Corey Woods has posted and I've seen a quote from Peter Kahl that they can identify 70-80% of het pieds by appearance. The problem is the 20-30% that don't have the nearly of full 3 scale wide white belly with thick black straight connected black lines at the edge - particularly in the last 1/3 of the snake.

There are also reports of presumed non het pieds having similar marks but from the ch and pet store animals I've looked at I believe the percentage that are good examples is very low and perhaps close to the actual percentage of random het pieds in the wild. Others have reported seeing much higher percentages in presumed non het pieds so I suspect that either they are defining the mark more loosely than I or my sample is biased by having the markers picked out by the time I see them.

If it where the perfect system ware all het pieds had the marker and no non het pieds had it then we could classify the piebald as fully co-dominant but nature wasn’t that considerate to help us avoid confusion.

[ Show Entire Thread ]