Snake oddity

[The Snark]

Saw a 3 foot O Hannah on the road today. I suppose it had been run over but I didn't see any injury. When I hooked it it expanded it's hood but otherwise didn't make any movement at all.

What was odd was it's color. Roughly, ABOUT THIS COLOR if it shows this way. Very light olive tan, the white circumferential bands just a few random white dots. I've never seen one or pictures of one that color.

 

[Najakeeper]

No photo? Come'on Snark, you are slacking...

Might be a random color mutation, probably hypomelanistic based on the age and color.

So it wasn't run over then?

 

[pitbulllady]

There is a hypomelanistic morph that occurs in these. Tom Crutchfield in Florida has a hypo Indo-Chinese King, no black on it at all, and it's that same greenish tone that you illustrated.

 

[The Snark]

No photo? Come'on Snark, you are slacking...

Might be a random color mutation, probably hypomelanistic based on the age and color.

So it wasn't run over then?

I suspect is was ran over. Flairing it's hood as a purely nervous reflex.

Don't get me started on cameras. I've got 2 by my elbow that need repairing. I checked on Go Pro types, doing my research, and determined way over 90% of them sold here are pirated fakes. A friend bought a very high quality one for his drone, to the tune of $400, that worked for 3 days. Taking it to the service center with all the packaging and paperwork they said it was a China fake. I even considered buying from Amazon. Found a very nice camera for about $65. After duty and import tax, $180.

All the kings around here turn some shade of brown to tan during the summer, no black at all and most easily IDed by the belly color contrast (and hood if they expand it of course but I'd rather not get one that excited) from several feet away. So hypomelanistic seems the order to the day with them to widely varying degrees.
A herpetologist explained it's their temperature regulation thing as they often spend entire days in full sunlight.

BTW. Najakeeper, or anyone, could you examine your King's black scales with a magnifying glass or microscope? I suspect that dusty black isn't black at all but densely pigmented dark brown.
Hypomelanistic makes perfect sense there. They aren't chameleons, just regulate the melanin production.


I just did some research on the color spectrum and Hannah probably has followed some basic color principles. The brown color spectrum is in fact orange and yellow at low intensity, and olive green is low intensity green and yellow. We can substitute pigment, melanin, and it's density to emulate the color reflected from the skin of Hannah. All you have to do is reduce intensity of the black color by reducing pigment cell density to produce those two color spectrums. Black of course simply being too dense, opaque, to reflect light, near zero intensity, and not a true color. So think of Hannah, as one example, of varying it's color entirely by reducing or adding melanin to it's scales. The greater the reduction, the more the true colors, greens and browns, show up.

An electron microscopic image of a black Hannah scale would reveal that nearly every cell is pigmented in the low intensity orange to green spectrum. Compare to the skin of humans, say an African race, and northern Europeans. The pigments are exactly the same color and only the density varies.

 

[Beary Strange]

Sounds like it was a very attractive snek. Too bad someone squished it. :c

 

[Najakeeper]

I will try to take a macro photo of the scales, that's the best I can do right now without engendering my life. I've already done something stupid once with my boy and almost paid for it.

In the meantime, here is a black and white photo of his first shed: