I bred a pet store girl with markings that looked similar to those seen in many het piebalds to a 50% chance het pied male with the markings but only hatched two normals. I loaned that girl out to a 100% chance het pied with the markings this year but she didn't produce.

I don't believe they are doing captive breeding of ball pythons in Africa. At least not in order to mix the babies with the ones from eggs and gravid females they dig up. It's just too hard to get wild caught adult females to breed in captivity so I suspect they spend their time looking for more wild bred animals rather than trying to breed their own. Or if they did breed a special animal they would keep the babies separate.

However, I do believe that hets for many morphs should be distributed in the wild at fairly high rates. I've heard of multiple cases of imported/pet store females proving het albino. The hard part in figuring how common hets are in the wild is not knowing how much ball python move around and so how much the imported homozygous morphs are created by localized inbreeding. If het piebalds where randomly distributed at 1 in 200 wild animals it would result in 1 in 40,000 random pairings being het X het and 1 in 160,000 ch babies being homozygous piebald. With about 150,000 wild bred ball pythons harvested in Africa each year the 1 in 200 wild het estimate could produce a piebald every year or two and 750 exported hets a year. If the distribution of the gene isn't random then a lower percentage of hets could have produced the imported piebalds that started the cb line and add to it periodically.

The big problem is how common is it for non het pieds to have similar markings? I’ve not seen the strong markings (3 scale wide white belly with thick dark lines on both sides for the full last 1/3 of the snake) very often outside of my pied project. But then some of the project ones that I think are hets have fairly subtle markings. I’ve seen posts by people claiming as high as 50% of normals have the marking but I think that is either an extreme exaggeration or the mark is being interpreted very loosely. If you where to look for very strong markings I’d be surprised if you found over 1%. But even then what would your chances be of getting one of the imported hets vs. a random look-alike? Probably a lot better than 1 in 200 but still not a sure thing.

So, I don't think it's terribly likely that your two imported girls are het piebalds but if you didn't have to pay much of a premium for them and now that you have them it's definitely worth trying them just in case they aren't look-alikes.

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