Good question. I know corn snake breeders have inbreed for many generations and some claim it doesn't matter. In my limited experience though, some of my better corn snakes where the most outbred ones. The bloodred line was one that was suspected to suffer ill effects from too much inbreeding but I had some really nice outbred bloodred X blizzards. Some claimed it was just the nature of the bloodred line to be small and want to start on lizards based on where they came from though. I haven't really kept up on corn snakes but last I knew there where lots of people outbreeding some of the inbreed lines that where suspected to have some problems due to inbreeding.



I've heard that boids may be more at risk for inbreeding problems quicker. I don't know if enough boid breeding has been done (compared to corn snakes) to really be scientific about this but it seems that eye problems popped up fairly quickly in albino burmese pythons, albino boas, and I even read recently about an albino olive python I think it was. At any rate, boid breeders seem to work harder to not inbreed any more than necessary so I think we will be ok. Often inbreeding is done for one generation and then outbreed the next with ball pythons (while corn breeders might line breed 7 generations or more). There is also a lot of new blood coming into the captive ball python population every year.



It will be interesting to see if we start seeing ill effects as morph combinations become more commonplace. With the 1 in 16 hit of outbreeding a double recessive trait it will be harder to do than the 1 in 4 of a single recessive trait. I suppose breeders can outbreed to unrelated morphs of one of the genes in the combo and not have to work as hard to get the combo back (i.e. Ralph might breed his snow males to unrelated axanthic and imported albinos). Also, with the prices of double hets being so high there are lots of different people making the initial crosses now so it should be possible for breeders to find unrelated morph combos for a while.

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