Todd Stockwell
Chun; You’re right that it’s been mostly private individuals this past year offering “carolina ornates” and “centrata ornates.” The larger dealers I’ve noticed on the net, however, seem to be tending towards using the ambiguous “ornate” for about anything DBT that has extra white or other colors. Rick and I have discussed that it would be desirable if everyone reserved ornate for macrospilota as I think this list has also discussed early on, but that will be hard to do much about other than all of us just doing it in hopes it will catch. By wholesalers are you referring to larger commercial dealers that sometimes offer individual “screamers” on kingsnake or their own web sites? When I think of a wholesaler of anything, I usually assume they are only selling to dealers in quantity at a substantial discount through “private” lists that we (the consumers) never see. Is this true in turtles? Or is just about every turtle dealer and breeder also at least occasionally selling directly to individuals at “market” price? My occasional, random and very limited surfing has only turned up a couple of web sites of what I would call true wholesalers where I could not access their inventory as a private individual – Fluker Farms and California Biological come to mind. My assumption is that the true wholesalers keep a low profile and that I wouldn’t even learn of them unless I went searching hard. Is that correct? My intent is not to quibble with you. Rather I’m just finding it difficult and expensive to try to track down dbt types that I am interested in because dealers and individuals don’t seem to know much about them and have a hard time accurately describing the subspecies and even the colors and patterns. You just don’t know what you’re going to get until you open the box when you buy sight-unseen. And it always seems I’m just a day (or even an hour) too late to buy specimens I’m particularly interested in once I learn of them which I know is just a part of this activity. Still, it’s always so tantalizing to hear about all of the “hidden” dbts out there that dealers seem to always be alluding to that stay in the hands of very tight circles and never reach the “real” open market. I hope that the rumors of more captive dbt breeders are true for the sake of both the dbts and us! Hopefully this list will bring some more cb dbt stock to change hands for breeding projects as we have wished. On a somewhat related note, does anyone on this list have more of a sense of the market for dbts overseas? The larger dealers I have spoken with the past year keep making vague references (that they tend not to want to elaborate on) to a strong overseas market for macrospilota especially. The feeling I get is that the dealers that export will almost always have a foreign buyer willing to pay a higher price than U.S. buyers for macrospilota or even “screamers” of the other subspecies and so few are left over to offer on the U.S. market. Anyone else pick up on this? These totally unsubstantiated rumors are all I really know about it, so I’d be interested in hearing from those of you who have been at this longer and know more about the turtle trade. On the flip side, how about overseas breeders of dbts? Does anyone have a current line of info. on the Japanese or Hong Kong producers that I’ve occasionally heard rumors of? Just curious. Chun, thanks for verifying that we do have postive evidence of the white skinned, black concentic circle specimens showing up both in the north and the Carolinas. Very interesting. Chun-Ming Chew wrote: