Thanks Steve, I appreciate your compliment on the female. She is a jet black beauty I agree... completely saturated jet black.

I can only speculate as to why we don't see more of them these days, but I will gladly share my thoughts. From what I am learning, knowing that melanism in these guys is recessive, and only about 50% of the offspring over the lifetime of a melanistic X melanistic adult pairing will exibit melanism, understandably they are naturally few and far between. And you aren't guaranteed of any melanistic offspring from every clutch... that percentage is referring to the total lifetime production of the pair. They could realistically go years without producing any. Also, being that the masses are generally attracted more to the normal variable and incredibly beautiful colored examples, it stands to reason that the interest hasn't been there enough for most serious breeders to remain involved in producing them. Add to that the fact that some of the babies that don't display the melanism can be somewhat drab in appearance compared to those prize winning, brilliantly colored specimens... and I think we have our answer to your question. I appreciate them very much, but the masses don't seem to and I certainly don't blame them considering the choices in thayeri.

An example of what I described is in the pics below. These are the adults and the clutch they produced this year. A pairing such as this, I understand reduces the lifetime probability down to around 25%, until you begin to incorporate these het offspring into the equation. Breeding the males back to the dam, or siblings together, brings the odds back up to around 50% if I understand it correctly, but I am far from well educated in the field of genetics.

Mike

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