I don't follow this forum but someone tipped me off to the thread a few weeks ago regarding the genetics of the granite greybands. Someone mentioned that this is a line-bred trait, not recessive, and that is somewhat true, but the mode in which this trait is inherited is still somewhat of a mystery. It is not a clear-cut selectively bred morph. I have built up our granite project at The Gourmet Rodent over the past 10+ years, and though we can reliably produce good quantities of them, we haven't figured out how we can produce granites in any predictable manner. Progeny of two completely patternless granite parents will often include a mix of "normal" phenotypes as well as granites with varying degrees of residual patterning. The normal phenotypes, when bred together, have sometimes surprised me by producing a high percentage of patternless snakes, while other times the same parents the following season will produce mainly normal to slightly granite-ish offspring. See the last several photos in this online album I posted several years ago(after the mosaic FL morph photos):
https://picasaweb.google.com/moropus1/1009Kingsnakes

The photos with the group of hatchlings are all siblings, and you can see the variability produced out of a patternless X patternless granite breeding.

Therefore the "hets" that John at Suncoast was offering as mentioned in the original thread are the more normal-appearing results of a granite x granite breeding, and again, breeding these "hets" together will result in granites, you just never know if you will get 8, 3, 1, or 0 in any given clutch. Breeding a "het" to an exceptional patternless granite will not necessarily increase your chances of producing a higher percentage of top-notch granites. You never know what you'll get.

Though this popped up in our colony from mixing generic alterna from unknown localities and various sources, These "hets" do have a distinctive appearance that resembles snakes collected from the Black Gap locality, and I have also seen some Black Gap snakes that are bordering on what we call "granite", with muted to no red/orange coloration and highly reduced patterning. I had wanted to obtain some genuine BG snakes to add to the mix and test their compatibility, but never put the effort into it since I am no longer managing the colubrid colony at the Gourmet Rodent. An interesting project for someone take on.

I should mention that we didn't necessarily produce the first granites. When we started offering these years ago as a new morph, it was brought to my attention that this morph was present in several other collections, yet nobody ever really focused on them like we did. Probably because some purists find them ugly compared with the "classic" alterna.

Hope that helps (or confuses the matter further).

Adam Black
Manager Emeritus
The Gourmet Rodent, Inc

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