Re: Are Hypos albinos or are albinos hypos?

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: JS says: ": Terry, I read and reread Bechtel here. He says that Hypomelanism is a broad definition of red-eye, yellow-eye, ruby-eye albinos...." : TD says: MY READING is that he says that people CALL some snakes THAT ARE HYPOS by other terms including calling them various types of "albinos". That's an entirely different ihing and i guess it's one reason why we continue to disagree. : I don't care what people call them. They are what they are, and i'm operating on the premise that if they have any melanin, they're hypos, and if they have none, they're "albinos" (amels). He spends some time explaining why albino mammals and albino reptiles are a little diff, and why we say "albino" now but it's a term created for mammals WHICH HAVE ONLY MELANIN pigment...so the term is not precise with reptiles...he compares it to the "I know one when i see one" or "I know art (or porn, or whatever) when I see it". By that he's referring to the "classic" albino or amelanistic. : If we're to advance herpetoculture, we've gotta try to do what's right, not just what conforms to what people called things in the past, when they had much less knowledge about the biology and chemistry of what's going on. : I mean, people used to think the Gouldian Finches (since i referenced them earlier in this series-of-threads) were three different subspecies. Subsequent breeding and research showed they're not. Do we keep calling them by the OLD names, the wrong names, or do we move ahead? When various triangulum ssp are reclassified, do we continue to call them by the old names, or embrace the new? (I know, in fact we continue to debate, so maybe that's a bad example!) But to me, the distinction is like the difference between common names ("Hoop Snake," "Corn snake", etc.), and the scientific name--do we call things what we've been calling them for years, when we realize there's more precise or more correct terminology? : JS: "If you hold red-eye albinos(albeit "classic" like COKE,lol)why would you not use the same ruby-eye or yellow-eye as obviously more descriptive terms than HYPO?? Makes NO sense.Jeff : TD: Well, many of the positions you take make no sense to me. That's why we have to continue working hard to try to understand one another. _I_ DON"T call amel hondurans "red eye albinos", so the rest of your question is a little tough for me to answer. Now if there were three types of albinos--by that i mean AMELS, ok, with NO melanin in the skin pigment--and they had three different eye colors AND they were shown to be separate mutations--then i think it would be great, and descriptive, and useful, and correct to refer to them as "red eyed albinos" and "green with pink tint eyed albinos" and etc. What i'm trying to say is that you haven't established that any of the other eye-color "albinos" ARE albinos--you even seem to describe them as having SOME melanin, but then you say yeah, but they oughta be called "ruby eyed albinos" or whatever, and I'm not getting it--i'm willing to concede that that failure might be my fault--but i'm simply not seeing the link in that logic. To me it makes no more sense than my point of view apparently made to you. : Besides, you've got a snake that's four feet long and arguably has melanin in its skin, and we're gonna call it an albino because of its EYE color? And that's descriptive? I don't think so. : I DO think, however, that being of goodwill we can pursue this and perhaps with help from others more knowledgeable about these things than i am, we can a) come to understand each other's positions and b) maybe even come to the same conclusion! : peace : terry

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