>You've expressed the conundrum well, Rusty. A couple thoughts.



In all my hypo breedings, starting with the first hypos released from the Love's collection, plus some hets from them, and for many years after, I never got any results that contradicted the hypo as a simple recessive. That would have been a big deal, and would have been noted far and wide.



Hondurans in the wild vary dramatically. In "wild"type" (non-hypo) hondos there will be animals ranging from very light to very dark: Once these phenotypes are altered by the hypo gene, you're going to end up with very light and very dark hypos, it seems to me.



Discussion of "cleanness" and tipping and band width & etc. is irrelevant, imho: those are pattern variations, not variations of melanin deposited into areas that would be black on a normal or wild-type.



Imagine a line of hondos bred for "hypermelanism" in the pattern sense--a line of hondos where the black bands were wide, and tipping abundant. Maybe an extreme example from that line would be almost entirely black. But breed two generations to produce the hypo of that snake, and it would be almost entirely gray or brown. So pattern doesn't matter.



I'm maybe out of line with this thought, but: if you have two hondos that look like normals, like the two in your photo, and they produce all normal looking offspring, I'd question whether the original identification of one or the other or both of the parents was in error. That just seems logical.



Lastly, it would be great to test breed some "pure" megas or extremes. But I'd like anyone to show me how they expect to get such animals with which to begin that experiment.

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