Nature's Own Morphs: The Bell's Phase Lace Monitor

Let's clear something up, because it comes up all the time. A lot of people hear the word "morph" and picture something unnatural — like a breeder did something to the animal, or it got injected with something, or somebody engineered it. And honestly, we understand where the worry comes from. But that's just not what a morph is. A morph is genetics. That's the whole thing. It's the same beautiful bit of nature that gives one person red hair, another person green eyes, another a different skin tone. Nobody made those. They're just some of the wonderful ways a living thing can turn out.

And here's what a lot of folks don't realize: so many of the morphs people fall in love with came straight out of the wild. Leucism shows up in the wild. Piebald shows up in the wild. Calico, golden child — wild. The original albino and pied ball pythons that the whole hobby is built on today trace right back to animals that came out of the wild already carrying those genes. Breeders didn't invent any of that. Nature wrote it first. All a breeder ever really does is notice a gene that's already there and carefully work with it.

So when you see a stunning morph, the honest thing to feel isn't suspicion — it's a little bit of awe. That's just nature showing you the range of what it can do. And one of the most beautiful examples of it out there is the Bell's phase lace monitor.

The lace monitor, Varanus varius — people call it the "tree goanna" — is a giant out of eastern Australia. Second-biggest lizard on the continent after the perentie, pushing two metres and thirty-odd pounds. Most of them wear that dark, lacy speckling the species is named for. But in some populations, a totally different-looking animal shows up: a yellow to yellow-brown base, fine black flecking, and big bold black bands running from the shoulders all the way down the tail, with a black cap over the head. Same species, completely different look. That's the Bell's phase, and it's a knockout.

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Same species, side by side — the normal lacy phase and the banded Bell's phase, both out of the same wild populations.

What we love about this one is its history. When Europeans first ran into the banded ones, back in 1836, two French zoologists — Duméril and Bibron — figured they were looking at a whole separate species and named it Varanus bellii, after an English zoologist named Thomas Bell. It took a while before anyone realized it wasn't a different species at all. It was just a color phase of the lace monitor, living right alongside the normal-looking ones. Think about how striking a natural variation has to be for trained naturalists to look at it and say, that's got to be its own animal. Nature just does that.

The genetics are lovely and pretty simple, too. A lot of morphs are recessive — hidden, only showing up when two carriers happen to line up. Bell's isn't shy about it. It acts dominant, or codominant, which basically means the animal wears the gene right out in the open and passes it along. Breed a Bell's to a normal and you can get banded babies straight away. And when an animal carries two copies of it, you get what keepers call a "Super Bell's" — usually the cleanest, boldest banding of all. The one thing you can't do is make a Bell's out of two normals. The gene has to already be there — because it came from the wild, and it always has.

It's even got a home. Bell's shows up mostly west of the Great Dividing Range, through the dry semi-arid country of northern New South Wales and Queensland — down from around Woodgate, Eidsvold and Mitchell in Queensland to Bourke, Macksville and Port Macquarie in New South Wales, with a few records reaching into Victoria and South Australia. A morph with its own patch of country. You can point to it on a map.

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It has a home — concentrated west of the Great Dividing Range through the dry country of NSW and QLD.

Australia doesn't send its native wildlife out into the pet trade, so every Bell's phase over here traces back to a small captive bloodline that somebody worked patiently to establish — which is part of why they're still rare and still special. In the States there's a handful of good people keeping that going: Cold Blooded Shop, Kevin McCurley's New England Reptile Distributors, breeders like Kolls Exotics, dealers like Imperial Reptiles. None of them invented anything. You can't invent a gene. All you can do is take good care of a line nature started, and pass it on.

And that's really all we want to say here. Morphs aren't something to be afraid of, and they're not something people cooked up in a lab. They're genetics — the same everyday miracle that makes people and animals come in every shade and pattern there is. The Bell's phase lace monitor is just one gorgeous reminder of it. We didn't make it. We just get to witness it — and honestly, that might be the best part of this whole thing.