Amelanistic Okeetee Corn Snake
This particular cultivar actually started out as an error on my part. Some people may remember when it was actually called 'Reverse Okeetee' rather than Amelanistic Okeetee. I believe Bill and Kathy Love were the first ones marketing corn snakes under that name. At that time I had some animals that I had obtained from them and the amelanistics that came from that group greatly resembled the Reverse Okeetee that they were marketing. The animals that produced this line were actually triple heterozygous corns that originally produced the Blizzard corns for me. The amels were a very deep rich orange red coloration with bold white borders around the blotches that I felt certain this was the same line Bill and Kathy were marketing as the Reverse Okeetee. So that's what I started referring to them as, as well. In an effort to enhance the line even further, I bred this line into my original Okeetee female and produced a generation of heterozygous animals. Subsequent breeding of this generation began to produce a different sort of amelanistic corn that had much more intense orange in the ground color with red blotches again outlines with bold white borders. But these were not the deep orange red of the original strain, so for a period of time I was marketing the original line as Reverse Okeetee, and the 'new and improved' line I started calling Amelanistic Okeetee. This was getting a bit confusing and it was time consuming to explain the difference to people inquiring about them, so I eventually dropped the Reverse Okeetee name completely in favor of Amelanistic Okeetee.
The coloration in this cultivar is very intense. Brilliant oranges and reds, often with very wide, bold white borders around the red blotches. Blotches are large, often forming a saddled look, altogether producing an exceptionally pleasing looking animal. This cultivar is very similar in looks to the Fluorescent Orange, but they are from completely different bloodlines. I honestly believe that the best of the Fluorescent Oranges are better looking than the best of the Amelanistic Okeetees, but that's just my personal opinion. I am seriously considering merging the two lines together and dropping one of the names to simplify things a bit. There's really not all that much difference to warrant having two different cultivars looking so similar. And things are already confusing with the corn cultivars and bound to get much more so in the future.
