I will try to do this right one more time. Here is the complete story.
What was at first thought to be a simple breeding of a piebald male to a het piebald female in 2008 turned into the biggest surprise I have ever had in my entire breeding career. With over 300 clutches of eggs spanning 8 years of breeding, I often wondered why nothing unexpected ever popped out. Well that was about to change...Big Time!
First off I do not own any Axanthics nor am I working with any Axanthic genes in my collection. Or so I thought. Ironically I was about to buy a few axanthics and start a few projects with them. This being one of them.
Let's go back to the beginning. In 2002 I purchased a group of 4 possible het piebald females from a broker in New York who purchased them from Steve Roussis. I bred all 4 to my piebald male and after several clutches determined that 2 were piebald hets and 2 were probably not. One of the hets, female 1, produced a piebald male which I kept as my #2 breeder. One of the non hets, female 3, produced all hets of which I kept 2 females. This year I bred my #2 piebald male and one of the daughters of female 3 and got 4 eggs.
These days I let my eggs start to pip on there own. Once a few have piped I will cut the rest. The first egg to pip looked normal under the low light of my walk-in incubator. However when I transferred to clutch to my hatching room I noticed that there was no color to the head and soon discovered that I had an Axanthic in the egg. It hadn't even occurred to me that the next treasure I would find would even be a possibility. All I saw was white with some gray and black blotches....A Piebald Axanthic!!!!!! I was dumb founded, amazed and completely taken back.
After many phone calls and web site searches I felt confident that this was a world first. When I think about the odds it truly is incredible. Most of all because I wasn't even working with Axanthics.
When going back over my records I realized that I had sold of the mother of the mother of this clutch which was a het Axanthic without me knowing. However I have 3 of the originals females still in my collection of which 1 is confirmed a double het in addition to the mother of the clutch.
The clutch ended up having 1.0 Pieaxanthic, 0.1 Axanthic het pied, 1.0 pied 66% poss het Axanthic and 0.1 het Pied poss het Axanthic.
To most of those that have been working on this project for many years and have not achieved your goal, I apologize. To Lady Luck....I thank you very much!
UPDATE: I spoke to Steve Roussis yesterday and he does not have any Axanthic genes in his collection either. The father of the poss het females came from Pete Kahl and to my knowledge Pete was not working with Axanthics either. Steve thinks that the mother could have been a het Axanthic that came out of Africa. What line of Axanthics are they? I don't think I will ever know.
Thanks again for reading and looking!
Markus
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www.ballpython.ca
