Posted by:
RandyRemington
at Sun Apr 30 07:36:43 2006 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by RandyRemington ]
I don't know how many ivory ball pythons are imported but in general hets should be much more common than homozygous in the wild. The problem in figuring out just how much more common is not knowing how much localized inbreeding takes place.
If 1 out of 200 wild ball pythons where yellow bellies (het ivory) and they where randomly distributed and bred randomly they would only pair with another yellow belly for 1 out of 40,000 pairs. With only 1 in 4 of their offspring being ivory that works out to 1 out of 160,000 wild bred hatchlings being ivory.
These are all just guesses for numbers but it shows how the fairly high number of 1 in 200 hets only produces (with completely random distribution) 1 in 160,000 homozygous.
They export about 150,000 baby ball pythons from Africa a year so with these example numbers that would include about 750 yellow belies but less than 1 ivory a year.
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