RSS Feed
Long Beach by RossAZ480, on Flickr
On January 15th 2006, I decided to enter for the first time. It was really dry this time of year, nothing was green, but it had rained the night before. I found several boards laid out and some piles that looked to have been made by a bulldozer with other pieces of plywood in it. I spread a bunch of those out. It wasn't until I lifted a couple of small pieces of bark out of desperation, that I had found what I was looking for. A baby hypermelanistic Cal king! I knew exactly what it was and was really excited about finding it. Here's some shots taken from the field right after I found the king.
Here he was as a young adult.
Notice how the belly gets darker near the tail? This is only seen in some hypermelanistic kings from Long Beach.
Couple of months later I found this juvenile female.
She lightened up as she grew.
A more recent shot. She has now become darker inside her yellow bands.
This May the male was placed in with the female and copulation took place shortly after. These were only introduced once.
Gravid.
She laid 9 good eggs 40 days after I bred her.
Eggs were laid 6/17 and started piping on 8/23.
Here's what the clutch looked like. There's about 6 out of the 9 here.
Interestingly, there were two females that were just a bit lighter shade of brown than the rest. I suspect they will brown out like the female did.
I also bred my male to this female my friend found in the same field.
For some reason they were only hooked up an hour. I wasn't completely sure copulation took place, so I reintroduced them again the next day. This time they remained locked for several hours.
She was gravid 32 days and laid 5 good eggs.
All 5 hatched, but since they were all pretty much identical to the other LB kings, I didn't take any clutch pictures. However, I did photograph the darkest male out of the clutch.
Out of the 14 babies I got, none of them had the darker than normal belly pattern seen in my adult male. That's how it goes with LB Grease kings and other LB hypermelanistic kings found outside LB. I wouldn't say its rare, but its not common. Also, there are many LB hypermelanistic kings darker than mine inside the light rings. I've produced some that are a lot darker than the parents. This LB hypermelanistic morph is variable with the amount of hypermelanism it displays and it seems most of the time its the males that can be really dark.
