These six points interested me, but come up rarely in discussion. Can anybody help?

[libby]

Just wondering what the current thought is on the following speculations:

1) Snows have trouble gaining weight. (My 3yo Mack certainly does, has even been wormed by vet, is otherwise healthy.)

2) Snows don't follow temperature guidelines for sex. (Could this result in more hot/cool hatchlings than usual, and is it likely not to be apparent prior to selling weight?)

3) Patterns can change over time, in adulthood. (My 4yo hypo female has recently developed a strong yellow band toward the base of her tail, which is interesting because I am told she was wrongly sold to her previous owner as a carrot tail.)

4) Male geckos are rarely ever infertile.

5) "Cool" males. Are they thought to have noticeable behavioural differences? Presumably if #4 is correct, they're not thought to be sterile like their "hot" female counterparts. (The Mack Snow male I mentioned before has a noticeably different "personality" than any other males I have seen. I own four males. He was sold to me as a proven breeder w/ the hypo female.)

6) Snows may be a subspecies rather than a morph. Any truth to this?

I apologise if any of these queries are really stupid; they seem to be things that come up rarely in discussion and without any elaboration. Particularly, the phenomenon of "cool males", I can't find any information on. I've been keeping geckos for about a year (but researching for longer) and I currently have eight, so at this point I'm growing more confident calling out abnormalities such as the Mack male's flamboyant behaviour. Thanks in advance for addressing any of the above!

 

[Kmay571]

My snows have never had problems gaining weight. And my snow hatchlings are gaining weight just as well as my normal hatchlings.

I have bought a tsm and tsf snow pair who both wound up as their respective sexes. I have some snow hatchlings as tsm, but I will see if they end up as males.

As for patterns changing, I haven't noticed anything other than my bold jungle getting "bolder" black markings. This is completely disregarding juvenile pattern changes.

Infertility in males would be hard to prove without doing tests on the male. There are many factors that can effect whether or not an egg gets fertilized.

I have no experience with cool males.

I believe there are subspecies that look like snows, but I have never heard that snows might be a subspecies. I'm interested in that.


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[libby]

I believe there are subspecies that look like snows, but I have never heard that snows might be a subspecies. I'm interested in that.

Hi, thanks for your response. These are recurring things in some very old threads, so I did wonder if thought has changed. I don't see how Snows can themselves be a subspecies, but a couple of people did mention that. Agree with you that male infertility is hard to prove due to myriad variables. Very interested in accounts that Snows are successfully temp sexed and do gain weight normally, as it does seem like a few people (self included) had anomalous geckos rather than it being fact that they have these differences. Good to know about adult changes in banding thickness; my hypo's tail stripe development would come under that moreso than anything drastic.

I do reckon my boy is a cool male, though. If the limited weight gain (not diagnosed as having a cause), feminine mannerisms and massive changeability (think jumpy one minute, clingy the next, occasionally an aggressive and clueless breeder - he bit my female deep on the head once) are not otherwise explained by the morph having abnormalities compared to the average gecko, I'm going to have to assume cool males are generally fertile, rarely noticed and never studied. Indeed, there's barely any discussion anywhere that I can find. May be worth noting he's a very white Mack Snow w/ very faint yellow cast, sold to me as such, and at the time I didn't realise how unusual white Macks have become. Can barely find pics of others, so even more confused.

ETA: recent pics of him, as little filter as possible. He has a very pretty face, weighs about 64g, and quite a slim tail.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BDbVIMFppnO/?taken-by=veryskeksi

https://www.instagram.com/p/BDp1rxEpphb/?taken-by=veryskeksi

https://www.instagram.com/p/BDeBJD2Jpho/?taken-by=veryskeksi

 

[Neon Aurora]

The Wiki does mention that snows tend not to follow the same rules for temperature sexing. Mack Snow - Leopard Gecko Wiki I'm not sure why that would be and is very interesting on a biological scale. I also don't work with snows, so I can't attribute anything in that regard.

I've never had a cool male and don't know if yours is one, but if indeed snows don't follow normal laws in regards to temperature sexing (which I wasn't aware of and really know nothing about other than what the wiki says), than I'm not sure that "cool male" is an applicable term for a snow. That's what makes sense to me, anyways. =P

I don't really see how a mack snow would be a subspecies. The term "subspecies" is honestly pretty ambiguous anyways, and I'm not confident that it could be applied to animals bred in captivity. It appears to me that the first mack snow was a random mutation from a pairing of two Eublepharis macularius.

I used to have a snow and he never had trouble gaining weight. The rest I can't say much about because I'm not experienced with snows. =P

 

[acpart]

Here's my take on your questions. My responses are based on 11 years of breeding leopard geckos:
1. Mack snows and weight gain: I have a number of geckos who have gained weight very slowly. Some are Mack snows and some aren't. I haven't found any greater tendency with the snows. I have a supersnow male that's 10 years old. He virtually doesn't eat between about Jan. and April. He currently weights 80 grams.

2. Snows and temp sexing: I incubate at about 82 and generally get all females. About 1-2 geckos a season turns out to be male. Some are snows and some aren't. This seemed to be a big issue when snows were first developed, but as far as I know, it no longer seems to be the case.

3. Patterns changing over time: I have seen females get to be less colorful after breeding, hypo stripe geckos develop more spots and blizzards constantly changing from bronze to ivory. That's about it.

4. Male geckos and infertility: as has already been said, hard to tell.

5. Cool males: no idea. However, I've had hatchling clutch mates display very different temperaments, weights and eating patterns.

6. Snows as subspecies: this one is kind of interesting. There are some subspecies (actually I think they're classified now as different species) that look pretty snow-like, particularly Euplepharis angramainyu which are larger and slower to mature than leopard geckos (Eublepharis-Pure Species - GeckoBoa Reptiles). I wonder whether snows are leopard geckos that have this species crossed into them. No real idea, just speculating.

Aliza

 

[Alceste]

1) I will sort of agree with the statement but only in the case of Super Snows. You might see on geckoboa's website he notes that supers tend to be "slow growers" and this has been my experience as well.

2) I have seen snows behave similarly to non snow leos in regards to temp sexing.

3) It has been my experience that snows develop way more spotting with age.

4) Never seen an infertile male, only really lazy ones

5) I wasn't successful in quickly finding the source but I'll keep looking, I think I remember reading that the concept of "hot" females came from a Dr. Vosjoli who coauthored a bunch of leopard gecko books with Ron Tremper in the 90's. Long story short, it was later proven with a correct statistical sampling that females produced at higher incubation temperatures were just as fertile and shared the same range of behavioral characteristics as females produced at "normal" female incubation temperatures. The hot females thing is to my understanding a myth and I have never heard of cold males.

6) I don't think snow is a subspecies. For a while a lot of facio lines looked snowy, but there are also montanus lines that look the same. And now, with angramainyu coming on you see very light colored examples of that species as well.

 

[Alceste]

I didn't find the article I had in mind but I did find this: http://aerg.canberra.edu.au/library/sex_general/1993_Viets_etal_TSD_Eublepharis.pdf

In the abstract at the very begining:
"Although a previous study indicated that females from a warm incubationtemperature (32°C) failed to lay eggs, we found that 12 of 14 mature females incubated at 32.5"C, and 5 of6 mature females incubated at 34°C produced fertile eggs and viable hatchlings."

32.5 C is 90.5 F and 34 C is 93 F

 

[Kristi23]

Some geckos are just slower to gain weight. Right now I have a couple and they're not snows. When super snows were first released, there were some issues with them being smaller and growing slower. But I tend to see geckos that are bigger having babies that are bigger. Not outcrossing enough is where you usually get the weaker babies.

I don't have problems with temp sexing snows. They have been the same for me as other morphs. I know some people say they have issues, but I personally haven't seen it here.

A lot of geckos will change pattern and color with age, breeding, and even illness and cold. Some get darker, some get lighter, some hypo out, some get more spots. I've seen someone here years ago that had a mack enigma that was pretty hypo get super spotty all over after she was bred. Many of my geckos get a bit dull when ovulating. I know that sometimes a weird spot will show up that wasn't there before. I have one male whose spots got more orange when he was probably 3 or 4 years old. Now his color is more dull and brown when he used to be more yellow. I just think a lot of things happen and you'll see even little changes from time to time.

I don't really think snows are subspecies. But a lot of people think that our current eublepharis macularius are a sort of mutt mixture of eublepharis anyways. It's hard to say what's really in them without genetic testing.

 

[acpart]

I didn't mean to say that snows were a subspecies. I was just wondering if it were possible that they showed up in the hobby because some other subspecies was crossed into the captive population and eventually geckos started showing up that displayed the subspecies traits.

Aliza