Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was wondering, with people breeding Ball Pythons that now may have 2,3 or 4(or more as time goes by)genetic components that may make a certain morph, will there come a day when it will be extremely difficult for a buyer to reproduce the morph they purchased?

Lets say hypothetically that to create a certain morph, you need a female with 3-4 reccessive and one co-dominant trait crossed to a male with another co-dominant trait and he would also need to have the same 3-4 reccessive genes. Other than the original parents which would be know to contain the correct genetic makeup, how could someone buy offspring and hope to have the correct recipe? You might get 1,2,3 or even more of the required geneics, but you would have no way of knowing what you are missing and every time you breed what you had, it would become even more confusing...Would you end up buying something and only have, lets say a 1 in 64 chance of making the morph you wanted and paid for?

Think about it.

there are already projects like that in the works, I am working on punnett square on a the longest shot combo I'm currently working on, it's going to be hard to hit, and I'll post the results of the square when I'm done.
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Josh & Krysty Hutto
J&K Reptiles

Various Ball Pythons, boas, dogs, cats, fish, an amel tiger retic female, a couple sulcatas and a few other odds and ends.

a BAD dog is MADE not bred, support the American Pit Bull Terrier as the greatest breed of dogs on Earth!!!!!

As the combos get more complex there may be a niche for breeders who understand genetics.

Already platy looks to be in interesting one to reproduce. It doesn't look like platy X platy will give you 100% chance platy. According to the not completely proven (but consistent with everything posted so far) theory that the hidden diluting gene that turns a lesser into a platy is an allele of platy, the platy X platy breeding should produce eggs that each have a 25% chance of being a homozygous lesser lucy, a 50% chance of being a platy, and a 25% chance of being a normal looking homozygous hidden diluting mutation. It's actually those normal looking animals that might be the most valuable because crossed with the homozygous lesser lucy they are the only way to produce 100% chance platy.

You also can't produce cutches of eggs 100% chance spiders without a homozygous spider which has not been publicly proven to be viable yet.

Surely the purchasers of a high number of morph combo animal would be told what the animal was. I suppose another discussion could be held about the most unnoticeable morph once you get to those multiple morph animals. Could the breeder even be sure of everything that's in such a cross? Say, once an animals already pastel and fire could you also tell if it was vanilla just by looking at it? If you could, how about telling if it was super pastel or vanilla?

And at some point even those multiple combos would be potential pet store animals rather than going to breeders. At that point the purchaser might not care about reproducing the morph, only that it’s pretty. I used to breed calico hamsters and knowing how to produce 100% calico females was important to me but not to the people who purchased them from the pet stores I sold to. The information on how to do it is widely available but not sure if most hamster breeders bother to learn it or not.

Maybe there will eventually be breeders who specialize in producing animals for other breeders who specialize in producing animals for pet stores. For example, breeder A might produce the specialized stock like homozygous lucys and homozygous hidden diluting gene animals to be paired up and sold to breeder B who wants to produce 100% platy clutches. But then again maybe there is more fun in variable and not fully predicted clutches. Having a large variety of hatchling types in one clutch to match a variety of tastes might be best.

Randy you are too good with figuring out genetics. It took me 20 minutes to do a 1 in 64 punnett square. but here it is

black pastel double het pied/albino x black pastel double het pied/albino and these are all the possible combos:

normal
het albino
het pied
double het
pied
albino
pied het albino
albino het pied
albino pied
black pastel
black pastel het albino
black pastel het pied
black pastel double het
black pastel pied
black pastel albino
black pastel albino pied
black pastel pied het albino
black pastel albino het pied
Black ball
black ball het pied
black ball het albino
black ball double het
black ball pied
black ball albino
black ball pied het albino
black ball albino het pied

and finally the BIG DOG----ALBINO PIED BLACK BALL

now if that isn't a clutch that I'd look forward to, I don't know what is.
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Josh & Krysty Hutto
J&K Reptiles

Various Ball Pythons, boas, dogs, cats, fish, an amel tiger retic female, a couple sulcatas and a few other odds and ends.

a BAD dog is MADE not bred, support the American Pit Bull Terrier as the greatest breed of dogs on Earth!!!!!

I would think so but at what end? where does the madness end or will it ever!!!!!!!!
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www.myspace.com/apabana

Or perhaps look to dogs or cats for example, maybe someday the "muts" will be less desirable and the quality of a "purebred" will be judged. Just a thought, not a prediction.
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Jeff Benfer
You'll get your regius's to the wall, man!
1.0 pastel Python regius
0.1 mojave Python regius
0.1 normal Python regius
0.2 Terrapene carolina thriunguis
2.3 Terrapene carolina carolina
4.1 Kinosternon baurii
1.1 Malaclemys terrapin terrapin
2.1 Ambystoma tigrinum
2.2 het albino and anerythristicThamnophis sirtalis parietalis
1.0 anerythristic Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis
1.1 Iowa snow Thamnophis radix
1.1 heterozygous for amelanistic,carmel, and stripe Pantherophis guttatus
0.1 anerythristic motley Pantherophis guttatus

All of that gets figured into the equation by the buyer and if someone is comfortable with the odds of whatever they buy...great. 1 in 16 odds are tough enough and there's no shortage of sales with animals like that.
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Matt Lerer
Ghi Reptiles

One of the nice thing with all the co dominant mutations is that when combining a bunch of these even if you only have say a 1 in 256 chance of a super pastel super vanilla super spotnose super enchi from breeding a pair of pastel vanilla spotnose enchi you also only have a that chance of producing a normal. This example assumes that you could even identify that combo by looking and that none of the genes are linked but the point is the variety of such a clutch would be staggering. Sure it would be nice to hit the combo of everything snake but you could breed that pair for years without producing two of the same thing. Sort of a glass half full thing when you think of everything else they can produce even if you never hit that combo.

With receive combos of the same number of mutations you always have more chance of producing normal looking animals (most likely some sort of hets though). But the same principle applies; while the more genes involved makes it harder to hit the ultimate combo it also makes it harder to produce normals. Cross a snow with a striped ghost and then breed a pair of those quadrouple hets together and you also only have a 1 in 256 chance of a snow ghost stripe (not sure how you would tell it was ghost) but you only have a 81/256 (about 32%) chance of each egg hatching a normal. Odds are over 2/3 of the clutch will be at least one and many more than one of those visible morphs. Producing a big variety of 2/3 morph and morph combos should be more fun that producing only ¼ morphs from pairs of single gene hets. So don’t be afraid to produce or buy high gene count combos.

I think that this thread has at least demonstrated that the more possibilities in a multi het animal, the more excited we would be about the resulting clutch! And, by extension, the higher the value of the animal.
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Brad Chambers
WWW.HCU-TX.ORG

The Avalanche has already started-it is too late for the pebbles to vote....

Exactly.

The glass half empty person would say I'll never hit that 1 in 256 odds and not make or buy the quadruple hets. But the glass half full person would have a lot of fun and produce a lot of neat snakes trying.

Also of course eventually you could improve your odds by upgrading the males. Using a striped snow male het ghost to your original quadruple het females would get the odds up to 1 in 32.

EXACTLY, the Royal Python combo's are untapped and Royal Pythons are "THE breeders snakes". Gotta love selective breeding!
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Kyle
www.royalvariations.com

"be safe, be happy and dont let anyone make you afraid" David Coverdale

endless possibilities!!!

Only four mutants? Trivial. The white silky chicken is purebreeding for seven dominant mutants. Got to hand it to the Chinese; they made it over a thousand years ago. And as far as I know, nobody has succeeded in taking the Golden Seabright bantam chicken apart and figuring out its mutants (yet).

Paul Hollander

Corn snakes are already combing multiple recessive traits and the one or two codom traits as it is.

However, compared to how long corn snakes have been in the pet trade and undergoing selective breeding (something like 50 or more years?) Ball pythons are still in their infancy (err...10-15 years?). So, I certainly won't be surprised to buy that rare animal, the normal ball python at a pet store, breed it to another normal ball python and end up with offspring that could be albino, pied or other recessive trait just simply because it was captive breed.

I think anybody now will be hard pressed to buy an all normal captive breed corn snake that wasn't already het amel or anery.

Maybe not big money morphs, the albino or other recessive trait, compared to the 2-4 combinations of recessive traits or more with dominant and codominate traits which ball pythons seem so full of, but definitely a happy result for little Johnny born 20 years from now who wants to breed his snake and he gets an albino in his first clutch from two normal snakes. (heck, or any first time snake breeder...I was quite thrilled to find out my two normal corn snakes of unknown genetics (but definitely unrelated) produced an anery baby.
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PHLdyPayne

IMO -- once it gets to the point where it is a really hail mary long shot - forget it. As well -- if it's going to take years to even prove it out to have all said traits - I'd rather be producing something else - than proving and hoping. Not to mention how it would open the market to even huger scams.
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Tosha
JET Pythons

You definitely see different personality types when it comes to attitudes about possible hets (not that this thread was all about possibles but you mentioned proving out). I can see not wanting to invest your time and space in a non sure thing but I think it goes deeper than that. Some people are much more excited about the possibility of success while others are more worried about the risk of failure. Perhaps neither group is really realistic but most people seem to be polar one way or the other.

NP.

n/p