Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm already spending sleeepless nights wondering about next year's projects.

Does a pied clown make sense???

Please help me I'm terminal.....
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Brian Gundy

www.for-goodness-snakes.com

this was discussed several weeks ago if you do a search. So far no one has worked on this. I guess a clown was bred to a het pied once and it produced a pied, or something along those lines.... it was clown something to pied het, and it produced a pied. I have pieds and het clown and will be working on it in the next few years, but I dont have the homo clown in my sights to start the project yet.... only a het. I WILL breed my het male clown to a female het pied 2007 or 2008... not sure yet.

Ben

Ben:

Thanks for responding to my question.

I have a 1300 gram female clown and a 900 gram male pied and have been thinking about producing some double hets next year. I was wondering what the ball python community thought of this project.

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Brian Gundy

www.for-goodness-snakes.com

DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!

Do it! Make the double hets!
Who wouldn't want an animal that can produce the two most popular recessive morphs?
I know I would!
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-Man fears the beast in the Wolf because he does not understand the beast within himself.

>>I guess a clown was bred to a het pied once and it produced a pied, or something along those lines.... it was clown something to pied het, and it produced a pied.

How was a pied produced from a clown to a HET pied? That can't happen, can it? At the least, both would have to have been het pieds.
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Jeremy Conrad
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...Can't...stop...must...get...more...balls...

I remember it from a couple years ago. A guy bought a pair of het clowns, bred them together and produced a pied. I believe he ended up selling the entire project.

Corey

Thanks for all of your responses.

Maybe now I'll be able to sleep better.

I hope you're all having a great season.

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Brian Gundy

www.for-goodness-snakes.com

It was Matt Turner, he bred a het clown with a normal and produced a pied.

That's the way I remember it – a known het clown to an assumed normal producing a pied. Sounded like something that would have been interesting to try and figure out over the several years since Matt Turners initial breeding (anybody remember the year, seems like it was maybe even back in the 90's).

There are several possible explanations.

One of course is that both the het clown and the assumed normal could have just happened to have been het pieds. There should be a lot more random het pieds than random homozygous pieds. Still the odds of two unknown hets being paired are exponentially long. For example, if hets for a mutation where randomly distributed in the population at 1 in 10 the odds of two hets being paired randomly would be 1 in 100 and the population would be expected to produce 1 in 400 homozygous. If the hets where 10 times more rare at 1 in 100 then only 1 in 10,000 random pairs would be het X het producing 1 in 40,000 homozygous - making the homozygous 100 times more rare if the hets are 10 times more rare. Of course we are talking about a captive pairing here so man may have skewed the odds to be less random - perhaps the animals involved or their ancestors where selected based on belly pattern concentrating the odds of het pieds much higher than random wild pairings.

Given the long (but not impossible) odds of both parents just happening to be het pieds it got me wondering if perhaps there was a less improbably explanation. One candidate I came up with was that perhaps pied and clown where alleles, different mutations of the same gene. In that scenario there may have only been one random het in the pairing, the assumed normal female being an unexpected het pied. If clown and pied are alleles (different mutations of the same gene) then the double het clown and pied probably will not look normal since it doesn't have a normal copy of the common gene. It might be that the pied looking offspring was a double het and the pied allele is dominant over the clown allele. Sure this theory also requires the improbable situation of pied and clown just happening to be different mutations of the same gene so it's hard to say for sure if this allele theory really is more probable than two random pied hets but in general one unexpected het is exponentially easier to come up with than two.

So, I've been waiting for years for someone to breed clown to pied to see if they get the generally expected normal looking double hets or if they get pied looking double hets in support of this allele theory.

Randy, I think the pied hatched in 2001

Randy:

Thank you so much for your response.

I will try breeding the pair together next year and let you all know how things turn out. It sounds like an interesting adventure.

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Brian Gundy

www.for-goodness-snakes.com