Without knowing the specific history to your animals, any future purchase will be a guess if it's compatible. Heck, it's not even known now if any of the anery or hypo lines are compatible or not.



IMO, new morph 101....



Step one - acquire new morph animal(s) Many methods including but not limited to - WC animals, Offspring from WC animals, purchasing from whatever source at ??? pricing, breeding siblings for spontaneous new morph (like Mike did) etc.



Step two - (duh) raise them up, yeah an obvious one but then again you can't do ANYTHING towards proving ANYTHING until you complete that all important second step.



Step three - Breeding trials.



IMO there are three sepoerate breeding trials that have to be done to fully prove anything and I'm sure others will expand that to say multiples of each for supporting proof.



A) Visual Morph to unrelated normal - proves or disproves dominant morph. Three possible outcomes...

I) all morphs = Probable dominant morph and your animal is homozygous.

II) 1/2(ish) morph 1/2(ish) normal = probable dominant morph and your animal is het.

III) all normal = possible recessive morph, your animal is homozygous and all offspring are hets. (the other possibilities are polygenic morph where multiple genes are involved or simple one off, non genetic freak of nature.



B) Het to Het or het to visual - can partially prove recessive nature of the morph



C) Visual to Visual - litter of all visuals along with other breeding trials would prove recessive nature.



Since you have visual siblings, BY ALL MEANS breed them together that first year. Duh, a litter of morphs but also one important step towards proving the line/morph. I would also use that visual male for any of the other breeding trials I could. Bred in a 1.3 group consisting of 1.0 visual, 0.1 visual, 0.1 het (if you have one) and 0.1 unrelated normal. This way most of your breeding trials will be done the first year and assuming all the litters fall withing expected outcomes, you will NOT have completely proven it but will be close and can market them with your known results as evidence of probable morph status. IMO the most important of those breedings is the visual to the normal as that part of the breeding trials is a two generation process and the sooner you get started, the sooner you can finish.





Again, all is my thoughts on the subject and breeding trials to prove out morphs need to be flexible and subject to modification as individual litters are born (or fail to become gravid/slug out). For example, your visual to visual could be inbred to the point that some of the babies are born with defects. May still be valid as proof but those defective babies would not help increase your founding stock. Even the healthy ones would be risky to breed.
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Thanks,





Dave Colling



www.rainbows-r-us-reptiles.com







0.1 Wife (WC and still very fiesty)

0.2 kids (CBB, a big part of our selective breeding program)



LOL, to many snakes to list, last count:

26.49 BRB

20.21 BCI

And those are only the breeders



lots.lots.lots feeder mice and rats

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