Posted by:
DonSoderberg
at Wed Feb 6 08:16:10 2008 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by DonSoderberg ]
You're a good photographer, so see if you can shoot the eyes of your new babies. Snake-eye shooting separates the camera-toting men from boys. lol.
The snake (sire) you believe is a ghost could in fact be an ultramel anery. It would explain why you got all anery types when you bred it to an anery type last year. The ultra gene works like a recessive gene when paired with non albinos. The only recessive gene both dark snakes had in common last year was anery, so all the babies were phenotypic aneries. Keep in mind that the ULTRA gene is NOT a hypo gene. Yes, ultras and ultramels are hypo by loose definition (having greatly reduced melanin), but we reserve the tag HYPO for corns that are in possession of the recessive hypomelanistic gene. Hence, I'm on a mission to get people to stop attaching the word HYPO at the end of ultra or ultramel. It makes people think the ultra gene is allelic to hypo, which it's not. This mutation (ultra) resides on the albino locus. Hence, even though ultras and ultramels look hypo, they're an allele to albino (not hypo).
Okay, enough semantics and chit-chat. If you show us the eyes of your snakes and some have the classic pink pupils and some have the ruby pupils and some have normal black pupils, the indication will be that the sire is actually an ultramel anery. If he had been an ultra anery, all the babies would have been ultramels (ruby pupils); no amels. One thing that makes the identification of ultramels VS hypos difficult is that the results of the progeny of those two genes are very similar in appearance. You have enough babies there to determine which you have. If you see only pink pupils on the albinos and black pupils on the others, you likely have an amazingly beautiful line of hypos. NOTE: It is often interpreted that some hypos can have ruby pupils, but I have het to see proof that those animals are not ultramels. It could be that we have a line of recessive hypos out there that have ruby pupils, but I have not yet seen results of breeding trials that proved it. Many think that if a snake looks like a hypo A, it must be a hypo A. We all need to tighten our seat belts. This ride's gonna get krazy. It is not always going to be easy to distinguish between the look-alike mutations in corns.
BTW, I too have a line of ultramels that throw creamsicle looking corns. My non albinos that look like they're carriers of caramel actually are not. The albinos look like the ones you're showing here. Like creamsicles.
Show us close-ups of the eyes. Nice snakes : )
Don
South Mountain Reptiles
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The EYES have it . . . - DonSoderberg, Wed Feb 6 08:16:10 2008