Odd looking normal
 

I encountered this cornsnake on the side of my house about a year ago. I thought that it was interesting that his pattern faded out from a fairly bright classic pattern in the front part of his body to more of the grey phase of cornsnake. The fading is reminiscent of a pine or bull snake. I've been looking around at various morph lists and haven't really found anything like this snake; has this coloration been bred for?

As for the snake himself, I recall it being a little cool, so he was quite easy to work with. I suspect he was on the brick for heat and didn't seem to mind borrowing mine during a picture session. To the best of my knowledge, there is no legal way to collect native reptiles in my state, and we can't keep wild-type natives anyway, so he was returned to the yard after the pictures.

https://i.imgur.com/iN49xNCl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/icv0wHJl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/VPVn5xJl.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/i86cRmFl.jpg

He's pretty. The ground color will pick up a bit more tan as he ages, but yeah, he's fairly pale. Still definitely a normal though, just kinda a 'buckskin' one

Nice looking animal. Kind of reminiscent of some of the earlier generations of Miami Phase I used to work with.

It is interesting to hear that this snake resembles those early snakes from the Miami/Homestead area. I guess that the grey color ended up being more dominant than the gradual color change from head to tail.

I often wondered if the Miami Phase that exhibited the gray background color was a naturally occurring population of axanthism in the corn snakes. When I was working with the Candy Cane corns, getting and keeping the orange coloration out of that line was very difficult to accomplish, even though I started with some very nice pure gray background Miami Phase as my base stock. So I felt that by introducing Amelanism, that one or more other genetic traits accompanied that Amelanism gene. And once it was in the stock, it was difficult to get it back out again.

So is the yellow coloration related to the orange background color in some way? Beats me. I remember one project I started when I had a mind's eye view of a yellow background colored corn snake with stark black blotches on it. It seemed natural to breed 'A' Anerythrism into Caramel to see where that might progress in that direction. Oddly enough, what I wound up producing was completely axanthic anerythristics that were pure gray in background with those black blotches I was looking for. But I never could get the yellow coloration back in after that, and it was soon a project that I had to abandon for other things.

So between the results I got in the Candy Cane line where it was difficult to get rid of the yellow/orange background color, and the apparently complete opposite results I was getting in that yellow with black blotch line I hoped for, it was enough to drive me insane.

It is good to be retired.......... :laugh:

It reminds me of the Alabama's I worked with several years ago.

I'm only an hour or so away from Alabama. Of course, since it isn't legal to collect wild cornsnakes in Mississippi, it is also possible that some "Alabamas" could have been collected a little farther west...

Sent from my moto g(7) supra using Tapatalk

Rich, I've seen folks using the "Ashy" gene ( :grin01: ) to "clean up" the orange in Candy Canes.

Very neat looking wild type chairman

Well, whatever works. Can't see any harm in using genetic material from a genetic line that originated in the Florida Keys for a line that came from Miami Phase stock. At least in the case of lines that came from my original stock, anyway. Some of the Candy Cane lines had emoryi in their genetic history.