This line genrally drops Purple Solid Snakeskins but it will drop a few Blue Solid Snakeskins as well. This line can be quickly turned into producing mostly Blue Solid Snakeskins by crossing them to Blue females. Dont let the pictures fool you into thinking the Purple color is poor. The pictures dont do justice to the true Purple caudal color of the fish. The pictures showing up as a grey/black with a hue of Purple. That is not the case in person as they are atleast 90% of the caudal shows solid purple. This line does produce males that are 100% solid Purples but most have some amount of grey coloring.but not in the ratio show in the pictures. The black/grey coloring fades as they age to show more purple coloring.
This strain took me two years to develop starting in early 2004. This was done through a number of crosses. This strain gets very large and has a 90-95% body pattern when they mature. Snakeskin poatern is very hard to photograph so dont judge the pattern by the pictures. One thing that really makes these Solid Snakeskins so nice is that most of their stomach area will have the snakeskin pattern when they mature. This line does not have the peduncle full of a blue or purple color and it is full of snakeskin pattern unlike other solid snakeskin’s you see on the show bench today.
These fish are now discontinued and we no longer have any in our fishroom. The Variegated Snakeskin color strain is my favorite. I worked with this strain for 7+ years. My original Variegated Snakeskins came from James Heller (not to be confused with Jeff Hiller), Bill Orth and a few other outside sources. I made many crosses with those lines to create my own winning lines.The ones I had were more of a green lace than the yellow lace that they show up as in the photo. They are very slow growing with medium to large bodies. My lines also throws albino yellow lace snakeskins once every 3 to 4 generations or any time you make a cross. My line did very well for me over the years. I have the most points in the history of the IFGA in the Variegated Snakeskin and Snakeskin veil class. I no longer breed this strain, but I am sure in the future when I have more tank space it will find it's way into my fish room.
These fish are now discontinued and we no longer have any in our fishroom. However, we will still give you some history on them just in case you get lucky enough to run across them in the future. We did a number of crosses to get these to IFGA show quality although we found this strain very hard to keep at show quality. This was not our primary line we use for showing, but it is a line we have shown in the past. We feel that it may be related to the old yellow cobra lines that were common from the late 60's to the 80's. The main difference between what they where then and what they are today is that they no longer have the Zebrinous bars, which gave the word cobra to name. They now have a Rosetta pattern, which is a nice feature. All snakeskin breeders admire this pattern. I hope that the lucky few people who were able to get them can keep them going so others can enjoy their beauty.
