You best bet is to get a good genetics text and learn the basics from that. Then apply what you've learned to snakes. One of the best bangs for the buck is Elron and Stansfield's text, "Schaum's Introduction to Genetics". I got the third edition around 8 years ago and like its problem oriented format. A used copy of the 4th edition in paperback costs less than $10, the last time I priced them.

A snake without abnormal (AKA "special" ) genes is a normal snake.

"Het" is short for "heterozygous". A gene pair is heterozygous if the two genes in the pair are not the same. Examples: a pastel mutant gene paired with a normal gene (in ball pythons) or an albino mutant gene paired with a normal gene (in ball pythons). A snake is heterozygous if it has a gene pair that is heterozygous.

A gene pair is homozygous if the two genes in the gene pair are the same. Examples: two albino mutant genes, two normal genes.

Some people will tell you that a het snake looks normal. This is true only if the mutant gene is recessive to its normal version. It is not true if the mutant gene is dominant or codominant to the normal version of the gene. But that leads into a discussion of recessive, dominant, and codominant mutant genes.

"Hypo" is short for "hypomelanistic". Hypomelanistic snakes have some black pigment (melanin) but less than a normal snake. Hypomelanistic is the name of a single mutant gene in several species. In boa constrictors, there are several mutant genes that reduce the amount of black pigment, but none is named hypo. The boa mutant that is most commonly meant by "hypo" was formally named "salmon".

I do not know whether there is an albino Dumeril's boa.

Nobody created the ball python piebald mutant gene. It just happened sometime over in Africa. One or a few piebald ball pythons were caught in Africa and bred in captivity. All the rest are the founders' descendents.

Hope this helps.

Paul Hollander

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