Talk:Slowinski's corn snake

Christ this is a mess.

1) So, this page is in conflict with the page for Pantherophis guttatus. Wikipedia as a whole should be consistent: either recognize Pantherophis guttatus as one widespread species, or recognize it as three separate species. Right now, the page for Pantherophis guttatus does the former, while this page does the latter. Worse, on this page these are listed in Elaphe, on the Pantherophis guttatus page they are listed under Pantherophis... and this article talks about rejecting the taxonomic change to Pantherophis without ever introducing who made that change, or when, or why. It's a mangled, inconsistent mess.

2) Why are there separate "bibliography" and "references" sections that apparently overlap in function? This doesn't make sense, and the specific sources cited make no sense. Why cite some blog in which a veterinarian offers a taxonomic opinion... but not the paper in which this species is named? There are lots of taxonomic opinions offered by non-taxonomists online and you could support just about any taxonomic arrangement you like in this fashion, but it just isn't very meaningful; cite the taxonomists. Why cite the 2003 version of Crother et al.'s SSAR list, when it has been superseded--and had -already been- superseded as of the Dec 2010 "accessed" date? Just cite the current version.

3) Further, what's up with the Arkansas fixation? This is a species that was described based on mitochondrial sequence data from specimens in Louisiana and Texas (so the statement that it is "known only from isolated localities in the southeastern part of Arkansas" is flat-out wrong) and Burbrink, who named it, says this: "Thomas (1974) and Smith et al. (1994) claimed that specimens from Arkansas and Missouri appeared similar to specimens in western Louisiana. Tissues were unavailable from these areas and therefore the partition identity of these populations could not be determined." At best, this species is only tangentially related to Arkansas. At worst, it may not occur in that state at all. And yet the article is written as though this were an Arkansas endemic! It's baffling.

Were it up to me, I'd just delete the whole thing. There isn't anything interesting or verifiable here that isn't already presented at the Pantherophis guttatus page and realistically it just isn't salvageable without a complete re-write. Paalexan (talk) 10:03, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Mistaken image

The image currently used in this article is—despite being erroneously labeled as such on the Wikimedia page—neither P. emoryi (of any subspecies) nor even P. guttatus, but rather a juvenile of some other Pantherophis sp. of what is sometimes referred to as subgenus "Scotophis" (colloquially a "black ratsnake").

This is clear from the form of the two brown streaks that trace in diverging directions from the frontal onto the parietals (which are in P. emoryi more robust, linear, edged by clearly distinct black coloration, and often divergent from a singular angular origin as opposed to two separate ones on this snake), the grayish cast of the top of the head (the background hue not changing substantially from the head to the dorsum in P. emoryi), the high nonconvexity of the dorsal blotches, and the elongatedness/ill-formedness of the lateral blotches.

I have attempted to remove the image but it was restored. Help? Rafayaashary01 (talk) 05:35, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

(Assuming the reported locaton of Oberlin, LA is correct, then it is specifically P. obsoletus.) Rafayaashary01 (talk) 05:37, 4 March 2024 (UTC)