You know me Sdaji and that I don't have anything to do with crosses or snakes of unknown heritage. In fact I don't keep or breed snakes anymore due to personal reasons. However I still have a very keen interest in and work with wild animals.
They were wild diamonds from the Gosford area not captives. Very much pure diamonds from a well south of the Karuah river which as far as I'm concerned is the beginning of the intergrade section. I have my own reasons for believing that too. It was typical in the sense that they wrestled, but there was no biting. The group consisted of a 2.4 m female of approx 5-6 kgs and two 4=5 ft males, when another third male showed up. The male that wasn't joined with female instantly came away from the others and before the third male was 3 feet from the female began the confrontation. It lasted for approx 1 min, but might have gone on longer except that they were disturbed by my presence, and then they both went to the female.
Yes, I know what the books say, and yes you are correct about breeding groups of diamonds that consist of one female and multiple males, that is very common but not always the case. I guess at the end of the day whoever writes these books didn't give one to the snakes to read.
I only wish I had my phone on me at the time because I would love to have the footage.
Which brings me back to my point which is that animals which are genetically built to be anti-social should not be housed with others. Unless, they are in a large enclosure where each individual animal can get right away from each other AND still have all their needs met(eg thermal req)
I personally don't think they should be kept in a cage where they have to come into contact which each other, or each others faeces, because what we do know is that snakes live in a world of highly tuned sense of smell and they are anti-social, so to me it is obvious that being kept together confined will cause stress, wether humans think so or not.
Maybe it would be better to use the term "naturally" rather then "in the wild" when it comes to determining what is best for these animals.
I wasn't implying you keep crosses, but we all end up seeing a range of snakes in a range of situations, sometimes including things we don't approve of.
I personally see the taxonomic situation as differently from you and most people. I see it as a spectrum from around the Victorian border to Cape York rather than all Diamonds being pure and identical from around the Victorian border up to some magical line where they suddenly start changing. Gosford Diamonds are a bit different from Sydney Diamonds which are a bit different from... and so on. I think your observation is very interesting and demonstrates the point I'm making nicely. The extensive studies done on Diamonds were done further south, and Gosford is towards the north of what people call pure Diamonds, but as you've seen, they're behaving a bit differently. Still though, even in Gosford they're far less prone to combat than Carpets from QLD, more than Sydney and if Sydney ones ever do it the ones further south are presumably even less prone.
Very interesting observation however you look at it.
As for the original topic, sure, in a perfect world where we cared about nothing other than the snake's wellbeing and spared no expense we wouldn't bother with things which are designed to make the vivaria pleasing to human eyes and we'd vehemently oppose handling unless absolutely necessary and clean three times per day and only use filtered water which would be replaced hourly and all sorts of other fanatical stuff. In the real world we have people who for various reasons cohabit their snakes or can't afford the top of the line thermostat or handle snakes just because they enjoy doing it.
I haven't kept snakes together for quite some years now but in the past I did, and even in species which routinely combat vigorously I found they usually calm right down pretty quickly. For example, Water Pythons are pretty into it, but I found that when I introduced them in breeding season they'd only combat for a while before settling down, and if I didn't put them back into their own enclosures and left them in a 2.1 group the males would just take turns mating with the female the whole season. If I put them back in their own enclosures for a couple of days and reintroduced them they'd go through combat again then settle back down. Same with others such as Carpets and Antaresia. It really didn't seem to stress them at all other than the completely normal amount you'd expect from a normal, natural round of combat. With taxa like Diamonds which are far less prone to combat than normal it would be even less of an issue. I haven't kept any snakes together for over 10 years, but previously I kept pythons in groups of 6 or more, including out of season, never any dramas.
I think we've all seen Carpets kept communally, it's still common in public zoos etc, and almost always results on no issue. I totally agree that ideally for the snakes' sake it's beat to keep them separately, and these days that's all I do unless I want to combat them to encourage them to copulate, but I don't think it's the end of the world if people want to do it in some cases.