Whenever I'm suspicious of a trait/issue and want to link it to inbreeding, I like to follow it further and find out what the underlying cause is.



Behavior/temperament are definitely genetic in mammals and I've read enough that I'm theorizing that poor temperament is also genetic in reptiles. Since refusing to eat is a behavior, my first line of analysis will be to decide if this is an inherent behavior brought down from one or both parents or if this is a learned behavior. On the whole, the hypos and het hypos seem to begin life eating without issue so I'm going to grade that theory as improbable.



The next thing I'm going to look at is an underlying physical issue that causes the snake to be uncomfortable while eating. Assuming they begin life eating like all of the others, something makes things uncomfortable and they learn that eating causes them problems so they become reluctant feeders. We know from Mike's website that the original hypos had a tendency to puke and several were failure to thrive. Was this something environmental, did the hypos need different husbandry than the normals, or was this an internal genetic defect? My guess is that it may have been something genetic, but not something strong enough to be prevalent in the subsequent outcrossed generations.



I do know that there are several different examples of colors in mammals that carry with them a linked defect such as white/deafness, dilute/skin conditions, etc etc. It wouldnt be surprised at all if there was something deleterious linked to the hypomelanistic animals, but my guess is its nothing particularly life threatening since we havent seen more of it and there's definitely been enough inbreeding and linebreeding on the original animals.



Dave makes a really good point, we dont know how inbred those brother/sister original snakes were. I dont expect they were too inbred or there would have likely been a lot more problems in the subsequent inbreedings off of the original hypos. There are some really promising outcross projects going on right now, should be interesting to see what animals come of these projects in a few years.



Back to the snake tho...if it were my het hypo, I think I'd tweak the husbandry a bit and see if I could entice an appetite through a change in temps/enclosure size/humidity/prey size, etc. If he continues to be a lousy eater into adulthood, I'd probably look for a different animal for my program, but assuming he's perfect in all other ways, I'd be really careful of the type of linebreeding done on him and only use him on snakes of outcrossed lineage.



Rambling .02...

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