Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Please nobody be offended by this ?.... I'm very new to ball pythons and I love coming in here every day and reading the posts. I find the photos of different morphs and the breeding and genetics posts very interesting. I do a little work in genetics (oysters) and I began to wonder what kind of precautions breeders are taking to preserve vitality while creating all of these neat new morphs? Perhaps I haven't read enough, could somebody recommend a book I could read just so I better understand ball python genetics?

Captive breeding of ball pythons and most of the mutations are very new with the vast majority of the pythons only a few generations away from wild bred. We don't really know yet what kind of problems inbreeding might or might not expose in them. To be safe, many breeders make extra effort to avoid inbreeding as much as possible by crossing lines founded by different imported morph animals and out breeding to normals.

Also, many of the morphs are so new that I don’t think you will find them in any book. I would suggest following the links at the top of this forum to some of the larger ball python breeder's web pages for near current information on existing morphs.

Well i would figure that the breeding of one male morph to numerous females creates several partially related hets. By breeding these hets to non siblings you will have diversifed the gene pool more and more. After several years of this the genetic makeup will be differed to degree where it is most likely safe and non damaging to the health of the animals. I know this is not how it always works and siblings will be bred to siblings and sales will confuse things but theoretically some simple thought by the breeder could eliminate this problem in 3 to 4 generations completely.
joe

So from what I read around here I can see that breeders can prove their traits but are any of the strains fixed? I'm getting the impression that they are not. Can somebody clarify this for me? How long has serious commerical breeding been going on in the US and Canada? I was reading about the "Paperwork" thread and I think the idea of having pedigreed snakes with papers like an AKC dog is hilarious yet a very good and intriguing idea. I don't suppose anybody has bothered (or had the capital) to do any sequencing or mapping? Has anybody observed any genetic problems or do we not discuss that for business reasons? Dicephally is documented in most N. American snake species, has anybody ever seen it or read about it in a P. regius? As interesting as breeding P. regius is I'm glad that I like my regular $30 one just fine

A couple more ?'s that I'm not sure if they are approriate for public discussion but I am curious so apologies to any I may offend:
Do breeders have a code of conduct?
How much culling goes on?

Why do I keep seeing "mutation" instead of "allele" or "trait"?

Most of us hobbyists are not formally educated geneticists. I know I tend to go with the established terminology within the hobby and don't particularly care if it's accepted outside the hobby or not as long as ball python people know what I’m talking about. I suppose it would be better if we used the textbook correct terminology of the day but it’s not likely that it can be fully corrected within the community due to the momentum of the current usage.

>Why do I keep seeing "mutation" instead of "allele" or "trait"?

"Trait" is too vague. In the above sentence, I'm not sure whether "trait" refers to a gene or the whole animal's appearance. If appearance, "phenotype" is better because it is a standard genetics term.

A "mutation" or "mutant gene" is a gene with a molecular makeup that has changed from the wild type allele's molecular makeup. A mutant gene produces a changed (mutant) phenotype that is different from the wild type phenotype. AFAIK, all the mutations known in ball pythons are independent; there aren't any loci with more than two alleles (yet). So we can talk about the pastel mutant and its wild type allele or the spider mutant and its wild type allele. But using "pastel allele" and "spider allele" in the same sentence is likely to give the impression that pastel and spider are alleles with the same locus rather than independent mutants with different loci.

I had a university genetics course and spent 5 years working in the genetics lab. That's the terminology that the pros taught me. As I often post on genetics-related threads here, maybe some of it has rubbed off on others.

Paul Hollander

I don't think there are any formal codes of conduct such as might arise out of some formal club or governing body (I don’t think there are any). In general the biggest concern is out right fraud and we haven't gotten around to the smaller issues yet.

I'd be very interested in the culling aspect also. I really don't think very many problems have been seen yet but I would like to think that the big breeders tend to hold on to the best animals for themselves rather than keeping the problem animals they can't sell for their own breeders. Unfortunately, with the high prices of most of these morphs I suppose that most any individual that can breed does get bred, regardless of quality. Hopefully as the prices come down we can do a better job of being selective and distinguish between breeder grade and pet grade individuals. Currently the main selection criteria is the desired mutant genes.

Check out Greg Graziani's history on the below link. The oldest morph is albino at 11 years so only 5 or 6 generations tops (most probably much less). There have also been quite a few new imported albinos in this time as well as lots of outbreeding. I'm not aware of any problems associated with the albino ball python lines yet but reports of one eyed albino burms and boa constrictors are heard from time to time so I suppose it's possible.

I think the two things that ball pythons have going for them so far is that there is a huge imported gene pool with more every year and we haven't been breeding them very long. Bob Clark pretty much started it off with the albinos in 1992 and it's been growing every year since then. Because of the imports I don't think many bothered before that. It's still hard to sell normal ball pythons at a profit due to the continuing imports so the current captive bred "normal" population is mainly a byproduct of interest in the morphs and in most cases actual morph breeding programs.

Documentation of lineages (so as to be able to track problems and avoid inbreeding) would be a good idea but isn't often done in ball pythons. Apparently the chondropython people are the ones to talk to about that.

I know Dr. Mark Seward (http://www.drseward.com/) was looking into trying to identify the gene and develop a probe to test for het piebalds some years ago. The idea being that there would be a market for being able to pick the hets out of possible hets. The problem is that you would not have long to recover your investment before the morph price fell to where the test might no longer be economical. Perhaps the technology is now here such that tests could be developed quickly and cheaply enough. I'm thinking there might even be a market for basic paternity testing to certify that high dollar hets are from the claimed father and not a result of sperm retention, parthenogenesis, or a breeding mix up. Also, as multi possible het combinations become more common it would be nice to be able to test for several genes rather than just trusting to luck with small ball python clutches.
Greg Graziani's history

Again what is parthenogenesis? i read something in reptiles magazine about a retic female basically cloning herself. Is that the term for it?

Yep, that's it, a female having babies without using a male's genetic material. They have a Burmese python in Amsterdam that seems to be doing this. It's probably incredibly rare but without testing who knows for sure.

...my original female BP laid 4 fertile eggs that hatched in 1992 after NOT being with another BP for over 8 years, strongly suggesting parthenogenesis OR sperm retention of over 8 years duration. Scott J. Michaels DVM