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Scale count for cornsnakes...?

The funny thing is that I found this thread while I was doing a search to determine if my snakes are too big/old to pop (they are all 04s ranging from approximately 16" to 20") and the procedure. I had Petunia out last night and the look of her tail just bugged me and I thought I'd like to be more certain what gender she is. 2 of my snakes had just shed yesterday, and I had old sheds for the other 2 - minus one tail - and I thought I might as well try it. I didn't think I'd get such conflicting results for the counts, though it seems to me the body count minus the tail count might be more accurate as it takes into account that some snakes may just have more or less scales and then you have a proportionate number. I can't guarantee that my counts are completely accurate tho I did do each one 2X. It is VERY tedious, but you know . . . curiousity killed the cat! LOL I did post pics of their tails in the photo section, if anyone wants to mosey on down there and take a guess. They're not great pics, but you get the general idea. And I did not attempt to pop them - yet - do you think they are too big? I just don't want to hurt them.
 
Hurley said:
Heh, "Connie's method" is not Connie's method. ;) There were over 5 methods described in the newsletter including the two scale methods mentioned. Actually, Connie's method is probing or popping. :p
Click to expand...
Sorry! I was just going by mbdorfer's post.

I too prefer popping for accuracy as well, but before I was confident enough to pop them on my own, I used the scale counting method. Now I just do it for the fun of it... to see if it holds true over MANY snakes, or if I've just been lucky with the few I've sexed this way.
 
The probing results!

So I had my snakes probed today, here are the results:

The ghost that I bought as a male, and the scale count indicated female is . . . FEMALE.

The ghost that I bought as female but I did not have a shed to do a scale count from is . . . FEMALE.

The normal that I bought as a male, and the scale count indicated female . . . FEMALE.

And the crimson that I bought as a female, and reallly had me wondering in the 1st place, and the scale count indicated female . . . INCONCLUSIVE . . . but probably female (they guy said the probe went in a little deep for a girl but definately not deep enough for a male, so he didn't want to say for sure but most likely female).

So there you all have it . . . It's no wonder I was confused about the gender of my snakes, 2 were mis-sexed. Now, I know probing is not 100% but the guy who did it used to breed corns himself and he said that he was rarely wrong on probing. In fact, he thought he was going to be able to tell just by looking . . . LOL . . . even tho I told him these were really hard to tell . . . he ended up probing them. And unless this guy IS wrong, the scale count if the body minus the scale count for the tail was correct for all 3 snakes that I tried it on.
 
Yeah, that IS a problem, but only a small one . . . it gives me an excuse to buy more snakes!!!! LOL

Except then I won't be able to breed any until 07. I'm not too happy about that.
 
IMO with scale counting it would make more sense to divide rather than subtract. They have varying numbers of belly scutes, and varying numbers of caudal scales. If an increased number of caudal scales is proportional to the increased number of belly scutes, this could throw off a method that uses subtraction.

That is, if (assuming) there are generally twice as many body scales as caudal scales, then if the snake has 10 belly scales, it would only have about 5 caudal and the difference would be 5. If it had 500, then the difference would be 250. Obviously these are exaggerated results, but it's intended to show that the "answer" can be skewed as a function of the snake's overall length. (Longer snakes would falsely look like females because of higher numbers in the answer.)

Whether or not this is even enough to make a difference in accuracy is a whole new question, but it seems like there are some "borderline" results and it might be worth seeing if division would yield more accurate results than subtraction. :)

Refiguring Amanda's results, obviously there is the same pattern between males and females.
Code: 
Caudal	Diff	Body	Proportion	Sex
81	149	230	2.84		M
82	130	212	2.59		M
74	154	228	3.08		M

64	161	225	3.52		F
66	165	231	3.50		F
70	163	233	3.33		F
71	162	233	3.28		F
In this case, females are over three, males are at or less than three.
 
Hmm... the other thing that seems to emerge from the above (again, keep in mind that it's a very small data set) is that the body count barely changes and doesn't seem to have any significant correlation to gender. However, the differences in caudal counts seem to be much more radical between genders.

Notice the one oddball (male with 212 body scales) still has a very "totally male" caudal count. If the body count were related to the caudal count, you'd think he'd have in the range of 70-75 caudals.

At first glance, and only based on the above limited data, what this suggests is that counting the body scales is unproductive. ;)

Also, out of curiosity, what morph is the "212 scale" male?
 
Serpwidgets said:
Also, out of curiosity, what morph is the "212 scale" male?
Click to expand...

He's a Snow that is hopefully also Homozygous Hypo (he looks like a Coral Snow). I bought him as a regular Snow, but subsequent info from the breeder tells me that he should be Homozygous Hypo. I'll prove him out this season, as I mated him to a Ghost.
 
Well . . .

Thanks for putting up that info on setting up proportions. Very interesting!!!

Counting scales on a shed is a tedious chore, and there are more reliable sexing methods. But I did have some serious doubts about whether 1 of my snakes was sexed correctly and thought I'd try that. My thought was if the scale count method backed up what sexes my snakes were supposed to be I'd call it good, if it didn't I'd persue other methods. For me, counting the tail scales alone out of 3 snakes I got 2 inconclusive and one incorrect. For counting both body and tail scales and subtracting the tail scales I got 3 correct answers.

For me, the most beneficial part is that it alerted me to the fact that I needed to look into this further - I was just about to buy an adult female to breed my normal female to cause I thought she was male. That would have sucked, to put it bluntly. :eek1: Although I know I wouldn't have been the first person to have that happen, it would have been a huge disappointment to me.

I'm going to get some probes so that I can address future sexing questions myself. LOL I just don't see myself sitting around counting scales on sheds anymore! But I have to confess that this method did come in handy in this particular situation.
 
peep_827 said:
Counting scales on a shed is a tedious chore, and there are more reliable sexing methods. But I did have some serious doubts about whether 1 of my snakes was sexed correctly and thought I'd try that. My thought was if the scale count method backed up what sexes my snakes were supposed to be I'd call it good, if it didn't I'd persue other methods. For me, counting the tail scales alone out of 3 snakes I got 2 inconclusive and one incorrect. For counting both body and tail scales and subtracting the tail scales I got 3 correct answers.
Click to expand...
LOL, yeah, I've counted scales a few times before. I just used a sharpie and dotted every 5th scale and BIG dot on every 10th. ;)

I'm curious now what your numbers were. Amanda's sample is a small one, and it would be interesting to see if there might be an overall trend in belly scale counts of males versus females. :) (Great, that's what I need is to count scales on all of mine, LOL. :crazy02: )
 
Lol

Yeah, Serp, THAT's just what you need to get started on. I'm sure, like me, you have NOTHING better to do! :rofl:

I thought about using a marker, but my son is saving my snake's sheds and I didn't think he'd be too thrilled with me if I marked them up. I know there will be many, many more . . . but it seems important to him.

I did 3 of my snakes, here are the numbers:

1 ghost: body 244 - tail 66 = 178 = FEMALE, probe confirmed (bought as a male)

1 crimson: body 230 - tail 66 = 164 = FEMALE, probe inconclusive but probably female

1 normal: body 232 - tail 70 = 162 = FEMALE, probe confirmed (bought as a male)

You can figure the proportions if you want to. Personally, I think there may be something to it, but I found counting the tail scales alone to be inaccurate.
 
the size of the snake makes no difference to the amount of scales they have, they just get bigger with the snake, making it easier to count them.
 
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