>>Tery;

>>

>>Those should be some real nice hatchlings! I'm new to this forum and had a question for you. I have a 2004 Tangerine Hypo Honduran pair and a 2004 Nelson Albino pair. Have you ever bred a Nelson Albino to a Tangerine Hypo and would there be any reason for not breeding the two together(In 2007 I was thinking)?

>>

>>Thanks,

>>

>>Rob Reiding.



Hi Rob,



Without introducing a whole bunch of rhetoric let's just say that what you're proposing is called hybridising. Some people love it. Some people (i'm in this camp) hate it. Pluses: It can produce some beautiful specimens, and you can feel like playing god or master laboratorian. Minuses: the snakes you produce don't represent anything that can/has existed in the wild, and you can never--never ever--get back to pure stock from those hybrids: they and ALL their young forever are mutts. You can never sell anything that descends from them as hondurans, or as nelsoni. That's a lot of price to pay for the experiment, imho. But like i say, there are others here who would defend the practice. There's a separate hybrid forum so i guess if you want to pursue it you can learn more there. I'd ask you think long and hard about the consequences before deciding to proceed.



Just as an aside, the hypo x albino cross eventually produces animals we'd call "hybinos", and we may produce the first definite hybino hondos this year * (they've been rpdouced before but no one can point to a snake and say "that's one" because we don't know how to distinguish them from "regular" albinos--the albino removes all melanin so how is the snake's appearance altered if it is homozygous for a trait that also reduces melanin--what's the effect of reducing what's already eliminated? So while hybinos are intellectually interesting -- and MAY someday be identifiable if we figure out any visual clues -- they're not dramatic double-morphs like ghosts or snows.



terry

* -- how, then do we propose to produce definite hybinos? eitherr of two ways...

1) as in the past, produce albinos that MIGHT also be hybinos but can't be sure. you have to test breed these (x hypos, getting lots of hypos and ONLY hypos) before you can conclude one IS also hypo and thus a hybino

OR

2) do a breeding that can produce animals that have to be hybinos (hybino x hybino is the obvioius example, but how do you get those first hybinos?) So what we're breeding are hypo het/albino x hyp het/albino. See what happens? ALL the babies are hypos because both parents are hypos. 1/4 of the babies are albinos (becuase het/albino x het/albino = babies 1/4 of which are albinos). So all the albinos out of such a pairing are also hypos & thus hybinos. So the babiers that LOOK like albinos will BE definite hybinos. That's why hypos het/albino are in particular demand right now.



td

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