Very nice looking snake and photo Chris,....

However, I cant quite agree with the black and white specimen Allen has being more of a clinal variant at all if when bred to a normal as Don Soderberg did, as well as Allen and others (as Allen Sheehan mentioned here in this same thread and said offspring he himself produced had absolutely ZERO red or yellow pigment whatsoever). When bred to a typical normal, he got ALL typical looking normal hets, then when bred back to the anery/axanthic parent a typical 50-50 ratio of morphs and normals are produced. That is a true recessive gene mode of inheritance. Same thing when the future normal het babies would be bred to each other, a theoretical odds of inheritance of roughly 25% mutants would generally be produced, the rest of the roughly 75% would be very typical and dark in their background color.

This is just like the recessive trait anery Gray-banded kings (L.alterna) morph, or countless other proven recessive anery/axanthic mutations in the hobby mainstream. The anery/axanthic Florida kings would be another perfect example of a very similar phenotype where the background is TOTALLY void of all red, yellow or orange pigment. Also, the couple odd red flecks on the one animal posted (but not the other that were produced) is considered a paradox anomaly as in many other mutations seen in the hobby. Just one example being a snow (amel x anery/axanthic) that displays SOME flecking and/or random patches of red/yellow that would otherwise be impossible to happen in a double homo "snow" mutation were the red/orange is supposed to be COMPLETELY missing, but isn't.

Here is an axanthic Florida king morph. It's identical to the axanthic gene in Soderger's axanthic Texas Rat where it is COMPLETELY void of any red, yellow, or orange (all colors which the pigment cells known as xanthophores are responsible for producing). Recessive axanthic colubrids also tend to have a strong bluish hue to them as well that the Black Rat also has.

In any case, if nothing but typical normals and intermediates where produced when the first generation was bred back to each other, or back to that odd parent, I could then go along with it being a variant that is not recessive, but the color mutation has already been proven to be recessive (lacking all red/yellow/orange) with the exception of the ONE paradox axanthic that was posted with the few odd flecks of color.



cheers, ~Doug
-----
"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

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