Re: Stupid Website

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ The Racer and Coachwhip Forum ]

Posted by paalexan on August 16, 2002 at 22:07:35:

In Reply to: Stupid Website posted by Chance on August 05, 2002 at 15:25:39:

:Hmm, well, not sure why the website isn't working. We may have been updating at the time or something, but try again if you want to. It should work now. Though we have had problems with our provider, their service kinda sucks (but it's free for us so I can't complain), so just keep trying. Thanks for the great information. The male really does appear to be a "blue" racer, in that he's so dark that he's almost an indigo blue. The female is a lighter color. I started thinking....if they were sexually dimorphic in the first place, then this pair is backwards, because the female should be the more cryptically colored (like boomslangs, in that the males are very vivid green while the females are just dull brown or olive), or however you want to think about it.

I was away from the forums for a bit, but it doesn't seem like this thread's gotten buried just yet... : )
Well, you could have sexual dimorphism either way... most birds, for instance, follow the bright male/dull female pattern, but others (jacanas, for instance) have the opposite...
Also, the feature of coloration that's supposed to distinguish blue and yellow-bellied racers is that the blue racers will not have yellow bellies... dorsal coloration is pretty variable in both, and there's a good bit of overlap, but the ventral color means both of these are yellow-bellied racers. Eastern or western is another question, and needs scale counts and whatnot (which aren't that reliable, anyways... the two easterns I have are intermediate between easterns and westerns on some scalation issues...).

: I'm sure the guy was just going by what he was told. Anyway, that's cool though. I probably have a female of the race of western or eastern yellowbelly, and a male blue racer. Babies will look interesting, probably. But they are gorgeous snakes, and I'm certainly not disappointed with them. I don't think I mentioned this in the original post, but the guy that sold them to me also said something about how they only ate fish, and that he tried to get them to eat mice and they snubbed their noses. So on the way home from the show I tested this, as I had bought a few mice at the show for the snakes at home, some of which were larger fuzzies. The male poked his head out of the side of the container, sensed the fuzzy, and wham, grabbed it and ate it without killing the poor thing.

: ) From the racers I have, it seems these guys'll go for just about anything small enough and moving, but fish would be a new one...

Patrick Alexander

Follow Ups: