Turned out Oliver had a thing for the genus Elaphe and was delighted to chat with a young teenager with similar interests. The result was that these hatchlings had regions of the body bearing the basis of a "four-striped" pattern - similar, to my way of thinking, to the pattern of the four-lined (yellow) rat snake (Elaphe quadrivittata) I made some sketches of the hatchlings patterns and took them along the next time I took a bunch of garter and watersnakes to the Bronx Zoo for trade (The zoo used them to feed cobras and other ophidiophagic snakes, and I'd go home with a few recent hatchlings of whatever non-venomous species the zoo had a surfeit.) I showed my sketches to Steve, the keeper who handled the bartering, who immediately took me upstairs to see Dr James Oliver, the Curator of Reptiles. Now here's the interesting part! In a couple of the hatchlings, the long sides of some of the "H's" connected thru the normally intervening grey background.Īlso, in the same regions of the body, the lateral blotches were elongated and also joined. (As the snakes age, the grey areas darken to black, ,obscuring the underlying pattern - but if the skin is stretched, the pattern can still be discerned.) The larger dorsal blotches have concave front and rear edges, giving them a sort-of plump "H" shape - with the long limbs of the "H" running longitudinally. Juvenile pilot blacks are grey with dorsal blotches and smaller lateral blotches. In the mid 50s I had the opportunity to hatch out a clutch of eggs from a pilot blacksnake/black rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta) caught in NW Connecticut. IMHO the term "integrade", with its usual connotation of "hybrid" between species is far too often used when an individual of one species bears a pattern suggestive of a mix of features of the characteristically different patterns of two ostensibly separate species.
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