>>Haven't axanthanic amels/albinos already been produced by Jason Nelson, and they have purple color along pattern (called Lavender Snow)?
I believe that he meant a triple homozygous animal: Trumbower-albino, Amarillo-albino, and axanthic. Nelson termed them lavender snows (and I love that!), but Ballam's line was the first to produce this genetic combo years ago. The only really NEW combo is the stillwater-Hypo Miami-axanthic I've seen. I won't go into much detail, because as some of the you know already, there is still a lot of confusing results on the question, "Are Ballam and Miami lineages allelic or not?"
>>Also, is there even a such thing as "anery" in Pits or just axanthic?
No matter what you read, anerythrism and axanthism are pretty much the same thing. Excluding sequestering of caratonoids, xanthin and erythrin are produced by the same cells. If those cells produce more yellow and stop working, we call them axanthic. If those cells produce more red and stop working, we call them anerythristic. Obviously, this is a simplification, but if axanthism popped up with a red bull line, we'd have called them anerythristic. It didn't, though.
There are just different WAYS to obtain this general phenotype (like chartcoal/Anerythristic Type A, Lavender, etc. - all in cornsnakes) and those have different looks. by habit, we say the "bluer" ones are anerythristic and the "browner" ones are axanthic, but that isn't biochemically true. Like the term "true," it is an incorrect use of the terms, but it may or may not mean something to average Joes. It's like "Pilot snake." Herpers know that is a meaningless, confusing, term, but lots of rednecks use it and it means something (confusingly) to THEM.
>>And one more question that has been in the back of my mind...wouldn't a true "albino" (definition wise, not in terms of what people call have been calling it) be an all white snake with red eyes with no pattern, and that 99.99% of the "albinos" out there are actually amel?
Again, that is a misnomer. Amelanism MEANS albinism. In mammals, we only have one pigment: melanin. It is responsible for everything from green eyes to red hair. (Red hair is a defect altering the composition of the melanin made, of course.) Reptiles have more pigments than that, plus the use caratenoids, iridiophores, and similar methods to alter their coloration further. Anyway, that meals amelanistic mammals are white (no other pigments) but amelanistic snakes can be many other colors because they ONLY lack melanin. Amelanistic = albinism, so an albino snake can have ALL other pigments except melanin.
KJ
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KJUN Snakehaven
Pituophis.net
