Let me start with a little bit of history on this new morph. I was lucky enough to come across a couple of odd looking “striped” cornsnakes for sale a few years ago. I pointed these out to a very good friend of mine, Graham Criglow, and we immediately did what it took to put them on my breeder rack. These were actually more of a striped-motley pattern than a striped one, but we were hoping to use these animals to make “Okeetee” stripes and/or “Okeetee” motleys. Obviously, there are no true striped cornsnakes with dark or black borders (and they are extremely rare in motley corns), but these had very well defined borders. As they matured, the borders remained black, and the snakes developed into fairly good looking “striped” Okeetee corns. Our original plans were to breed them into some of our “Extreme” Okeetees (aka “Abbott’s” Okeetees) to improve the red and orange coloration while maintaining the dark lines so rare in classically striped cornsnakes.
Once we got the snakes and could verify what we saw in images (and later breed them to unrelated females), there were many obvious characteristics that differentiated them from regular striped, motley, or striped-motley cornsnakes. This led us to believe that these snakes might be a new mutation and just not a new twist on an old mutation.
1. The black lines were obvious. These are never present on striped corns and are so rare on motleys that they can almost be ignored. The new snakes are more of a “lined” corn than a striped corn!
2. Lateral patterns were heavily checkered in a mosaic-like pattern. The best way to describe the lateral pattern is that is strongly resembles digital camouflage patterns. Normal stripes and motleys have the dorsal pattern absent or modified into a partial, thin, stripe.
3. Ventral scales were usually edged in black (similar to many “het bloodred” cornsnakes but darker and more obvious) and many had partial checkers over much of the ventral surface
4. Overall coloration was that of a NORMAL cornsnake. Striped and motley cornsnakes have a hypo-like appearance. These do NOT. They retain the beautiful coloration of a normal cornsnake while having a striped-motley like pattern with intricate sides.
5. The dorsal stripe was almost always complete from head to tail, and it does not yet seem to turn into a true motley or striped pattern when outcrossed. In most cases, the “stripes” above the spine are, at most, broken in only 1 or 2 small places.
Due to these differences, we began calling these snakes the “Tessera” cornsnakes because the mosaic pattern and colors really strike us. Not only are they visually pleasing, but they can be downright shocking in appearance. For those curious about why we call them Tessera cornsnakes, “tessellate” means “to form a mosaic pattern” and “tessera” is one of the Latin roots for it.
Anyway, the above differences were obvious enough that we thought we might have something new. We sent a male to Don Soderberg (South Mountain Reptiles), and Graham and I kept the rest. Between all three of us, males were bred to 3 different (and unrelated) “Extreme” Okeetees and one normal Okeetee cornsnake het stripe. One of our females laid four good eggs, and those few babies had normal patterns. The clutch was really too small to mean anything, of course. The normal female het stripe produced a clutch of babies, and about half of them were Tessera cornsnakes. The rest had normal patterns with a couple of odd motley/stripes mixed in. Believing this was related to the striped allele, we were not surprised.
However, the other two Extreme Okeetees also produced clutches that were composed of approximately 50% normal and 50% Tessera cornsnakes! That’s right: we produced Tessera cornsnakes by breeding a Tessera to two different, unrelated, normal Okeetee cornsnakes. We feel fairly confident that these two snakes are not het for stripe or motley, so this implies that the Tessera mutation is (1) inheritable and (2) not a recessive mutation! We will confirm this next year by breeding our Tessera cornsnakes to other cornsnakes that are known to not carry the striped gene and by checking these female Okeetees to verify that they are not het stripe.
Assuming these tests turn out as expected, we don’t know yet if this is a dominant or codominant (or incompletely dominant) mutation. The only way to know this is to check for a “super” form by breeding two Tessera cornsnakes together. Regretfully, that goal was not accomplished this season, but we should have the answer by the end of 2009! This may be the first known dominant/codominant mutation in cornsnakes! It’s about time, and it has all of us here very excited!
What is exciting about the mutation is not just the intricate new pattern or the consistency of the pattern from one individual to the next, but also that the striped-type pattern has a normal coloration without the hypo-like effect of the stripe and motley mutations. In other words, we may be able to make dark colored “striped” patterns: albino Tessera cornsnakes with two WHITE stripes down the back, dark anerythristic Tessera cornsnakes with two black likes that may look like they were drawn with a sharpie, ultramel Tesseras with dual purple-tinged lines on bright orange, hypo-colored, cornsnakes, etc. The potential of this morph is almost unbelievable! It truly is a whole new branch in tree of cornsnake morphs.
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KJUN Snakehaven
Pituophis.net
