Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hey guys and gals thought i would post some up dated pics of my cal king babies. i have not even sexed them yet but will soon. i am just enjoying them and watching them grow. i have not had a picky eater yet they all came out and went right for f/t pinks after their first shed.most are on their second shed now.
spotted line
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2 YELLOW SPOTTED ALBINO three of these hatched out this year i think i will hold on to them hehe

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4

these are from my chocolate stripers
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and just some random babies






i love this wild pattern

HEY, this month is the start of my second year keeping snakes
so far i have been able to keep up the cleaning/feeding/cleaning ritual (hehe). thanks for looking

thanks for looking






i have 79 snakes in my collection and of,them three are non kings
well two are milks(kings hehe) and 1 bull snake.kings are the coolest snakes on the planet IMHO.
any one here in jax, fl? nobody around me has kings now, rich hebron is out of snakes and russ bates moved away. i feel all alone now. no one here now but lizard lubers? hehe
na really the rainy season is here and the road cuz'n time in jacksonville is ready to kick off soon. dem lil duval county chains will be crossing the roads around JIA.i garron'tee.time for the pillow cases to disapear around the wilson residence hehe.

Bravo, man! I heard baby Cals can be a bit of trouble (force feeding, pinky pumps, etc.) when it comes to that first feed. Is this your first time breeding Cals? If not, have you ever had to deal w/ any troublesome eaters in the prior to this bunch?

reako45

this is my first time breeding any snakes and i chose kings. i have been lucky. i did buy two graybands last year that i had to feed lizards to for about 3 weeks and then they went to f/t pinks.

thanks jason

Just for the record - I've never had a baby cal that was a problem feeder.

Most of my baby cal kings were SF Bay Area locale (walnut creek, Pinole in west C.C. County, Antioch in east C.C. County) and I've got two juveniles currently that were WC in Redding as hatchlings - they both ate from the hand.

I'm not saying that all Cal Kings are good feeders, but a lot of them are not troublesome in the slightest to get feeding.

I suspect the issue may be f/t - and that if live pinkies were used, a lot of them would take their first meal. There also may be some genetic locale issues.

-=-=-

The fact that many smaller species of kings (IE mountain) refuse pinkies but go for lizards is something I've thought about - survival of the fittest would seem to deselect those that reject a suitable food source. Only thing I can think of is that baby mt kings are so small as hatchlings, that taking pinkies from a rodent nest is a threat to their life, so the ones that survived to breed largely were those that went after lizards.

Maybe with the introduction of the norwegian rat into california, we are starting to see the same thing happen with Cal Kings?

I don't know.
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3.0 WC; 0.3 CB L. getula californiae
0.1.1 WC; 0.0.3 CH Elgaria multicarinata multicarinata

Not to bad for your first season! You got some great animals.

I LOVE those albino spotteds. You know who to call if you decide to let one go!

cheers

man you do tempt me with that photo. i always enjoy seeing pics of that guy. do you have any offspring yet? very clean spots.
next year i will have some more breeders and they are all het for albino. plus they are all spotted. my male breeder is a striper and the female is a spotted that produced these. so maybe this time next year i can set you up. thanks jason

what do you think would be a fair market value for that spotted?

That male should breed this coming year. Maybe we can do some trading next summer.

Renegade is the only breeder I know with a line of spotteds that breeds true. He charges $150-$200 a pop for the nice ones. I think thats a little high. I would say $100 for normals with really nice spots. Your albinos are smokin though. I'd pay more for em.

cheers

Question about breeding for traits.

Could you help me understand the difference between a morph and just an odd trait?
Like my spotted cals, the female has produced other spotteds but also stripers. this is because the male is a striper.
Next year I will be breeding two spotteds together, so should I be right in expecting all spotted offspring or will the grandfather's stripes still show up in the offspring?
Will there always be a mix of traits or will this line one day produce all spotted?
plus some of my spotted have a solid brown belly, yet some have yellow and some both.
i just think of a morph as something you can predict the breeding outcome of.
but with the spotteds i will have no clue what will come out.
so should i breed the solid brown bellies together to see if they produce solid brown or breed the male 04 back to the mother they are both het for albino.
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mother-01

mother-02

A trait is any physical appearance or phenotype. These can be random, or caused by the environment (ex. unusual laying/incubation temps), or caused by a single gene, or caused by many genes. A morph usually refers to a trait that is inherited in a predictable fashion. Some like albino are simple recesive. I'll asume you know how that deal works. These are also discontinuous, meaning you are either albino or you are not. Compare this to a polygenic trait like hieght, where you have tall people, short people, and everything in between.

The patterns of cal kings are unfortunately rather confusing. Instead of being a single change in one gene, the different patterns are caused by groups of unknown genes. Even when you breed a normal striped to a normal banded, the offspring are not very predictable. Striping is somewhat dominant over banding, but not in the simple recisive mendelian sense like albinism. Often aberants, or combinations are produced.

With aberancies like spots its even harder to tell. We could both have snakes with spots, (phenotypically similar) but the spots may be caused by different underlying genes. If that were the case then breeding two spotteds together may produce none at all. Right now I have a male from renegade. I know that this snakes spots are inheritable to some degree. I have several spotted females from unknown backrounds that he will be bred with this coming year. I don't know what to expect. Hopefully he will be compatible, and the females spots aren't just random aberancies.

By using selective breeding (breeding animals with spots together), and line breeding (breeding related animals), you increase your chances of getting what you are looking for. Breeding back to the mother would give you the most assurance in producing spotteds because she will have the same genes for it. However, my vote would be to go for the gold and try for albinos.

cheers

do you have any hets now? and who has albino spotted cal kings?
i have asked around people say they have seen them but nobody has said who.

and thanks for your response. it is a great help.i think my understanding of my snakes is starting to become a resource i can draw from. next years breeding will be bigger and better. i got to see what worked and what failed this year.
good luck with your pairings

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I'm not disagreeing with anything in that post, but I just use (er, try to use) different terminology.

I don't really consider albinism or lavender to be a "morph" because they do not change the pattern of the snake, like pied does is pythons, etc.

I like to use the word "phase" for what can be expected to be found in the wild, such as coastal banded or desert banded or striped. Morph I prefer to use with designer patterns that breed true. IE if you have spotted breeding true, it may technically be an abberancy but I would consider it to be a morph.

Black belly might be considered a "morph" but it apparently isn't that uncommon in certain populations. 50/50 I would consider a morph because it is very rare in the wild but breeds true.

If reverse stripe breeds true, I would consider that to be a morph.

Melanism is something I'm interested in. The Mendota and Davis kings look strikingly similar. If I'm not mistaken, both tend to be abberant with black bellies, and quite possibly the same gene or combination of gene. If I remember, Kerby is planning to do the cross to see if they are in fact the same thing.

I'd like to get a pair of Davis kings and outcross them with normal banded, selecting the most banded offspring and see if I can separate the hypermelanism from the black bellied abberant, but it was suggested to me by someone else that it may actually be a codom thing and not simple recessive.

I know that there are melanistic Conjuncta kings (I don't think Conjuncta is still recognizes as a separate subspecies) that are banded melanistic, it would be interesting to cross them with a "normal" banded and see what happens. I think f1reptiles breeds/carries them. It would be interesting to see wether or not it is the same melanistic gene that davis/mendota has, and if not, what a king that expresses both of them looks like (IE if it looks super hypermelanistic ...)

-=-

One thing I want to try and selectively breed for is an extension of the banded phase, where the cream bands only go halfway around. Just looking at banded kings, it looks like the way cream bands are formed, they start going up the side and then streak across the back, often diagonally to the axis, to meet another cream band from the other side. Sometimes two cream bands meet the same cream band on the other side, making a sort of Y. Sometimes they don't meet any bands on the other side, making the zipper pattern.

I don't know if it is genetic, incubation conditions, or both, that causes the zipper pattern I want to try and reproduce down the entire length of the snake (so that there are no complete cream bands).

I've noticed that in general, it seems captive bred babies I see at shows show far more zipper than wild cal kings I've found. That could indicate it is incubation, or it could indicate that it is a trait that inbreeding (line breeding) increases. I don't know.

If I'm succesful and produce a line of Cal Kings that "breed true" zipper, banded individuals without a single complete cream band, would that be a morph - or is it just an extension of the naturally occuring banded phase?
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3.0 WC; 0.3 CB L. getula californiae
0.1.1 WC; 0.0.3 CH Elgaria multicarinata multicarinata

If you study genetics, A morph is any phenotype (with a genetic component) that differs from the wild type. Separating patterns vs. colors is totally arbitrary, and phase is synonymous with morph. It doesn't matter if your talking about eye color in fruit flys, white flowers in pea plants, or albino cal kings, they are all morphs (or phases).

You do bring up a valid point however. A morph is anything that is different from the wild type. But how common does a mutation have to be before it is considered just a differnt type of wild type?

Separateing the black belly trait from the hypermelanistic trait is an interesting idea. I'm curious to see whether the two traits are separate or if a single gene controls both a pattern and color variation at the same time.

Thank you for the information.
My separation of phase and morph was based upon the fact that many field guides refer to banded phase and striped phase and intermediate phase - which is why I made the assumption that phase was natural and morph was designer.

I had no reason from precadent to deny "morph" from albinism etc. except that it is used as an adjective when describing a phase/morph, IE albino banded or albino striped or albino 50/50.

Striped 50/50 wouldn't make sense since they are incompatible terms, whereas the term albino or hyper/hypo is compatable with any pattern phase/morph. That was my rationale.
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3.0 WC; 0.3 CB L. getula californiae
0.1.1 WC; 0.0.3 CH Elgaria multicarinata multicarinata

Well, a few years a go I bred the Mendota (hypermelanistic) with the aberrant pattern to a few things.

One was a Chocolate Banded, resulting in 100% Chocolate Bandeds that were 100% het for hypermelanistic. I bred a pair of those het Chocolate Bandeds back to each other producing more Chocolate Bandeds and a few hypermelanistics that looked just like the Mendotas. The hypermelanistics were all aberrant just like the Mendotas. No banded hypermelanistics.

Another project that year was breeding the Mendota to a 50-50 cal king producing all 50-50 babies that were 100% het for hypermelanistic. I bred a pair of those hets back to each other producing a bunch of 50-50s and a few hypermelanistics that looked just like the aberrant Mendotas. No banded hypermelanistics.

This year I bred a male Mendota to a female Blizzard (albino & hypermelanistic) and got all hypermelanistics (100% het for albino) that look like Mendotas only they were all BANDED! Go figure!!!

Kerby...
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Lonesome Valley Reptiles
www.lonesomevalleyreptiles.com
Specializing In California Kingsnakes

I've got one slot left on my bag limit for WC kings. I'm going to attempt to find a female Redding before the end of the season, to pair with one my redding males next season.

Hopefully that will let me hold back two female banded locality snakes that I know are banded w/o any history of striping in their family tree.

Those two girls I hope to pair one with a davis male and one with a mendota male, and then see what happens when I cross the hets with each other (mendota het to davis het) and line breed them (mendota het to mendota het and davis het to davis het).

It really would be nice to get a banded hypermelanism that breeds true banded.

If you've got banded hypermelanistic that are het for albinism, that at least indicates to me that it is possible. Are they black belly or are they typical banded checker belly?
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3.0 WC; 0.3 CB L. getula californiae
0.1.1 WC; 0.0.3 CH Elgaria multicarinata multicarinata

They all have solid brown bellies just like the Mendotas and Davis cal kings.

Kerby...
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Lonesome Valley Reptiles
www.lonesomevalleyreptiles.com
Specializing In California Kingsnakes

I had a pair from Renegade and bred them for a couple of years and they did not breed true. Spotted is an aberrancy. They did produce some nice ones though.

Just like the Wide Stripers from Don Shores don't breed true but can produce some nice offspring!

Kerby...
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Lonesome Valley Reptiles
www.lonesomevalleyreptiles.com
Specializing In California Kingsnakes

i would like to know if the mother or father of the spotteds you bought was a spotted. i bred 2 wide stripers this year and they produced one true wide stripe out of six eggs.

do some snakes pick up the look of the parents but not a means of passing it on?

thanks
jason

I bought the female spotted in 1998 and the male spotted in 2000 I believe. I have no idea what the parents looked like. They all came from Renegade directly.

I'm sure the more you line bred those...the more predictable they would become. I sold mine a couple of years ago.

Kerby...
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Lonesome Valley Reptiles
www.lonesomevalleyreptiles.com
Specializing In California Kingsnakes

I think that he hsa them dialed in better now. He sent me some pics of his breeders and the resulting clutches in 2005. There was some variation but there was a ton of spotteds as well. There were also a lot of ones with a dashed striped.

To me it seems that there are visually 2 dif types of spotteds. There are ones where the spots are obviously remenants of a broken stripe. The spots are sort of square, occassionally they are elongated, and the side patern looks like a striper. There are others where the spots are bands that are missing the sides. The white on the belly comes up to meet the spots. There are probobly lots more combos, but I think that some are compatible and others are totally different genes.

This female is a mix of the two types. The adult pairing is a banded male to a dashed female. This pair frequently throws offspring that are half banded in front and half striped in back. Which is exactly what she is. You see how her spots totally change from front to back?

Zweifel, R. G. 1981. Genetics of colour pattern polymorphism in the California kingsnake. J. Heredity 72, 238-244.

Zweifel examined a lot of clutches of striped California kings and concluded that a single dominant mutant gene for striped can produce a considerable variety of expression, from good stripes to spots and everything in between. Probably both modifier genes and environment affect the actual result. In my opinion, breeding a pair of spotteds could produce some babies with pretty good stripes, as well as dashed stripes, spotteds, and normals.

Paul Hollander

Congrats man!
Those are all nice. I like the spotted albino and the one with the thick black stripe down his back!

Zee
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"I am an expert on everything, but I know so little and have so much to learn!" -Carsten "Zee" Zoldy-