Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am curious about the gene pool of snake breeders. Im sorry if this is common knowledge. I just dont know anyone personally who breeds reptiles. My question is how is a breeding stock founded? Say i have a wild type corn that i breed to my amelanistic corn to produce hets. Will the offspring then be bred to produce amel and more hets? Are those offspring kept from breeding for inbreeding purposes? do you continue to breed your original pair of hets with no ill effects? How do you keep your lines from being inbred? Are there any known complications from inbreeding? i am under the impression that it is ok to breed a pair from the same clutch with no ill effects. Please enlighten me and thanks in advance for reading my very novice questions. = )

Upon reviewing my post. I am not interested in your family history. I was referring to the gene pools of your snakes. LOL

LOL. I don't think any one will think you are talking about their human families.

As to your questions about snakes, your "breeding stock" is what ever snakes you choose to use for breeding.

In-breeding is any time you breed two related snakes together. Like offspring to parent or brother to sister, or niece to uncle, or cousin to cousin, so on and so forth. If the original snakes, such as your pair, are both good quality, healthy, and unrelated to each other then the risk of getting any bad genes poping out in a first generation of inbreeding (het offspring to amel parent) is verry low and generally accepted as a standard practice in the hobby.

Problems usually only crop up when the in-breeding goes on for many generations.

A good example is the gloden corn population. A gentelman (user name blueking)who posts on the corn snake forum caught the origional female wild some years ago. To investigate/proove the genetics of the gold trait he bread her to a normal male and then took one of the resulting male offspring (who looked normal)from that first clutch and bread him back to his mother. That resulted in a clutch with a mix of normal looking hets and golds, thus prooving the genetics to be recessive.

Blueking has since been breeding the golds and hets he has to increace the number of golds and he includes unrelated normals in the progect to keep good variability in the population.

Hope this helps.

A
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1.0 BP Nicodemus
0.4 Cal Kings 3 alb 1 het Dora Queen Ace Pearl
2.0 Alb Corn Bizaar Elixir
0.0.1 Rev Alb Nelsons Oden?

nnnnnnnnnn
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1.0 BP Nicodemus
0.4 Cal Kings 3 alb 1 het Dora Queen Ace Pearl
2.0 Alb Corn Bizaar Elixir
0.0.1 Rev Alb Nelsons Oden?

lol,lol,lol

Inbreeding is very common with reptiles in captivity. Especially when cultivating new recessive traits, genes, etc. It may go on through several generations, and this is usually how line bred traits that are not recessive are perfected. However, stock does get "bad" with inbreeding and eventually problems may occur. How many generations is unknown, and some breeders are probably on their fourth or fifth generation of inbreds for sure.

Inbreeding of snakes is only bad when a bad trait exists that can be inherited.

In the wild, especially for those snakes that have very limited microhabitats and ranges, inbreeding does occur.

It could be that mate selection is unknowlingly done by chemical sense, and this sensing may favor genetic differences, thereby guaranteeing some genetic variability even among very closely-related animals.

So the real answer is, let your snakes choose their mates..
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Mark