“If these are dotted house snakes, then where the hell are the dots”? The question came in an almost angry email from a fellow lover of the African House Snake. I did not get angry and in fact I understood his indignation. Only a few years ago I had responded almost the same way when Mike of North East Exotics (who’s site seems to be down so I can’t link to it) from Canada contacted me about this very subject. I had posted an article on the old house snake blog about breeding issues between L. capensis (the cape house snake) and L. fuliginosus (the common brown house snake) and posted a picture of one of my male reds and he contacted me to say it was actually a L. maculatus or “dotted house snake”.

This seemed almost like sacreligious! I mean everyone knew these snakes were Fuliginosus, heck there was still a ton of debate that Capensis was a separate species. The reality as I have learned is the vast majority of house snakes that have been imported in the past few years and sold as L. fuliginosus are actually L. maculatus. I am about to lay out a case for you on this species issue and I think when I am done it will be pretty clear that indeed there are “dots” on these snakes and they are certainly very different in many ways from the common Fuliginosus.

Let’s start out with something everyone can agree on right now, a picture of a Lamprophis fuliginosus, here is a nice head shot. Now I don’t know anyone that would object to calling this animal a L. fuliginosus. There are a few traits to note with this snake. First note the very thin eye lines that are common to the brown house snake. The eyes of course have the typical vertical pupil that makes house snakes so cool and that beautiful sheen is visible on the head.

Additionally look at the lack of any real markings around the nose, the stripes in front of the eye just sort of fade to nothing. If we were to look at a full body shot we would find that this snake is also void of any real body pattern, just a nice shade of brown. Of course this species comes in colors from greenish, to red, to black and other shades. Again there is nothing revolutionary here in calling this snake a L. fuliginosus is there? So now that we are all in agreement that the above snake is a L. fuliginosus I think the rest of this article will be a real awakening for some. Honeslty now that you have seen a Fuliginosus does this snake look anything like it?

 

Indeed when you look at these two species side-by-side it is almost impossible to make a case for them being the same species. On maculatus look at the head and note the very prominent eye lines which continue all the way to the snout. Unlike L. capensis you will notice that the eye lines also continue past the neck and are adjoined to the body pattern, where as L. capensis typically have a break between the eye line and the body pattern. If you look at the body pattern you begin to see where the original taxonomists came up with the term “dotted” and you can see that young Maculatus are often very highly patterned. As they age this pattern typically fades a great deal and it is easier to confuse them with Fuliginosus. Yet even adults have the very different head pattern and you can just about always see the body pattern if you examine these animals in good lighting.

Recently I came across the following map that is from an article written by Barry Hughes and is reported to be the actual work that elevated L. capensis to a full species. Unfortunately I only have pictures of the pages. While the article focused heavily on the differences between capensis and fuliginosus I found this map quite interesting. My understanding is that Barry compiled this map while traveling in Africa and researching house snakes. There many instances of L. maculatus on this map so we know they are common through out much of Africa.

 

 

The other thing to note is that the largest concentration of maculatus come from the Somalian Horn. As it turns out many of the snakes imported from Tanzania are actually harvested in Somalia. To me it is clear we have a third species that is commonly brought into the U.S. and is probably causing hybridization and some fertility issues.  This picture was taken by Don Shultz at Mfezi.com and you can read the entire article at this thread on his forum.

As for the “dots” perhaps this picture will help with that issue. When we hear “dotted” we tend to think of an obvious spotting pattern. Yet there are clearly some dot like patterns in L. maculatus.  As you can see the body pattern has some clear circular component to it and as they repeat down the body you get a subtle “dotted” effect.

To me the fact that we have three species that are commonly called simply L. fuliginosus has answered a lot of questions, explained a lot of breeding and sterility issues and frankly explained why every picture of a L. fuliginosus in any book I have ever read looked nothing like the snakes I started working with almost 5 years ago.

~ Jack Spirko

Popularity: 74% [?]

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under House Snakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.