Unfortunately, it is not a true color morph, or even a trait.

Actually, both those statements are incorrect. Red coloration in Hognose, such as the Extreme Reds and Extreme Red Albinos, are in fact a true color trait which makes it a type of morph. Where your confusion lies in the fact that you are comparing these to simple Mendelian traits such as Dominant, Co-Dominant and Recessive traits, which is not what this red coloration is. What the red coloration has been understood to be so far is a polygenic trait, otherwise known as a line trait. In order to understand what a polygenic trait is, you need to understand what the word itself means, poly- (many) and genic (genes), meaning "many genes". In other words, it's not a single gene (as in dominant or co-dominant traits) or pair of genes (as in Recessive traits) that cause coloration but a combination of many more genes which makes these traits far more difficult to reproduce unless you do line breeding (inbreeding) to help keep the lines pure and unchanged.

You are correct that one must inbreed specific colored animals to try and keep these traits intact although it's not always necessary.

This is one of the problems with the Extreme Red Albinos, a lot of people believe that the red trait is linked with the Albino gene and that when they breed their Extreme Red to non-related/colored animals, that those animals will also be het for the red gene, but in actuality, it will only truly be het for the Albino gene as well as carrying the genes that also made it red, but it doesn't mean that those red genes will come out in F1 or F2 offspring unless the genes that go into making the red are passed along by both parent animals or you get lucky. This is why you don't see too many people producing Extreme Red Albinos even though a certain individual has been producing and selling a lot of them for many years. If the red gene were a simple Mendelian trait, then we'd be seeing a lot more after all of these years.
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

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