Laredo line female with split pink saddles.

This project will keep established a pure, unadulterated lineage of animals descended directly from the Laredo confiscation. Animals in this lineage show all the variation present in leonis and add a different color palette. Some of my Laredo snakes even have pink rather than red or orange saddles. Animals in this project will only come from verifiable Laredo ancestors. Currently working with  3.4 pure animals in this line.

Leonis female in the "alterna" project looking very similar to a Blair's phase alterna.

Back in the 1980s, a line of wild-caught and captive leonis existed that exhibited gray backgrounds and black bands or orange saddles just like alterna. Some even had alternates. Sadly, that phenotype was lost over time. This project's purpose is to resurrect it. We have several animals that show degrees of this phenotype and we aim to refine it. All these animals are pure leonis from trusted reputable sources. While hybrids can be beautiful, we are very careful to avoid them here.

Melanistic male leonis. Our animals are usually solid black. On some, the underlying pattern can be seen in the right lighting conditions. None has any white anywhere, as Mexican black kings sometimes can.

We have melanistic and heterozygous for melanistic animals from at least 4 different bloodlines. We aim to produce at least a few clutches per year that will contain some melanistic animals. These are like a smaller, more docile version of a Mexican black kingsnake (nigrita). They are strikingly iridescent and gorgeous. Many start out with a faint pattern or "smokiness" before the jet black color solidifies.

Typical milksnake phase (MSP) leonis. The background color on these ranges from gray to buckskin to yellow and ivory.

This project's goal is to maintain the milksnake phenotype of leonis. This phase is just as beautiful as the leonis and melanistic animals, but for some reason is less popular. I'd put milksnake phase leonis up against any other tricolor and I think they come out on top. I don't understand why they are not just as sought-after as the other phases. We want to maintain a quality group of milksnake phase animals to protect them from going the way of "alterna" leonis.

Female leonis phase on the orange end of the color spectrum. This animal had siblings that were both leonis phase and milksnake phase.

This project simply aims to maintain the diversity of phenotypes that makes leonis the "box of chocolates" kingsnake. We want to keep this line unpredictable and containing all the variation of the leonis species, so this line uses leonis from the other projects as outcrosses as well as just high-quality animals that don't fit in other projects. This line throws leonis phases, MSPs, melanistics, and shows the full range of potential in leonis.

Female amelanistic pyro heterozygous for the Applegate special gene.

My only non-leonis projects. This species is Lampropeltis pyromelana. We've started with European animals imported from Kyle Greenhalgh in the UK and zebra line animals from Bob Vonnegut. We have alleles for normal, amelanistic, Applegate special, and zebra in our collection. There have been less than 10 AppleMels produced so far, so it's a goal to produce one of them. We also want to combine the zebra line's high band count with the Applegate allele and see what happens. When the price comes down, Sentz hypo-e is another gene I'd like to add into our collection.