Unearth a surprising science of color and pattern in the California king snake, and learn how genes shape what you see.
This edition offers a clear overview of pattern dimorphism, inheritance, and how observations from field work and captive broods illuminate the story.
- Learn how striped and ringed patterns differ and how they appear across regions.
- Discover what the data suggests about inheritance and the mother’s influence on offspring.
- See how researchers compare normal and aberrant specimens, and what that means for population patterns.
- Understand the methods scientists use to analyze sex ratios, scale counts, and incubation data in a long-running study.
Ideal for readers of natural history, herpetology, and anyone curious about how scientists study variation in wild populations.