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melanistic smooth snake |
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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Posted: 26 May 2015 at 9:09pm |
Thought I'd share this beauty with you from Dorset, found during a survey with Ben and Stu from ARC Trust on Sunday:
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Liz Heard
Senior Member Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Location: South West Status: Offline Points: 1429 |
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Great find Will, you must be chuffed. Thanks for sharing!
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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thanks Ben, I was most definitely chuffed - as were the ARC guys as I was with. They had found one on the same site last year, about 150m away, so the question now is whether she is the same one or another individual. Either way, a lovely animal.
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Suzy
Senior Member Joined: 06 Apr 2005 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1447 |
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Will did they not know if it was the same animal from its scale pattern?
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Suz
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Tom Omlette
Senior Member Joined: 07 Nov 2013 Location: Stoke on Trent Status: Offline Points: 449 |
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beautiful! great find will.
tom
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AGILIS
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1689 |
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well copped Will looks like a Aussie black snake spose that because its black, was it from the dense site ?keith
Edited by AGILIS - 28 May 2015 at 6:55am |
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LOCAL ICYNICAL CELTIC ECO WARRIOR AND FAILED DRUID
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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thanks guys @ Suz - I'm not sure they got close ups of the head first time around, but we certainly photographed every last mm of it this time, including the belly scales which had some predator-related damage on them. This should help with ID in future. @Keith - yes, looks far more menacing than your average smoothie. I'm sworn to secrecy about the location, as you can imagine!
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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PS I'll put a few more photos of it on Flickr in the next few days, but here's a link to the photo in high resolution if you want to see it in more detail:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/100121190@N06/17504468614/in/datetaken/ |
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arvensis
Senior Member Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Location: Hampshire Status: Offline Points: 493 |
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Nice find. It will be interesting to see if any other melanistic individuals are found at that site.
Mark. Edited by arvensis - 02 Jun 2015 at 9:56pm |
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will
Senior Member Joined: 27 Feb 2007 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 1830 |
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yes Mark, the ARC boys will definitely be on the lookout. A melanistic one was found about 140m away from this one last year, but it's not known if this is the same one. I found partly melanistic ones from 2 other sites c.2km from this site, so there might be something in the local gene pool. I just hope that this site doesn't suffer a burn like the ones that we have seen so often this year on our heaths - thereby perhaps resulting in the loss of a unique set of melanistic alleles from the UK smooth snake population...
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