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Old 05-08-2018, 12:30 AM   #1
Rich Z
Cinder Corn Snake

A section from my retired SerpenCo.com website and some following recent commentary.

Well, for some reason I can find any writeup I specifically did on the Cinder (which incidentally I originally just referred to as a "Type C Anerythristic" and later referred to as an "Ashy Corn"). But I did find the below concerning the Upper Keys Corns where I made brief mention of it.

Quote:
Upper Keys Corn Snake

I will be the first to admit that I have NO idea what a 'Lower Keys' corn snake looks like. Every corn snake I have ever heard about coming from the Florida keys seems to be called an Upper Keys Corn. Not sure exactly why that is. Either the Upper Keys are just teeming with corn snakes that the Lower Keys lack (which is sort of consistent with the fact that the corns from the Lower Keys are protected), or many people think that the Upper Keys begin with Key West and extend to the mainland. Seriously, I do suspect that each of the major keys in the Florida Keys might have it's own minor variations in the way the corn snakes coming from them appear, but unless you yourself go down there and catch them, or get them from someone entirely trustworthy, I would take such information with a big grain of salt.

The Upper Keys Corn is kind of hard to describe. In some instances it looks like something inbetween a hypomelanistic corn and a regular Miami Phase corn. There is usually very little contrast between the blotches and ground color. And often the abdomen can be pretty much patternless. Kind of long and lanky of body shape, looking a bit more streamlined that the typical corn. Nearly all of my examples are very mellow acting animals, and in some respects act very similar to the Amber corns in personality.

One interesting bit of information is that I have had some apparently Anerythristic looking babies hatch out of the line I have. The guy I got them from (Craig Boyd) said they were wild caught animals, so this is an interesting development. This is probably just some 'A' Anerythrism popping up, but I have never heard of them coming from the Keys. I certainly hope so, since the last thing we need is yet another genetic form of apparent Anerythrism!
Now what is interesting is that my memory of the source of those Cinder/Ashy corns was not what I am stating here. A long time ago I did one of the Birmingham, AL reptile shows, and there was a guy there looking to trade a female Upper Keys Corn for something, and we wound up agreeing on a trade for an adult leopard gecko we had on surplus. Come to find out that the corn was gravid, so I hatched out the babies and kept some around for a new blood line. When they grew up, I bred them with snow corns to see if there were any of those particular genes lurking around in that gene pool. Nope. But I kept some of those babies, raised them up, and bred them together. So of course, I got anerythristics and amels, and certainly a snow or two, but some of the anerythristics just looked a little different to me.

So I am not sure about the real actual source of the animal(s) I got that actually produced this new gene for me. All that seems evident is that it did originate from the Florida Keys. But if my life were on the line, I would have to say what I wrote back then would have to be more accurate than my actual memory right now. This is not the only incident I can note where my aging memory does not jive with actual history.

So I spent years growing up those odd looking anerythristics and cross breeding them to Type A anerythrism and and also Charcoal, since it was quite possible that this was just a different expression of either of those known genes. In the meantime, of course I sold off a bunch of related offspring, and apparently Carol Huddleston hatched out some of those "odd" anerythristics as well. Since I still was not convinced 100 percent it was a unique gene and declined to give them a new name, Carol started calling them "Cinder" corns and marketing them as such. Personally, I saw a striking resemblance in their coloration to the endemic ashy geckos found on the Florida keys, once I had finally concluded that this was a new gene type, and wound up preferring to call them Ashy Corns. But I guess the marketplace preferred "Cinder Corn" and it stuck regardless of what I liked as a name.

I guess any snows out of that gene pool I sold off could have been amelanistic forms of the Cinders, but when you are hatching out thousands of baby snakes, subtle differences sort of become insignificant and easily slipped through the fingers.