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Absolutely untrue. Crotalids and colubrids are so far apart cladistically that you might as well try to mate a chicken and a parrot. Can't do it, and if you somehow managed the trick artificially, the absolute best you'd ever get would be deformed offspring that would never come to term, let alone survive. The gene pairs don't pair because they don't match up; they're too different. This is urban legend bull-doody, and anyone who believes it knows no science.
Hobbyists have been working on hybridized snakes for many years, with some success *within closely related genera only*. Even begin to try breeding snakes that are not *very* closely related, and you get nothing. Actually you get dead snakes if you're silly enough to try. Sometimes you get some seriously messed-up offspring that live long enough to make you go "OMGWTF was that" before they drop dead. You can't even cross a rattlesnake with a copperhead (trust me, it's been tried repeatedly) and get live offspring, not that stay alive anyhow. And those are fairly close critters, taxonomically speaking. Go outside the family Viperidae and you won't just fail to get live offspring, you'll fail to fertilize any ova at all.
I own a cottonmouth X copperhead hybrid and an Eastern massassauga X Western diamondback hybrid, and they're amazing animals, rare and valuable and sought after specimens. They aren't that easy to produce, so they tend to go for big bucks when people do produce them.
Agkistrodon piscovorus X
Agkistrodon contortrix is a same genus different species hybrid, and the S
istrurus catenatus X
Crotalus atrox comprise two genera that are so closely related that many taxonomists argue that
Sistrurus effectively *is*
Crotalus, eg, there is actually only a single rattlesnake genus. The take-home lesson here is that these particular snake breeds are not that far apart, but producing live hybrid offspring out of them is still bloody difficult, something of a Holy Grail for collectors. These guys are not cheap when they can be had at all, and it's rare they can be had.
As much as I (and many other collectors with bigger wallets than me) would like to own an even more exotic hybrid, say a
Crotalus X
Agkistrodon, *no breeder can produce them regardless of the economic incentive*. Anyone who tried and succeeded would be rich, so it's been tried many times many ways. Can't be done. Don't I wish, but no, not happening.
And breeding a viper to a colubrid? A rattlesnake to a rat snake? Good luck with that, now go try to mate your goat with your chicken and see what comes of it. It might be lovely to get a bird with four drumsticks, but I can't imagine any farmer being silly enough to try it, because
it doesn't work. You'd laugh at someone who did think it would work, which is why I am looking cross-eyed at this statement that rat snakes and rattlesnakes breed. Don't and can't. Please don't spread this kind of nonsense; it's silly.
Also, when I encounter a
Pantherophis (nee
Elaphe; taxonomists had at the genus recently and changed things around for the American rat snakes) in the wild, I lift the thing gently up in both hands and wear it as a necklace while I figure out somewhere better to put it. They're very gentle; children keep them as pets, and fairly often that's where one of my nuisance rat snake removals will end up. As a child's pet. It takes me about five minutes to gentle one. I recognize that they can't be left around chicken coops (they're called chicken snakes for a reason), but there are good homes for fine specimens where they are wanted and will be appreciated most sincerely. For that matter there's a market for the venomous ones also where they will do some good for human medical research. If you know anyone who has diabetes, breast cancer or heart surgery, you have reptile venoms to thank for the drugs commonly used to speed their recovery. Copperhead venom in particular is one of the best hopes for a breast cancer patient; the drug contortrostatin (from
Agkistrodon contortrix, our common copperhead) is responsible. Don't waste them if you can help it, please.
Step by step tutorials on humane snake removal and containment can be found on my website,
http://www.snakegetters.com
Though I'm a lover of ball pythons - but boa constrictors are just as great -
