Thanks for the responses!

FYI I am not selling any nor do I have any of these. A friend of mine just produced some and he asked me what I thought they were worth. He did get some of his breeding stock from me though so I was happy to see the project prove out for him. Several years ago he got some 100% het amel 50% pos het striped abberrant hatchlings from me and some other hets from Shannon.

I agree with what Joe said about the difficulty in producing them, ie the unpredictable nature of the striped abberrant trait, being a double edged sword. Hard to produce = rare = expensive but it also means fewer people will be interested in shelling out big bucks to maybe or maybe not get the results they are looking for.

My friend is more interested in genetics than in selling/marketing/making money though so I think the main reward for him was simply in reproducing and hopefully learning about something that was not fully understood.

Now that visual(aka homozygous) combos have been produced I do not think these will be as hard to reproduce as people might be thinking. I think there were actually two problems, 1) the poor fertility that male amel ruthven's are reported to have and 2) the unpredictable nature of the striped abberrant gene.

I don't think the striped abberrant trait is as hard to produce as alot of people think. I think what it is is that alot of people expected them to be simple recessive and when they found them not acting that way they got discouraged and gave up. It's also highly variable in expression; the trait can be exressed quite dramatically, as in fully striped, or it can be as subtle as just having a few broken bands. I suspect that alot of striped abberrants were actually produced but they were not recognized as such because they just looked like normals with a few broken bands and/or a few crossovers. I suspect that many striped abberrant ruthveni with more subtle expression were simply not recognized and got sold off as normals. I think if people had kept entire clutches and bred them back this would have been figured out alot sooner. Now that this is known I think the main problem will be dealing with and fixing the low fertility of amel males.

I think this is an awesome morph and awesome species and I hope people get into it. It may be a good thing if prices drop quickly because then more people might be able to work with them. I would hate to see such a great Mexican species go by the wayside and end up just getting hybridized out of existence, which seems to be the path many bloodlines have taken already.
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