Charcoal Corn Snake
This particular cultivar originated from a single female that Bill & Kathy Love came up with. I believe it was purchased from a pet shop, and is believed to be a wild caught animal that came from Pine Island, which is off of the gulf coast of southwest Florida near Ft. Myers. The original animal was different enough looking to cause Bill & Kathy to suspect that it may be something different from the Anerythtistics that were becoming commonly found in area nearby, but the only sure way to find out for sure was by breeding it with a known genetic type and observe the resulting offspring. As such, they chose to breed it to a snow male, since if this animal was indeed Anerythrism, all of the offspring should have been Anerythristic. Results proved otherwise. I don't remember the exact numbers involved, but the majority of the offspring were normal colored and a few of them were Anerythristics, thereby providing strong evidence that this animal was not only a new genetic type, but also carrying the gene for Anerythrism as well.
In the past this line has been called the Pine Island anerythristic, the type 'B' anerythristic, and the 'muted' anerythristic. Personally, none of the names did it justice, so when I heard someone from Canada tell me that he referred to it as the Charcoal Corn, it struck a resonant chord with me. Because that's just what this cultivar looks like. A long thin piece of smudged charcoal.
The coloration of this cultivar consists of very low contrast shades of grays with flecks of black and white throughout the body. The top of the head can often have a rather bluish caste to it and the eyes appear very dark, nearly jet black. It is often only by having one of these side by side with a type 'A' Anerythristic that you can see the minor details that tell them apart. And in many instances it may just be a judgement call to be able to tell if both genes are floating around in the gene pool that the animal you are trying to identify came from. Charcoals will never win any awards for beauty or be on the cover of 'Gorgeous Corn Snakes I Have Known' magazine, but they are attractive in a very subtle way.
There is a bit of a puzzle attached to this cultivar in that the yellow coloration is not entirely absent in all individuals, but not nearly so prevalent as it is in the type A anerythristic. At one time, a simple rule of thumb used to be that the Charcoals lacked yellow and the type 'A' anerythristics did not. This has proven to be a comparatively simplistic dividing line and one that has not held up to the test of time. I guess this shouldn't be at all surprising, considering the variations seen in the Blizzard corn and later, the Charcoal Ghost. It now appears that strong evidence exists that the yellow coloration (xanthism) may be a separate genetic trait in the corn snakes and we have been more easily able to view the results of this gene after we have subtracted some of the more distracting reds and oranges that corns come naturally with. Of course, perhaps a strong case could be made that the xanthism is normal in the corn and what we are actually seeing is genetic axanthism that removes the yellow coloration. I have a suspicion that perhaps the Miami Phase corns may be a locality specific population of axanthic corn snakes, but this is an avenue I haven't explored fully.
Most of the ones I produce will be heterozygous for the traits that produce the Blizzard whereas others will be possible carriers for hypomelanism. One of the more interesting and surprising projects to come from this line is the Charcoal Ghost line I've been working on. There are also some rather unusual Charcoal individuals popping out of a project I did to breed the Blizzard line with the Lavender line. I have a single individual that is two years old that appears to be dropping pigment leaving some white splotches on the head and body. It's far too early to tell much about this, and only having a single individual says nothing at all about what the future may hold in trying to develop this phenomenon. But to think that animals you produce might not show interesting traits until two years after hatching is enough to make you take up drinking heavily.
