Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

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TeeJay
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Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by TeeJay »

Field herping has been pretty slow up here in the north lately now that we actually have Winter again... with SNOW ! So I thought I would put up some pics of past hi lites with the critters indoors.

I bought these 2 Tangerine Honduran Milksnakes as hatchlings in 1997. The big old momma has produced eggs almost every year since 2000. The last 2 years she has produced infertile eggs so here's a series of pics of her last batch of good eggs. I'm thinking of retiring her as a breeder. It takes forever to sell off the babies around here anyway so I think she deserves a rest from it all.

Anyway... Here they are. Just plain good old het for nuthin black tipped Tangerine Hondurans.

Here's the Daddy Snake.

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Here's the big old momma. (At least 6 feet long)

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Springtime and love is in the air

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After she laid the eggs I moved them into a seperate container for incubation.

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As soon as the first egg pipped I moved the whole mass into a more natural set up.

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The reason why the first one is so fat is, as it was emerging (which took forever!) I kept squirting it with water to clean off the egg and help prompt it to come out. I could see the snake was drinking while still in the egg... just didn't realize how much till it came all the way out!

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Sometimes you get a bad one. This one was all kinked and dead in the egg.

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Here's the whole batch pre-shed. (Only 5 altogether)

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Here's one after shed and all ready for its first meal.

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Zach_Lim
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by Zach_Lim »

Great set you photos. Your enclosure is gorgeous.

Were the eggs incubated in the enclosure of the female/male?
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dery
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by dery »

Zach_Lim wrote:Great set you photos. Your enclosure is gorgeous.

Were the eggs incubated in the enclosure of the female/male?
And what about that snake.....??
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monklet
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by monklet »

Gorgeous!!! Despite all the mistrust over the pedigree of Hondurans, those look like the real thing. Just the fact that all the babies look puro is great. ...do you know anything about their line/heritage?
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gbin
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by gbin »

monklet wrote:Gorgeous!!! Despite all the mistrust over the pedigree of Hondurans, those look like the real thing. Just the fact that all the babies look puro is great. ...do you know anything about their line/heritage?
Yup, they look just like specimens I caught in Guatemala that I believed to be the Honduran subspecies. :thumb:

Thanks for sharing your beautiful snakes and lovely enclosures with us, TeeJay!

Gerry
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Gary2sons
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by Gary2sons »

Great post! :thumb: Very large and impressive milksnakes with some amazing enclosures!

Also really liked this quote!

"Just plain good old het for nuthin black tipped Tangerine Hondurans"

Easy to understand for the sometimes het challenged like myself! :lol:

Gary
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monklet
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by monklet »

Gerry wrote:they look just like specimens I caught in Guatemala
Lucky s.o.b! :x
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gbin
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by gbin »

monklet wrote:Lucky s.o.b! :x
You're right, Brad, but there's a bit of a sad story there, as well...

During the nearly three years that I spent in Guatemala, I collected a modest number of live snakes for myself in addition to pickling a large number of good-condition roadkills (and a few live animals that I reluctantly put down as particularly valuable scientific specimens) for Jon Campbell at UTA. The snakes I collected for myself included two especially beautiful milksnakes - one an easily 5ft male that very nearly literally scared the crap out of my assistant (a fellow who like almost all the local men thought that to touch any snake was to invite instant death) when I grabbed it, and the other a smaller, younger female - as well as several other specimens that were special to me in one way or another. For many months I regularly spent a portion of my "spare" time hunting/scavenging various prey to feed these animals, and I managed to keep them in great shape living in plastic shoeboxes/sweaterboxes that I bought in a village mercado about an hour away and set up there beside my wife's and my bed in our tent. Definitely a labor of love.

Unfortunately, when our studies were done and we went to Guatemala City with all of our scientific samples (including those for Dr. Campbell) and also all of those live snakes to get the necessary paperwork for exporting everything to the U.S., we ran into serious trouble. For some reason still known only to the Guatemalan authorities, although they were happy enough to give me collecting permits for everything at the outset - knowing full well that I intended to acquire some live specimens for myself thereby, I should point out - once I had the specimens not only in hand but also hundreds of miles in distance and thousands of feet in elevation from their place of origin, they decided that they would only issue me export permits allowing me to take preserved specimens out of the country. I couldn't go back and release those live specimens at that point, so my only choices were to preserve them :( or find a new in-country home for them. I went the latter route and left them at the zoo in Guatemala City. I've always hoped that they knew well enough how to care for animals such as those milksnakes, anyway (though they had essentially no herps on exhibit at the time, nor staff who were very familiar with herps), but I'm virtually certain that some of the more hard-to-care-for specimens that I left with them didn't survive the keeper staff's learning curve. :( :( :( I was devastated by it, and kept no herps at all for quite a while after I got back home because of it.

Gerry
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monklet
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by monklet »

WOW, that is just senseless and brutal! :( :roll: ...WTF? But thanks for relating it in detail.

Odd that, tropical milks only very rarely show up in posts from Central and South America??? ...are they just plain tough to find er what?
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gbin
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by gbin »

Hmmm, I certainly didn't find all that many milksnakes in Guatemala despite my time there, and there were certainly a number of snake (and other herp) species that I encountered much more often, too, but there were also species that I encountered more rarely. I reckon snakes can be relatively tough to find in general in the rainforest if you're only there for a short time (my biggest advantage was without a doubt how long I was there), and yeah, this might be a less often encountered species as well.

Gerry
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Cole Grover
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by Cole Grover »

Gerry,

Interesting info and heartbreaking all at the same time. Were you in the Tikal area when you found the milks? Any photos you'd be willing to dig up or either the specimens or the habitat?! This guy would be super greatful! Lampropeltis triangulum polyzona and L. t. abnorma (in the sense of Williams) both range (and intergrade where their ranges abut and blur) in Guatemala. L. t. hondurensis should exert some influence on the populations in and lowland areas in the southeast. L. t. abnorma is largely a highland "form", but that said, recent genetic work indicates that the Latin American forms of triangulum from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec south to the highlands of Costa Rica are genetically cohesive and virtually indistinguishable... I bet we see hondurensis, stuarti, abnorma, and possibly oligozona all sunk into polyzona in the near future. As we all know, one of the staunchest criticisms of Williams' work is that he made much adieu about nothing, so to speak, and heavily over split the species triangulum.

I suspect that finding milks in the rainforest is like finding any other semi-fossorial snake, but not having any real first-hand experience, I don't know. I've got a good buddy and fellow milk-head (who, coincidently, lives in the DFW metro area and studies herps at UTA, Gerry) who has found a number of triangulum in the Lago de Peten area of Guatemala while doing field work down there. I don't get the impression that they're difficult or "rare", but timing and search method are probably super important. Anecdotes from him and others indicate that road cruising is the preferred method for success.

Gotta bolt - hope everyone is having a great start to the new year!
-Cole
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gbin
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by gbin »

Yes, Cole, all of the milksnakes I found in Guatemala were in Tikal National Park. And I suppose it was uncharacteristically sloppy of me :oops: to say that I believed them to be the Honduran subspecies, as I understand that milksnakes from that part of northeastern Guatemala are actually a muddle of the subspecies surrounding the area (L.t. abnorma, hondurensis, polyzona and stuarti, I believe? it's been a while since I was conversant in this stuff...); I just thought of them as Hondurans because that's exactly what they looked like to me. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were right about these all combining into one subspecies sometime in the future, too.

It sounds like your buddy found them to be about as I did: neither commonly nor rarely encountered, but rather somewhere in the middle. (You should PM me his contact information so I can look him up sometime!) I only found a handful during my time there (sorry, but I don't have my notes handy and can't dredge the actual number up from memory), and all but two of those were on the paved park road at dusk or night. One of the two found in the forest (the big male I mentioned) was basking on the bare, sandy ground over a leaf cutter ant colony a bit before midmorning, and the other was under some woody debris beside a deep tree buttress also in the morning.

I should certainly be able to find some pictures of the habitat for you, Cole, and maybe of one juvenile milksnake (the very first one I found there); I'll take a look and post what I dig up soon. My sad story above is actually even sadder than I told it, though. See, despite the fact that I took lots of pictures of all kinds of herps and other things while I was in Tikal, I generally didn't bother photographing any of the herps that I collected, nor even of other specimens of those species that I encountered thereafter. I figured for those species I had plenty of time to stage particularly nice pictures of my captives sometime later, but then when later arrived neither my nor my wife's camera was still up to the task. (Some kind of mold badly fogged the internal surfaces of the lenses for my wife's camera, and my camera's film advance stopped working. It was a tough environment for all of our equipment.) So some of my very favorite finds - most notably two incredibly cool-looking Scaphiodontophis annulatus, again a male and a female, that I had some difficulty getting started eating but then had going great - never got their pictures taken. Yeah, I know I was a dang fool to put off photographing them that way, but in my defense we were just a couple of dirt-poor graduate students still using fully manual 35mm cameras and slide film in those days, so we didn't run off long series of shots of everything we encountered the way folks do now with digital cameras. Had we known what was going to happen - or even that it might happen - we would have found a way to buy and shoot a lot more film, I assure you! :(

Happy New Year to y'all!

Gerry
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TeeJay
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by TeeJay »

I got my Hondurans from John Meltzer of the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. I've lost contact with him for many years now, so I don't know if he would have info on where he got the parents from. Maybe I'll see if I can find his E-mail address and find out. I'll try and get a better pic of Big Mommas daughter (A 2002 from her second clutch) She's even bigger, prettier and... TAME! Early on I noticed one particular female in the clutch that was unusually calm (for a hatchling Honduran) so I kept her as a holdback. She's never been bred, as I wanted to see just how big a 'Monster Milk' could get. She is now one of my favorite snakes and will wrap around your arm and just remain there, sucking up all the heat out of your body... as opposed to every other Honduran I've ever owned that simply wanted to get down and crawl away.

Gerry... I too would be real interested in seeing Any pics of wild Central American Milksnakes and especially habitat shots.
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Chris Smith
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by Chris Smith »

Congrats!!
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MattSullivan
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by MattSullivan »

that is awesome congrats! mustve been sweet to see
hellihooks
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by hellihooks »

How unusual is it to get a tri-color from a typical (?) looking hondo? jim
Grass709
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by Grass709 »

awesome post! great pictures. just picked up a male and female pair of tangerine Hondurans at the last repticon, cant wait to do the same!
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Kelly Mc
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Re: Tangerine Hondurans Hatching

Post by Kelly Mc »

Engaging, Full and Breathtaking post.

Thank you for sharing
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