"This brings me back to the piebalds again.

You believe the kinks or spinal deformities cause the white?

I just don't think I can see that. In this case I do not have experience but it just doesn't seem to add up.

Why would these deformities only cause white spots on the few "piebald" specimens and not all corns with spinal deformities?

Piebalds seem to be connected to bloodred but not all kinked bloodreds are piebalds, have white spots at kinks and/or pattern differences.

In conjunction to that, why don't kinks or spinal deformities cause any color or pattern differences in all other corn morphs? "





The answer to this is likely, as I said, that there are many different things that cause kinking, just as there's multiple causes of heart disease, and multiple types of cancer. We don't know what causes kinking in snakes. Some appear genetic and can be inherited, some appear to environmental, and some are simply congenital deformities. Maybe these particular piebald examples had a protein derangement that caused a bending of the spine is those location that also bleached out all color. Maybe the backbone didn't fully form there. I don't know the exact *why*, but the fact that on *these* snakes (not all kinked snakes of course, but these *particular* ones) the kinks were *only* located in the pied patches, and that the pied patches were *only* around a kink suggests a correlation between the lack of pigment and the spinal deformity.



I tried to make a distinction in one of my earlier posts that I'm talking true piebald, rather than pied-sided which is how the bloodred-related white patches are typically called. The piebald corn pics I saw were of a normal hatchling, with white blotches mostly to fully ringing the body, the way it does in ball pythons.

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