Thanks for taking the time for that detailed explanation and especially for the numbers from your experience and the inheritance information!



Since I've never even seen a spider in person yet it wasn't that surprising that I didn't know about this until yesterday but I guess it's a testament to the secrecy in the ball python industry that even you didn't find out about it until your hatched some in 03. It certainly doesn't sound like it's much if any of a negative but I guess with big dollars at stake it isn't surprising that there was apparently a concerted effort by the many spider owners to keep it out of public knowledge until now. Kind of like all the morphs you can't get belly pics of except that I suspect that is repressed positive information that might help competitors.



I’m not singling any particular breeder out here as many people owned spiders before yesterday and didn’t say anything and secrecy seems to be the general rule across the ball python industry for any morph and any breeder with few exceptions. I can see early on hoping it was a fluke that would disappear with outbreding and then after making a few sales feeling constrained to protect those customers. However, as with price fixing, my personal opinion is that free and honest flow of information (including actual normal selling prices) would be the best policy for the longterm health of the industry.



From the info in this thread I would agree with you that it must be the spider gene it's self causing this and not something that is likely to be outbred. With all the generations of spider X normal females so far it's no doubt an incredibly outbred line anyway. Your note of it not being seen in your original male but showing up only in spider offspring clears that up well.



The only negative I can see is if this trait affects their quality of life excessively but that's hard to measure in a snake. I would say given their not repressed reputation for eating and breeding well it seems unlikely this condition has a big negative effect on their quality of life. Even a moderately stressed ball python is likely to not eat or breed. Anyone work with the tumbler pigeons? Maybe this is something like that.

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