Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I would like to start breeding BP's.
My goal is to hatch some Pied Balls( as I'm sure is everyone else's) I have a very simple question, When purchasing Hets
would I be better off getting 50% or 66%? How do they come up with the percentages?
My plan was to get 2.0 66% & 0.4 50%
Would this plan almost promise me to get at least 1 pied?

my reply on your question is this. if you are going to get the 66% males make sure that they're from the same clutch of eggs. then do the same with the females. reason being if you get all the snakes that you want you are better off getting them from the same mother. as long as they're siblings, your chances of getting a het increases. oh and the 66% and 50% comes from the way a clutch was breed. if you breed a het for pied with another het for pied, on the average of 4 eggs. 1 will be a pied, 1 will be a normal, and the other 2 will carry the gene to make more pieds. so you'll have to get all the normal babies from one clutch to be able to get a pied for a definite. now the 66% just tells you that you chance of that snake being a het has increased even more. so yes i do believe you'll do good with the snakes that you have in mind just so long as they're from the same clutch. let me know how it turns out.
RED

O.K. just so I got it clear, are you saying ALL the BP's should be from the same clutch or the males from one & females from another.
If they are all from the same one wouldnt that be inbreeding? or does that not really matter with these considering there would be a certain amount in the wild that would inbreed anyway?

when trying to get a morph, you want to inbreed. for example: you have a pied and breed it to a normal female. because one of the snakes shows the morph you are after then all the offspring are going to look like normal pythons but they will be carrying the gene to make more pieds. so what you want to do then is bring up the offspring and breed the females back to the father. because they carry the same genes then the offspring from them will give you more pieds. if you want to be better off in breeding a pied then i suggest that you buy all the males and females from the same clutch. you can go through it with your original idea and hope that luck is on your side. or you can get all the offspring from one clutch and definitely breed out some pieds. the question always is: do you have the money to buy all the snakes from a single clutch. if you do then i would go with 1 100% het male and 2 100% het females. this way you're garaunteed at the least, 2 pied balls. it's up to you but you will have to in breed if you start off with 50% or 66%'s or you can try you luck and get them all from different clutches and that last one is a big risk. so let me know on how you do it, i'd love to breed pied like you but i can't afford it. i recently spent $380 on a 100% het for albino male from lllreptiles and when i got home tonight i found it dead. so that there didn't work for me.
RED

We had a heated discussion on this subject here a year or two ago. I'm not sure we really convinced any of the die hard "same clutch" people but per biology and mathematics a clutch is just a random selection per the piebald gene and no more or less likely to have a true het than any other random selection. Each baby has either a 50% or a 66% chance depending on the parents (50% if only one het parent, 66% if a normal with two het parents). The confusion seems to come from people applying the Punnett’s squares to clutches when really they are for the independent odds for each baby. There is no guaranty that a clutch of 4 or 16 will come out with exactly the same ratios as predicted by the square. Any random selection of possible hets has the same odds as the random selection that is a clutch.

However, there is a twist regarding what is a random selection. Evidence is mounting that SOME het piebalds look different. There may be several visible signs which could be used to increase or decrease your chances of picking hets. If these signs are accurate and someone picks through the clutches before you with this knowledge then your selection is no longer random and might be lower than with the random selection of all the babies from a random clutch (i.e. not the clutch that didn’t happen to have any markers after all the clutches where looked at).

in either case if you do end up getting hets from random selection and produce a pied. you would breed the normal looking offspring back to the proven parents to produce more pieds correct.

That would be the easiest. Supposedly a little inbreeding doesn't cause much problems in snakes but I had always intended to try to find someone to swap for a distantly related pied to keep as a breeder male if I ever produce one.

However, based on the signs I think I have two fairly unrelated het males now so I'm planning on breeding them to each other's daughters to avoid inbreeding just in case. The males are only 50% chance hets but I'm getting confident enough in the white bellies with black striped edges being a reliable indicator that I'm going to do the cross breeding even though it will only work if both 50% chance het males are actual hets.

well good luck with your project there. having the two males such as you do you may cross the blood lines to keep them fresh. but for those who can only aquire one male will have to result to inbreeding until they can get another het male or female to refresh the blood lines.

If you believe in the striped belly sign you could perhaps pick up an unrelated possible het male pretty cheap that might well be a het.

This might not be news, but believe that ALL pieds originate from the one original wild caught animal that passed hands a bunch of times before winding up with a big name breeder. So your supposedly 'unrelated' het males all tie back to the same source....

Regards,

Neil

I've wondered about how many founder imported pieds have been bred. Not sure if I remember reading about any more or not. At any rate, all 3 of my possible hets are from Kahl so I suppose they are eventually related some where even if only cousin. If anyone knows how to read his feeding card notes on sires let me know. I think he is indicating using a group of males on the dam and in one case I see one of the same numbers appear so it's possible my babies could have a common ancestor as recently as the het piebald grandfather and most likely by the piebald great grandfather.

I did pick up a near breeder sized pet store girl with the white belly with black edge striping and a hell of an attitude that I'm hoping is het pied. I was actually excited when her quarantine fecal exam showed tape worms because I thought this indicated she was imported and hence new blood if she does happen to prove out (I'm not holding my breath, but am excited to try just the same). However I've recently heard of lots of captive bred animals having tapeworms so apparently they are easier to pick up than I though, maybe from feeders. I'll have to ask my vet more about that. At any rate, it's possible that she was a possible het sold into the pet trade by a local breeder who has been working with pieds for several years now. Not as far out as it might sound. With shipping and marketing of possible hets being so difficult I sold a male that I think is a het pied to a pet store yesterday. But that's a whole other discussion (why some breeders are more worried about the chance that a possible het is a normal than excited about the chance that it’s a het).

Regarding your last message about worms, I don't know exactly how they come, but the fact is that even on a captive-bred animal, perfectly dewormed at least once, if you don't do anything one year later they're back!

I suppose, as you've done, that feeding and drinking bring that, as for us : when we go out of our mother we don't have worms. There's no worms in candies, but if we eat too much sweeties we got some of those nasties... Same thing for snakes?

Anyway, it's easy to check and when you weight both preys and animals on a regular basis before and after feeding, you see what I've called "profit ratio" dropping little by little, and if you deworm when ratio turns significantly low, it rises up again to his maximum just after. No doubt, there were worms!

An uphill battle I guess. I read something recently about dogs and cats getting tapeworms from fleas! Maybe feeder rodents commonly have parasites and spread them to the snakes. If everyone just regularly treats I’d worry about what if we select for a resistant line of parasites. The alternative might be to do like the commercial pig farms and maintain ultra high quarantine - start a rodent colony by taking babies by cesarean under an antiseptic bath and raise them in a sealed lab with no visitors allowed. I guess these problems are why parasites are so common.

A resistant line of parasites? That's a fairly good question!
In my country, we need a vet or doctor's prescription to get Flagyl, and main reason is exactly what you're talking about... Sanity's authority try to avoid the birth of any amibian resistant line this pharmaceutical molecule.
Funny idea to create a parasite free roders line, but I worry by abvance about the cost of a single pup! LOL.