Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've been reading about BELs alot lately and they're confusing me. I was always under the impression that Lesser x Lesser produced BELs, but then I read that lesser x lesser produced super lessers. So i went to the king of lessers site Ralph Davis' site. He said he first produce em with super lesser x lesser. Then on to lesser x phantom. Here's where I'm confused. Will super lesser x super lesser produce BELs and are BELs consistently bred 50% in clutches or are they more of an anomaly almost like a more consistent paradox? And if they're produced consistently through a lesser line does that mean that lessers are a kind of triple stacked gene? Lesser Platinums are het for Super Lessers and Super Lessers are het for BELs? I'm sure this is an over discussed topic. No need to participate if you don't want, but I'd like to get a little more in depth with it than you get on google search. Also I'm mostly interested in the lesser aspect of BELs, but discussion of mojave, Russo, and phantoms are fine too. Just looking to gain some knowledge.

Thanks,
Mike

Alright i can help you with this one. BEL is what the super lesser looks like. So a lesser x lesser breeding produces 25% Super Lesser(BEL) 50% Lessers and 25% normals. Also, a super lesser x normal will produce all lessers (no supers so no BELs). a super lesser x super lesser will produce all super lessers (so all the babies will be BELs)

All of the morphs that make BELs work this way, except the phantoms, so mojo x mojo, het russo x het russo, butter x butter will all produce BELs and have the same ratio as the lessers. the lesser x phantom produces a BEL but a phantom x phantom produces the super phantom which i'm sure you have seen on Ralph's site.

hope this helps, genetics are really starting to get complicated in the ball python world

-Jake
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Still kinda confused, but I think I'm understanding. On rally's website he talks about platy daddy being different and some hidden gene. I'm new to the morph world so this may be a stupid question. But was platy daddy just a crazy wild caught that happen to carry the co dom lesser gene and the simple recessive gene or does platy daddy still have something unproven about him to this day? Ralph doesn't say that he ever found anything out yet on his website but I was wondering if anything has ever come up in the forum world???

The platy daddy stuff is where it gets complicated. Basically yes the platy daddy is a combo and he just happen to get it in the wild, the hidden gene sibs are needed to produce it but you have to breed them to a lesser as well. basically the lesser is a platy daddy without the hidden gene, and the sibs all have the hidden gene i think. so you bred platy daddy to normal, i'm pretty sure you get lessers and normal looking (hidden gene carriers) then you breed the lesser to a "sib" who is a hidden gene carrier, and you'll get platy daddys, but i'm not sure what the percentages are on that one. i do know that the butter daddy has been produced by ralph from one of his hidden gene sibs, so butters and lessers are basically the same morph, just a different line.

hope that helps, but i'm sure it didn't clear everything up
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Yeah it helps, not completely certain on the situation, but still fun to learn. It would be awesome if Ralph could isolate the hidden gene in platty daddy and discover a new natural proven morph. That would be nice to see. I'd like to get my hands on a platty daddy hidden gene baby. With it still being unproven I bet ralph keeps then to himself. If not I'm sure he charges a mint for them... And Rightfully so. I'm just too inexperienced and too under budgeted for that. Might check out the big list to night and see. I never really spent too much time there before. There's alot of reading there for the little bit of information you want from it. Anyway thanks alot for the info.

Ralph has isolated the gene - it is part of the BEL complex, it just isn't a visual morph. The Platty Daddy bred to a normal gives 1/2 Lessers and 1/2 "Het" Daddys (Just like a Lesser x Mojave BEL gives 1/2 Mojave 1/2 Lesser) I would describe it as a highlighter gene, as so far it is has been proven to be visible in Lessers, Butters, & Mojaves & Phantoms (off the top of my head). It is allelic to the BEL morphs so a Platinum (Platty Daddy) or Butter Daddy etc is basically a "super" like a BEL is (so it doesn't produce normals). I think everyone is over complicating it because it isn't something we can visually tell the difference from a normal.

I don't think there is a super "het" daddy, but if there is I'd love to see it. Ralph would be the only one who would know that though. I think he would have posted online about it already if he has made one.

Anyway, hope this makes sense. This is my take on it.
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Abigail McDufford
Wallflower Herpetoculture

I guess I didn't make my statement correctly. When I meant isolate I didn't mean prove it. I mean to isolate it by itself. Just the highlighter gene so that it could be bred into anything. That's why it's so confusing to me. It's a double morph snake. One gene acts like a normal co-Dom lesser into Lucy, but then the other is kind or unproven and it's not really co-Dom or recessive. It's co-Dom in the fact that it comes from a lesser, but at the same time it's recessive because you can't tell which snakes exactly will produce the platinum gene. Too me it sounds best described as het for a co-Dom gene. If that makes any sense. But then it makes me wonder which is the co-Dom the BEL or the "platinum". Both are isolated from each other, but come from all the same style snakes. I find that really interesting and impossible to overthink. Which makes both the BEL and the "platinum" gene similar to a paradox because you can't explain why the gene shows up that way. The only thing that makes these genes different from a paradox is you can predict the gene "as long as you know the parents." I think this gene is amazingly interesting, but very hard to truly understand. I know I should just take it for what it is, but I'm intrigued. When I meant isolate the gene I meant make the highlighter gene completely separate so that you could breed it into other stuff. Like a platinum pastel. Not a lesser pastel. A Platinum pastel. Or platinum spider. Anyone understanding me or am I an idiot.

It has been isolated - they are called "het" platinums or "het" daddys. Here is a picture of Jeff Luman's "het" daddy breeding a Lesser. They are only a highlighter gene to animals in the BEL complex. You could have a Pastel "het" daddy, but it shouldn't in theory look any different than a regular pastel because the gene isn't on the same allele as the pastel gene. Hope this makes sense!

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Abigail McDufford
Wallflower Herpetoculture

Not sure what an allele is but Mostly makes since. Guess something that has to do with a DNA strand.

How awesome would that be to receive a wild caught animal in the mail and find out not only was it a brand new morph, but it's also a simple recessive/co-dom combo. Man what a great find. I love hearing stories like that.