People push for morphs for several reasons.



I like to think the number one reason is because they are rare or something not often seen. Hatching out a new morph is the herpetocultural equivalent of collecting an animal that is extremely difficult to find.



Such morphs fall into two categories; gene linked heritable traits and those that just fall out of the expected norm. In the case of gene linked heritable traits the frequency of this gene in a population is not going to increase unless it confers some survival advantage in the wild or it is discovered and artificially selected for in captivity. Certainly line breeding increases the odds that existing traits might be discovered. For morphs that just fall outside of the established norms (pattern and color) I think the mere fact of a population being maintained under captive conditions greatly increases the odds of such animals popping up. For in stance it is not very common to find a wild eastern king with a crazy pattern yet they routinely hatch out in captivity. I'm not sure of the cause of this disparity but I suspect if has something to do with the artificial conditions we provide as well as removal of natural selection pressures. This is one of the reasons I've never completely bought into all the fuss over phenotype and locality status. A couple generations into captive breeding and I'm more surprised when significant variances don't pop up than when they do.


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“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Emmerson

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