Hi,



Sibling breeding or backcrosses to parents are very common in ball python breeding as well as herp breeding in general. Herps tend to be very resistant to inbreeding depression, as it has been going on in nature for millions of years, and as such most of the deleterious genes have been selected out. Some morphs however have bad genes that sometimes come with the good ones and therefore will have to be selected out by us through ruthless culling of defective animals from breeding programs and controlled outcrossing.



Examples where undesireable genes have come along with good ones are bug eyed-leucistic Texas rat snakes, scale deformities in albino western diamondbacks, cataracts in Angolan pythons, eye deformies in albino boas, and word is (unfortunately) spinal kinks in caramel albino balls. Now this doesn't mean (to me anyway) that we should shy away from these mutations, but that we need to be very selective when purchasing initial breeding stock of these types. Very simply choose animals that don't manifest the bad trait, as not all of the animals representing the traits mentioned above are affected. We can ensure that we can do our part to minimize these piggybacking traits and eventually select them out by careful pairing of animals to lesson the chance that the trait will be unconsciously selected for. For example, I purchased a het caramel albino male and bred him to several hardy, stout normal females. I kept back all of the resulting females and plan to (hopefully soon) breed these girls to a non kinked caramel male from a different blood line in order to insure diversity and hopefully produce non-kinked caramels.



So inbreeding in general is not necessarily a bad thing, we just need to keep selecting out the bad traits that come along with the good ones, if and when they show up. Take care.



Will

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