005, 12:45 AM
That is a snow corn. I can see her pattern outlined in a slightly yellow color on her back. From what I can tell, the camera bleeched her out somewhat. That looks like a "white" snow to me. I don't see any traces of pink.

As far as the difference between snow and blizzard. The snow and blizzard are bothe white snakes with red eyes. The snow still has yellow pigmentation in it's skin while the blizzard removes almost all of the yellow. They both do have patterns, but because the blizzards yellow is removed, it is very difficult to see. The only reason a snow has a clearly visible pattern is because it keeps its yellow pigments.

You would be correct in saying that a blizzard's scales are essentially clear, because a blizzard has genes that removes the blacks, yellows, and reds in it's coloration, giving off a patternless white appearance, sort of like a polar bears fur. The fur of the polar bear is actually a clear color to trap the suns rays and help heat the bear. Unlike the polar bear, the "clear" scales on a blizzard are caused by mutated genes, not by adaptation.

Jessicat
01-10-2005, 04:37 AM
i can see her pattern too
snow!

tat2d1
01-10-2005, 09:23 AM
i can see a yellow pattern.

does anyone realize the original post on this thread was in 2002?

Serpwidgets
01-10-2005, 11:18 AM
The snow still has yellow pigmentation in it's skin while the blizzard removes almost all of the yellow. They both do have patterns, but because the blizzards yellow is removed, it is very difficult to see. The only reason a snow has a clearly visible pattern is because it keeps its yellow pigments.

You would be correct in saying that a blizzard's scales are essentially clear, because a blizzard has genes that removes the blacks, yellows, and reds in it's coloration, giving off a patternless white appearance, sort of like a polar bears fur. The fur of the polar bear is actually a clear color to trap the suns rays and help heat the bear. Unlike the polar bear, the "clear" scales on a blizzard are caused by mutated genes, not by adaptation.I have to disagree with this. Snows and blizzards are born with no yellow or almost no yellow. The pattern is not coming from yellow or lack of yellow.

The white we see on snows/blizzards is caused by iridophores. It's caused by light being scattered/reflected by the crystals in these iridophores.

The pink areas on snows are pink because they lack iridophores, so you get "flesh color" showing instead of white. Just like the pink color you see through human fingernails.

On blizzards, I would suspect that the iridophores are less dense, but they are not entirely absent from the saddle areas, which would be why they have a less distinct pattern and appear more (for lack of a better term) translucent. (We will probably see better answers to these questions over the next couple of years as microscopic examinations are done. :))

About the snake not having any charcoal in it, all it takes is one individual, generations back, to be a carrier and the gene could pop up several generations later "out of nowhere." I would at least think it's a possibility, until it is ruled out. A lot of people simply say, "I never specifically crossed charcoals in," or "I never saw charcoals before in this line." But unless there were specific crosses to test this (and who does that? ;)) I would not eliminate the possibility. Not that it really matters, your snake is what it is, and it's pretty cool, but it's something to consider. :)

SODERBERGD
01-10-2005, 12:48 PM
Blizzard AND snow . .

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have two blizzards here that are homozygous for both. The one pictured on this thread appears to be just like mine. I'm betting if that snake was bred to a charcoal, they'd get charcoals. Same with anerythristic. Most of my blizzards with lots of yellow in them are actually both snow and blizzard, but I have never had a so-called patternless blizzard be homozygous for snow.

In my opinion, that snake is at least a blizzard and probably both blizzard and snow. As Serp said, the breeder may not even be aware of that gene in his parents of this snake. It can hide for many generations 'till paired up with a genetically complementary mate.

Yellow in blizzards? Sure. I'd say that at least half the blizzards out there have noticable yellow on them. I challenge those that have yellow blizzards to do breeding trials to determine whether or not those snakes are actually snow corns in addition to being blizzards.

To address the original question of this thread, here is a family shot sired by one of my male blizzard snows. BTW, the mother of these babies is a phenotypic anerythristic A that is obviously het for amelanism and charcoal (anery B). On a trivial note, Rich sold me my first charcoals when they were called Pine Island aneries. http://www.cornsnake.net/images/aneryVsCharcoal.jpg

cornman1979
01-10-2005, 01:02 PM
Would you class this as a snow or a blizzard?
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v629/john1979/WheramI.jpg

I think blizzard but am not 100% sure.

SODERBERGD
01-10-2005, 01:09 PM
Would you class this as a snow or a blizzard?
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v629/john1979/WheramI.jpg

I think blizzard but am not 100% sure.

Looks snow to me. What we used to call bone-white snow.

gardenmum
01-10-2005, 01:27 PM
I have to say, my blizzard that I bred last year has noticeable yellow outlines, as you can see in this picture. And out of double clutching to an Anery male she produced all Anery & Snow babies, which proved her out to be not only homo for Charcoal and Amel but also for Anery. So, this is interesting. This girl does stand up to what Don is saying.

I still say that that snow on the previous post here, "looks" like a blizzard and I also would not be surprised if she produced charcaol offspring if bred to a charcoal.

vanderkm
01-10-2005, 02:14 PM
Very interesting that the yellow marked blizzards may be snow as well. The guy in my avitar was a very typical blizzard as a hatchling, but has developed quite marked yellow trim on his saddles with maturity. I didn't have any plans to breed him this spring, but in view of this information, I will pair him with my amel het anery female and see if we get some snows from that. Would be nice to be able to have an explaination for these blizzards that show the yellow.

Our yellow trimmed blizzard
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/509/6304_May_24_Boo_18_reduced.jpg

The amel het anery A (she has produced snows and anery in the past but never bred to charcoal - so not sure if het for anery B)
http://www.ssnakess.com/photopost/data/509/6304_Dec_18_Ivy_2_reduced.jpg

mary v.

Serpwidgets
01-10-2005, 04:20 PM
Personally, I don't think the presence of anery is what is making our charcoals become yellow. Hurley has a bunch of charcoals and all of them have some degree of yellow on them. One of them is unlikely to be even het for anery.. if we can show that charcoals without anery genes are still yellow, we might be able to completely drop the idea that charcoal is the "axanthism" many people take it to be. :sidestep:

A possible scenario is that the original charcoal was just "selectively bred" (by nature) for little or no yellow. With every outcross into new lines, the genetic makeup for "amount of yellow" would creep back toward the norm. It would be like taking a bucket of blue paint and mixing in random colors... the paint would become less blue over time because most of the stuff that's mixed in would be something other than blue.

The amount of yellow in charcoals would creep toward normal because nobody is particularly selecting for "no yellow" normals, hypos, amels, etc to cross into their charcoal projects, so every newly-recovered line of charcoals has more of those "make some yellow" genes in them.

Hurley's hypo charcoals have quite a bit of yellow on them. The male is being crossed to my normal het anery/hypo, so that cross should give us some information, too. :)

It will be interesting to see what pans out from future crosses. I suppose it will take some time, or quite a bit of looking backwards at existing crosses/lineage to figure out what's going on. I could be dead wrong and there actually could be a "yellow-reducing" agent involved in charcoals. :shrugs:

SODERBERGD
01-10-2005, 06:04 PM
[QUOTE=Serpwidgets]Personally, I don't think the presence of anery is what is making our charcoals become yellow. Hurley has a bunch of charcoals and all of them have some degree of yellow on them. One of them is unlikely to be even het for anery.. if we can show that charcoals without anery genes are still yellow, we might be able to completely drop the idea that charcoal is the "axanthism" many people take it to be. :sidestep:

I'm definitely not saying that all blizzards with yellow are homozygous for snow, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary at this time, it's certainly a possibility. Likewise, I'm not saying that charcoals with yellow are homozygous for anerythristic A. But let's face it. Before the charcoals and blizzards were discovered to be non allelic to anery, people were breeding lots of snows to blizzards and aneries to charcoals. Heck even after they figured it out the practice continues today. Also the anery and charcoal genes have been swapped around so much that people breeding charcoal to charcoal OR blizzard to blizzard OR for that matter snow to snow could be unaware of the presence of the opposite color gene hiding in just one of the pairs, (homozygous or heterozygous).

As you say, we can guess all we want, but the proof'll be in the pudding. Now we have a larger group of folks on the watch, we might gather enough data to form a more reliable theory.

Lexcorn
01-11-2005, 10:07 AM
An interesting hypothesis Don. I purchased a sibling pair of Blizzards in Dec '02, whilst the female began to show some yellow on her dorsal & ventral at approx. 5 months of age, the male remained a pure white colouration.

I considered the presence of the yellow in the female to be just another variation of this cultivar, however, it may be worth mating the female to a Snow or an Anery 'A' to verify your theory.

http://img13.exs.cx/img13/9669/blizzardf1yearcroptitle060fb.jpg

http://img13.exs.cx/img13/5224/blizzard004closetitle7cl.jpg

Serpwidgets
01-11-2005, 12:13 PM
Now we have a larger group of folks on the watch, we might gather enough data to form a more reliable theory.Agreed. It would be fun to test the different ideas and see if we can narrow down the field of possibilities. :)

But let's face it. Before the charcoals and blizzards were discovered to be non allelic to anery, people were breeding lots of snows to blizzards and aneries to charcoals. Heck even after they figured it out the practice continues today. Also the anery and charcoal genes have been swapped around so much that people breeding charcoal to charcoal OR blizzard to blizzard OR for that matter snow to snow could be unaware of the presence of the opposite color gene hiding in just one of the pairs, (homozygous or heterozygous).I figured they've been mixed into each other a lot of times, but I was only considering that the first charcoal had anery in it and was bred to anery and snow to found the different lines. I hadn't considered it happening that way too. There should be quite a lot of them around, eh?

I've been curious what "anery + charcoal + whatever" combos would look like. I'll start a new thread specifically on that topic, see if maybe we can get some pictures. :)

pls76
02-25-2005, 12:39 PM
Comparison?
my snow looks similiar to the first pic of your corns. shes has a very pearly white look to her and she has a light peach tone too :rolleyes:

Alias47
02-25-2005, 01:22 PM
I just wanted to bring up eye color again...
There were several posts regarding the snow and blizzard having "red" eyes.

They actually have PINK eyes...which are very different from the red eyes of a strictly amelanistic cornsnake (or amelanistic ANYTHING for that matter...LOL)...the anery, "a" or "b"(snow or blizzard), takes away the red pigment as well.
Really is irrelevant to this thread...just wanted to clarify.

I have some animals that will be producing (fingers crossed) offspring homozygous for amel, charcoal, AND anery...the anery is guaranteed (unless some sort of genetic mutation spontaneously occurs :crazy02: )
The breeders are an anery het charcoal amel female and an amel anery het charcoal male. They are descended from Gardenmum's blizzard.

SODERBERGD
02-27-2005, 09:14 AM
[QUOTE=Alias47]I just wanted to bring up eye color again...
There were several posts regarding the snow and blizzard having "red" eyes.

They actually have PINK eyes...which are very different from the red eyes of a strictly amelanistic cornsnake (or amelanistic ANYTHING for that matter...LOL)...the anery, "a" or "b"(snow or blizzard), takes away the red pigment as well.
Really is irrelevant to this thread...just wanted to clarify.
QUOTE]

Obviously, perception is everything. The red you see in the eye is blood. I guess there's less of it flowing in the snows OR something is causing the blood to be less visible. Except for that occasional black fleck you see in albino snakes' eyes, the eye is completely clear.

Often, the angle or amount of light dictates how red the eye will appear. I have some snows that have eyes as red as other amels. Perhaps they have high blood pressure or something. lol.

Don
www.cornsnake.NET

gardenmum
02-27-2005, 06:32 PM
I have some snows that have eyes as red as other amels. Perhaps they have high blood pressure or something. lol.

Sounds to me like you need to be looking into some high blood pressure meds for those guys. :D

They actually have PINK eyes...which are very different from the red eyes of a strictly amelanistic cornsnake (or amelanistic ANYTHING for that matter...LOL)...the anery, "a" or "b"(snow or blizzard), takes away the red pigment as well.
Really is irrelevant to this thread...just wanted to clarify.

Well, actually, all of my snow and amel have "red" eyes as in the iris/pupil color. The sclera (humans = whites of the eye) are different. In the snows, as babies, all of mine were whitish but when they got to be older than yearlings this changed to pink/red.

Now, on the amels, the sclera is a clear reddish color as hatchlings but doesn't appear to take long to start slowly turning shades according to their body color (i.e. yellowish or orangy), reflective of the body color like normals and anery do. All my Amels het for butter have a yellowish/orange tint sclera and they have very yellow base colors, my two Amel het anery have orange/red sclera and they have orangy base colors.

So, my thoughts are that it is POSSIBLE that the snow are completely devoid of any color intensifiers in the eye so therefor what we see is the only the color made from the blood, while, like the normals and anery, the amels have some intensifiers to the sclera of the eye but not the iris/pupil part which would cause the sclera to take on a similar tone to the body color but the pupil would be red. NOW this is just a guess on looking at how the eye colors seem to be affected. I could be wrong.

Here are some pictures of my snows and the blizzard I had. The first two pictures are of my snow stripe. The first one as a few month old baby shows that the sclera is whitish and the pupil red. But after a short time goes by, the sclera become reddish (second pic). The same thing goes for the rest of the snows I have pictured. The blizzard (the third pictured), I can't say about her as a baby as I got her as an adult. But all have red "eyes" now.

The next post I will put pictures of the amels eyes.

gardenmum
02-27-2005, 06:39 PM
These are the amels.

The first three are het for butter. You can see the yellowish body tones and the yellowish/orange sclera. The last two are amel het anery. These do not have the yellish tone but have an orangy tone instead.

Just found this all interesting. And, as I said, I could be wrong, but it does "appear" that the snow has a "clear" eye in which all parts show the blood but the amels have something more going on in the sclera part but do have the blood showing in the pupil part.

Alias47
02-28-2005, 11:39 AM
I apologize...
I believe Dianne may have hit it right on the head...the sclera is the source of my confusion...

I just had all my snakes out last night...it was cleaning and rearranging day...and I noticed that the intense red of the amel definitely had to do with the deeply RED sclera on mine...while my snow does appear to have quite pink eyes...I can see from both of your photos it must depend on the angle or light...and the sclera color having a major effect as well.

Of course the flash ALWAYS causes redeye :D

SODERBERGD
02-28-2005, 11:45 AM
Dianne, you sure set that one straight. I hope you'll do more comparisons for us. My data was for mammals and way off for serpents. Thanks for that information.

Don
www.cornsnake.NET

Serpwidgets
02-28-2005, 12:20 PM
What I've noticed is that iris color tends to be the same as either the saddle color or ground color. Some are between those two colors. Most appear to be very similar to the saddle color, and only a few of mine have eyes that match the ground color.

This seems to go for any morph and includes amels/anerys/etc.

I have wondered if there's any correlation to how the pattern intercepts the eyeball, such as the height of the saddle-colored bar that crosses the eye. I haven't sat down to take a good look at that to see if there's any apparent link between the two. I've also wondered if there's a Mendelian trait controlling eye color.

We have eye pictures on all of our collection at http://cccorns.com if anyone wants a good-sized sample to look at. :)

Alias47
02-28-2005, 12:28 PM
Now I am back to being confused again...and have a thought for all of you.

Look at Miriya and Pinky on Serps page...both are snows and both appear to have pink eyes...look at ANY of the amels...regardless of red in their pattern...all appear to have red eyes.

My thought was this...since normals have black eyes(and any of the forms of amel do NOT)...their eyes very obviously have a fair amount of melanin present. Wouldn't this be the same for erythrin as well, having some degree of presence would affect the intensity of the red appearance of an amels eyes...versus a snow that does not have the erythrin present. I still believe sclera coloration definitely plays a role...but what of the structure of the eye itself?

Serpwidgets
02-28-2005, 12:36 PM
Here's an example of the saddle color vs ground color. (These are both hypo motleys.)

Saddle color:
http://cccorns.com/Collection/CharlieCollage.jpg

Ground color:
http://cccorns.com/Collection/WindyCollage.jpg

Serpwidgets
02-28-2005, 12:47 PM
My thought was this...since normals have black eyes(and any of the forms of amel do NOT)...their eyes very obviously have a fair amount of melanin present. Wouldn't this be the same for erythrin as well, having some degree of presence would affect the intensity of the red appearance of an amels eyes...versus a snow that does not have the erythrin present. I still believe sclera coloration definitely plays a role...but what of the structure of the eye itself?Hmm, I've never even thought of the possibility of erythrin on the retina. (Wow, gotta love those "duh" moments, LOL.)

If they are both present, then normals could still have black pupils because melanin is usually much more concentrated on the retina to absorb light so that it doesn't bounce around inside the eye. Amels would have "red" pupils because you're actually seeing erythrin. Snows would have pink/red pupils because you're only seeing blood.

I'll have to look in person. With photos the color can change drastically depending on the angle of the flash and whether the eye is pointed at the camera or somewhere else. (If you do it right, you can get overhead pics of amels that look like they have "black" pupils.)

Alias47
02-28-2005, 12:56 PM
My original post was based on this assumption...and people HAVE shown examples of red eyes in snakes that have no erythrin by proven genetics...which was the source of my confusion.

I personally can see a difference in the eyes of amels versus the eyes of snows...on most of the animals I have seen...but I don't have the experience of having the number of examples that the people who have responded to my post do (Don, Dianne, and Chuck)...so it caused me to question my "theory" (amazing how human nature makes it so easy to take what is really a "theory" and personally accept it as fact based on belief, huh? Guilty as charged :shrugs: )