"What about traits that are not so obvious?"

Very well said Jorge. Fact is ANYTHING "can"(and is) manifested, and potentially passed on to offspring through inbreeding(line-breeding). and a very large percentage of all these different genes and traits that get passed on, we humans have no clue about, and are virtually unseen.

As a matter of fact, there are a fair number of instances where snake's were fully developed(or lets say even half-developed), and it failed to live full-term and hatch. Most of the time this is simply chalked-up as, ...."oh well, must have been something I didn't do correctly", when in fact, it involved a "lethal" gene of some sort, and was not destined to be ..period!

We as snake keepers tend to focus on just a few basic things, the way a snake looks, and the pattern and colors. But there are SOOO many things that can(and do) go wrong, mostly to not much of a noticable degree, it is simply a question of to what extent.

Inbreeding always mutiplies the odds of other non-desireable things showing up too, right along with the good stuff we want to see. Most of the time things go pretty smoothly as far as we can see, but when any two un-wanted, organ jeopardizing, malformation, or lethal alleles line up in a pair on the chromosome helix, that is when they are expressed, whatever it might be. When two animals have the same like genes, this is always greatly multiplied, just no getting around it.

Some years ago, I had a clutch of related anery Hondos produce a clutch, and the entire clutch were fully developed, but their skin was fused together in their eggs where they looped around in the egg, and also had some very abrupt spinal kinks too. It was morbid as all hell looking man!. They looked liked little "paper dolls" like a girl would cut out of a folded up piece of paper and open up..LOL!

I'm pretty sure that had to do with a related gene problem in that particular case, and not something that I did or didn't do.

Any, yes, sometimes sh@* happens..LOL!


~Doug
-----
"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

my website -serpentinespecialties.webs.com

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