Reptile & Amphibian Forums

It does mine anyways.... While I am at work, my mind seems to wander, usually about boas. Something hit me yesterday that is driving me wild just thinking about the endless possibilities of what could happen with this....

We all know Motley is a co-dominant gene. A motley is correctly described as a heterozygous motley. Breeding a motley to a motley produces the homozygous form, or the "super" motley. The "super" motley is a jet black snake with black eyes, one of my personal favorites.

On the other hand, we have a somewhat new boa that hasn't been bred or experimented with yet, in the form of the Leucistic boa that is said to be over in Brazil somewhere. This is a beautiful paper white snake with black eyes.... Lets just assume the Leucistic gene works the same in boas as it does in Ball pythons, which would make it co-dominant. The hets for leucistic would be visibly different from the normal wild type boa. Breeding a het leucistic x het leucistic would produce a homozygous form, in other words the "super" white leucistic.

But this is what has my mind in knots this morning..... What happens if we bred a homozygous motley x homozygous leucistic?????? Both of these genes have visibly "morphish" het offspring.... The offspring would have to come out as some sort of a visual double-het, and WOW wouldn't that be something to see????? We've all seen the crazy mixtures that come out of hypo/motley or motley/arabesque......

Or we can even take this a step further and breed the double het for lucy/motley to another double het lucy/motley, which would produce a double homozygous leucistic/motley..... Crossing a jet black snake with black eyes to a paper white snake with black eyes.... WHAT WOULD THAT LOOK LIKE!?!?!?!?!? Or better yet, what would we call it?????

Perhaps an oreo body with white eyes? haha. The imagination can run wild with this for seemingly a few years, I don't think we will see this happen any time in the next few years.

When it does happen, I think we should call it the "eclipse" boa.....

Comments?????

It's mind boggling-LOL! Alright, seriously, I don't think you'll get a "mix". I think one will only be able to show one of the two traits at once. It would be almost equal to owning a Motley Lucy. How could you tell? The Lucy boa is VERY cool, but almost a dead end in terms of breeding potential IMO. If you lose all pattern and replace it with all white, any combo in theory will produce an all white snake. So, all in all, I think the super motley is a much more potent combo. This is the way to solid reds, oranges, maybe even purple with some CA T pos. combos, and even white. Jeremys original purple patternless is a very cool animal and IMO way more interesting than a Lucy Texas rat snake...err, I mean Lucy boa. Once we know what the het lucy looks like, that combo may be interesting, but I think the ultimate end result will be another white snake. It didn't do much for the ball market! Ah well, I guess we'll all find out in time what is in store. I'm just not as amp'd about the Lucy boa as everyone else I guess. Take care

Paul M.

I'm not a huge ball fanatic, but I remember a few years ago in Daytona some ball breeders were dreaming about the Black pastel and/or Cinnamon crossed to the Pied. Going on to potentially produce a black and white pied. Assuming the super cinny would become the pied pattern and the white of the pied would still remain. I've never seen this end result, so I assume the super cinny just dominated everything. But, maybe some of you know how far this project was actually taken, and what the actual end result was???? Could help in making assumptions toward the lucy potential, though we'll never really know....until we know. Thanks to anyone that can shed some light! Take care

Paul M.

done it yet. Those small litters with big odds are tough. That is a 1 in 16 snake when you breed a pair of cinnys het pied.
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Thanks Vinnie Caruso
opinons are like a--holes... everybody has one and they all stink

Cinnys are co dom , It will be like breeding a DH sunglow x DH sunglow. Cant wait to see that cross.

keep in mind a Super Cinny Pied is still a 1 in 16 snake when breeding a Cinny Het Pied x Cinny Het Pied. It is the same as saying a Super Sunglow is a 1 in 16 snake when breeding a pair of Het Sunglows together. Get it?
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Thanks Vinnie Caruso
opinons are like a--holes... everybody has one and they all stink

It is very similar to breeding a pair of Motleys het Albino together. The Motley is co-dom. Getting an Albino Super Motley from that breeding would be 1 in 16 odds. Hope this helps Vinnie

It's not really that hard to imagine ... the Black would take away the White, and the White would take away the Black, leaving you with a Transparent boa with only the skeleton being visible to the human eye ... hence we would call this new boa "Bones" ... or if the eyes did NOT get canceled out and were still visible, we would call this new boa "Snake Eyes"?

Sorry, I've had a hard and busy week and this is just what first popped up in my head.

Bill

np
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Thanks Vinnie Caruso
opinons are like a--holes... everybody has one and they all stink

perhaps we could call it a skelator? That would almost give a new meaning to the term "ghost" boa.

Bill, did you ever see Sean from EbN's "clear" corn snake?

Technically speaking a Leucistic boa should be entirely white, so even if it had another mutation it wouldn't be visible, unless it did something odd to the eyes. For instance an Albino Leucistic rat snake has red eyes.

Leucistic in rat snakes is recessive, however if it is co-dominant like Ball Pythons it could always make a cool morph in the heterozygous form mixed with something like a Motley for example. A Super Motley het Leucistic may look different, a different color than a Super Motley (like the stillborn Hypo Super Motley that was red).

Leucistic snakes by definition are achromatophoric, just like amelanistic boas have no black, or anerythristics have no red, the chromatophores (sp?) in Leucistics don't function, or aren't there, or something is wrong with them. Chromatophores allow pigments to be shown in snakes. (there is a really good explaination in VPI's Ball Python book, I don't want to get to much into it because I do not want to give the wrong information.)