A thought about Anerythrism...

I've been taking some photos for the update of my SerpenCo site for this season and while going through the photos trying to pick out the best ones, I found myself staring at a photo of an 'A' Anerythristic and my mind began to wander (easy to do when you get past 50 years old!).

Anyway, I've always found myself describing Anerythism as a genetic trait that removes the reds and oranges from a corn snake. But is that really accurate? If you would take a normal colored corn and remove the reds and oranges, would you REALLY have that much black and gray left behind? I sincerely doubt that reds and oranges mask the melanin and their removal would allow them to be visible.

What appears to happen is more like a displacement of the reds and oranges with melanin. In otherwords, the reds and oranges are REPLACED by melanin.

I played around with photoshop tonight and found that by taking a typical looking corn snake (Hypo Okeetee):


And removing the red pigment by adjusting the brightness of the pigment to white out the red, you get what would be a corn snake if you extracted the red coloration (anerythristic):


Then further playing around, I discovered that by transforming the red hue to yellows, I get what looks like an excellent version of an Amber Corn:


To further confuse things, I then changed the yellow pigment to green and produced yet another decent looking Amber corn with a different color formula:


So what about removing the yellow pigment? What would that produce? Well, kind of a rather normal looking corn snake:


Or how about just reducing the brightness of the red to zero? What would that do:


So it appears we can get quite a variance in the corn snakes just by adjusting the hue, saturation, and brightness of just the red and yellow pigments.

Hmm, what do we get if we remove BOTH the red and yellow pigment:



Beats me why I spent so much time doing this tonight. But it is interesting to use a graphics program like Photoshop to try to figure out what we are dealing with. However, try as I might, I just could not get anything to look like a Lavender corn. Maybe I just didn't put enough time into it, but I would think this would be possible to do.

So back to the original question: Is Anerythrism REALLY a correct term for what we are seeing in this cultivar?

great question

Rich, great question..one to ponder about over and over. Although I must admit that I love that solid black corn pic now just to figure out how to actually get one to look like that other than just on the computer!!

Off topic.

Isn't that like what Rich posted on his site saying a Butter Blood Red would essentially be something that looks like a yellow rat snake. Essentially wouldn't you just have a corn that looks like a black rat snake?! It looks like a black blood red or super dark pewter.

Back on topic.

Rich pardon my newbieness, but could it be that instead of describing Anerythism as removal of red that it could be described as a gradient of "hyper-white" for lack of a better word. I'm probably completely off here.

I've often looked at my anery and thought there had to be something more than just a removal of the red pigment. I was comparing a normal corn snake to him and wondering, "Is there really that much melanin under the red-orange of those blotches?" It just seemed that it would take a LOT of red to cover up the grey/black so thoroughly, if there was as much black in every normal as there is in a typical anery.

Rich,

What does it look like if you remove the yellow AND tone down the red? Also, that first picture you doctored, doesn't THAT one look more like a lavendar than an anery? Are lavs really anerythristic in the true sense of the word, and we are just misusing the term?

Darin

Cool stuff!

Heh, I'm only 32 and my mind has been wandering for decades.

Notice that Anerys have the faded-out "holes" in their saddles where the red is faded in a lot of normals, and the pink is white in snows. (Dunno what that means, just thought it might be relevant.)

I dunno if the black is underneath the reds, but I would suspect it to be under the yellows. The yellows on my anery's neck totally override the black coloration there. Since the black coloration is caused by the absorption of light, and the yellow is the reflection of yellow light, I'd think the yellow would be on a more external layer in order to show up.

I'd guess it's possible that there really could be that much black underneath the reds. To me, the "red" on amels isn't quite as red as the "red" on normals. Maybe that black does affect the coloration, just not as much as we would think it should?

I do think there's a lot of merit to what you're saying. I don't think the above explains the dark stripes that show up, and apparently are not affected by the red saddles... If the above is true, you'd think they'd fade out a lot when they went "under" the saddles.