Posted on 03/11/2021 11:55:35 AM PST by nickcarraway
A snake breeder who accidentally bred a ball python with the shape of three smiley face emojis on its body said he sold the designer reptile for $6,000.
Justin Kobylka, who has been breeding snakes for two decades, said he was attempting to breed ball pythons for the color combination of bright golden yellow and white when he ended up hatching a snake with three yellow smiley faces on its scales.
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The breeder said the snake was born after about eight years of working to breed pythons for the color combination.
Kobylka said he estimates about one in 20 of the snakes he bred for the color combination would have a smiley face, but the snake is the only one he's ended up with that has three faces on its scales.
Kobylka said the "emoji ball python" sold for $6,000.
At a reptile expo in Bowie MD, years ago, I saw the very first Piebald BP.
He was for sale for $25000...and someone bought him.
They’re a couple hundred, now.
They’re heads are the size of a thumb.
No threat, there.
No. Shedding is only to allow for growth in overall size, the pattern remains the same.
Funny...you are a font of knowledge about snakes, and I recall now you keep them.
A lot of people that I know don’t like snakes, but I find them interesting. The way they are constructed. The feel of them. The behavior. I have no desire to own them, but I find them interesting.
When I was a kid, I caught garter snakes and rat snakes but didn’t keep them. When I moved to Japan, they had dark green (I think) pit vipers called Mamushi, and on the Navy base, when I walked by the Hospital, they had outward facing clear tanks in them so you could look at what was inside (and they could get sun, I guess) and I would see them coiled up with an occasional white rat.
Heheh, as a kid, never gave a thought about it, and never thought about it for decades.
When it popped into my head again recently, I thought lazily “Ah. A snake thing with those poisonous green snakes in it. Hm? Why was it there?” and a millisecond later (as an adult) realized it had to be for antivenin, but as a kid...”Hey! Lets walk by the snakes and see if they are eating any mice!” Of course, I was raising white rats at the time, and it never came together for me!
The white rats ended up being banished from my house at some point.
I had gotten a wooden whiskey crate from the base liquor store, and put screen over the top and built a cool obstacle course for the rats (about ten of them) inside. Tongue depressors, Elmers glue, and I cut up straws and glued the segments like steps on the sticks. I was awfully proud of myself.
Well, I got up at sunrise one sunny Sunday morning, and everyone in the house was asleep. We lived in a huge apartment that was (by accounts we heard) an old parachute hanger for the Japanese in WWII. The rooms were massive with polished wooden floors, two floors with a flat roof that had an enormous air raid siren on top of that roof. There were probably eight Senior Officers Quarters apartments side by side in that huge white building.
When I got up in my pajamas, the first thing I would do is go check on my awesome mouse fort. When I walked over and looked in, it was...
Empty.
I glanced over and saw one scurry across the floor, so I grabbed it and put it back in the whiskey crate fort. I plugged the hole with cardboard, then saw another one waddling along the baseboard. I caught him too, and put him in with his fellow rat. Then I saw the third one.
It had somehow been in the open window, and someone had shut the window in the night and squished it, deader than a doornail. As I stood there holding it, trying to sort this all out, I heard a female shriek from my parent’s room.
Apparently, one of the mice had ended up in bed with them and crawled across my mother! Boy, was she pissed. Well, that was it for the rats. LOL, I don’t remember if I let them go or what...:)
Then, when we moved to the Philippines, they had ALL kinds of things there, monkeys, monitor lizards, huge rhinoceros beetles, geckos and small lizards who always had stumps for tails, bats, boars, and...snakes.
One morning, while waiting for the school bus, a friend said “Hey, your next door neighbor has a huge snake in the closed in carport!” We all ran over and looked through the clear plastic covering the screens, and there in the corner was indeed a huge black snake, coiled up in a corner and looking for all the world like a large coil of black garden hose!
At that point, a fire engine and vehicle pulled up to the house and shooed us all away and they took away the snake. It was a large King Cobra.
I had two other snake encounters in my life: When I was in the Navy at Cecil Field in Florida, they found an enormous rattlesnake. The picture in the paper showed the guy standing on the back of a pickup holding the head in his hand while the body rested on the ground. I had no idea rattlesnakes got that big!
Then, a few years back, my wife and I went horseback riding in the Shenandoah Mountains near Bedford, VA (home of the national D-Day Museum) These people were awesome. The guy running the place was an honest to goodness horse whisperer, and they were very unconventional in the care of their horses. But he talked to them like people, and they seemed to understand just exactly what he said to them.
Anyway, their horse riding wasn’t the usual fare you get at a lot of places like that, where all you see is the rump of the horse in front of you, everyone walking slow in single file. I had ridden a little bit, and understood how to ride, not let the horse figure out they are the boss, that kind of thing. My wife and I went riding with the owner and his wife one morning, and it was a gorgeous late summer day. There were four young girls (maybe 11 or 12 years old) there for a birthday party ride, so we all went out together. We stopped on the trail at a place he always let the horses drink from a little muddy pond, so we all let the horses walk up without us trying to make them go somewhere, and on their own, all spread out around the hole just a few feet in, put their heads down, and began drinking.
We were all talking, and suddenly I realized none of our horses were moving or drinking. They had all raised their heads and were completely motionless with their eyes all looking at the same spot, and the guy said quietly “Everyone stay quiet. It’s a snake.”
I was looking all around but couldn’t see it. But I saw something that looked like stick poking out of the water about half a foot at an angle.
It was a Copperhead.
The guy said in a low voice “Okay. Everyone pull gently back on the reins and lean back a bit to let the horses back out...which they did. When we had retreated a distance, the guy saw I could ride a little bit, and had my wife go with the little girls and his wife off on their own, and he and I just went everywhere. In my life, I had never had the opportunity to really ride a horse, it was more like walk a horse and be a passenger.
But this guy was running his horse up and down, through the woods, the front of his hat flattened against his forehead, but...I wasn’t that good, so I just...rode my horse here and there on my own as he dashed about. God, how I loved it-it was really riding a horse!
Then, we came to a large meadow at the top of this elevated area, several hundred yards across, with knee length golden grass, and a copse of trees at the far end. The guy said to me “Have you ever galloped a horse?” I said no, and he said “Would you like to try?” I didn’t have to answer due the ear-splitting grin I was wearing, but I said “Yes!” and he took off in a gallop, and my horse ran right behind trying to catch up! I was bouncing up and down in that saddle, really slamming down because I had never done it, but we got to the middle of the field and stopped. Heh, I am grinning right now just thinking of it!
We turned to continue up the gentle rise of that meadow to the trees, and we saw a turkey. It was trotting, but as we approached, it began to really run fast, its whole dark body at about a 45 degree angle! Astonishing! I had never seen a turkey do much more than mill on the side of a road and such, but this thing was moving!
Then, when it was about 50 yards from the tree line, it suddenly spread its wings and took off! I had no idea turkeys could fly! And the wings seemed so...stubby and broad, not wide.
I will say, that was a day of firsts for me!
“As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly”
Well, if I’m gonna get a paper-weight snake, my first choice would be a Gaboon Viper. Not sure I can, legally, but I really don’t need one(or two), either
LOL, I laugh to myself every time I think of that, because it is the first thing that pops into my mind!
A friend has Gaboons.
Very deadly, fat lazy slobs.
Wow, do you ever have a great memory!
No, the runner was Alice, who literally learned how to open locks by using his head and neck as a crescent wrench.
:D
The pic didn't give any indication at all of scale.
Matijuana...OK
Cocaine....OK
Methamphetamine...OK
Heroin...OK
Alligator Snapping Turtle...NO!!!
Gaboon Viper...?
Certainly a better outcome than the hindu “student” in NC who kept 2 mature King Cobras in his apartment— only discovered by the local police on a crime call to the complex unit next door-— somehow they found them using access through the nextdoor apt of the said hindu/foreign student.
King Cobras... imagine if they got out in a “student” apt. complex. Be less rats and less rattlesnakes (snake eats snake).
You should see the hysteria promos for “Giant Killer Burmese Pythons!!!” shows and then they switch to a stock photo of a puny, probably embarrassed Ball Python.
If they gave you honest scale, they couldn’t terrify you.
:)
Even the biggest BP female I ever had, he head was maybe the size of a very small plum.
No hots for Oregon.
:(
None of my are threats to anyone but themselves.
When I finally found Alice the wandering BP, he appeared in the bathroom with a befuddled house mouse in his mouth.
I watched as he put the mouse down on the floor and then tried to kill it by beating it to death with his face.
He was...”special”.
Maybe I could pass it off as an organic intramuscular drug injector.
A little gene splicing and maybe they could come up with one the injects designer drugs.
Not sure who would be in the market for Designer Death.
:D
When you told of Alice escaping it wasn't hard to imagine what that would be like in an old period home. LOL And now I remember who Alice was named after.
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