Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi all,

I bought out a collection the other day. The deal was I had to take everything, so I ended up with a few species I'm not very familiar with. Though I am aware of their basic care I am not very educated on corn snake mutations. I received an adult pair of corns and their babies. I was hoping you all could help in identifying them for me. Obviously, the first two pics are the adults. I was told the male was a snow and the female was an orange motley. The female is in shed.

Here are the babies. The owner could not tell me what they are. To me they look a lot like mom.

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Lee Frey
Serpents Plus (aka. Lee Herps)
sandboa@hotmail.com
www.SerpentsPlus.webs.com

Looks like your female is a stripe/motley, and your snow male is het for these two mutations. This explains the phenotype of the offspring that seem to show the traits of each.

The motley gene is allelic to(sharing the same locus on the chromosome helix) and dominant over stripe, which means if a cornsnake is het Motley and het Stripe it will be visually a Motley. The only way to tell if a corn is motley or het motley het stripe is to breed with a known stripe, and get stripe hatchlings.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com

SO from the looks of it, you are saying the babies are all motley/stripe as well. With the sires genes they are all het anery and het albino to boot. Is this correct?
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Lee Frey
Serpents Plus (aka. Lee Herps)
sandboa@hotmail.com
www.SerpentsPlus.webs.com

You are correct. The snow's anery and amel genes are passed to the offspring, so they are het for those traits.

Tim

Third Eye

Well, you produced a striped AND motley, and what look like motley-het stripes. These snakes can show variable traces of the striped gene influence to varyng degrees. And yes, they are ALL double het for amel and anery(snow)from your sire.

The first hatchling looks to be a classic striped, the second is a killer motley, and I think the other last wo are motleys showing stripe influence since motley is dominant over the stripe. It is sort of confusing sometimes, but here is why Isay this.

The Motley and Stripe Genes

The Motley and Stripe mutant genes are alleles and have the same locus. Every corn snake has one of the following six possible gene pairs at this locus:

1)two Normal genes (normal)
2)two Motley genes (motley)
3)two Stripe genes (stripe)
4)a Normal gene and a Motley gene (het motley)
5)a Normal gene and a Stripe gene (het stripe)
6)a Motley gene and a Stripe gene

When a snake has the Motley gene paired with the Stripe gene, the pattern is not the same as the normal pattern. In this case the snake shows a variable phenotype. Some look like snakes with two motley genes, and some show small or large amounts of influence from the Stripe gene. However, such snakes never look like a snake with two Stripe genes. Because of this it is assumed that Motley is dominant to Stripe with variable expressivity.

Typically snakes with both Motley and Stripe genes are called "Motley het Stripe" which is not actually the correct notation even though Motley is the observed phenotype. Really they should be described as "het Motley/Stripe".

You might want to pose this question on cornsnake.com as well, as there are others there more experienced with these two genes and how they interact with one another than I am. But there are also some others here that would also know based on all of your entire clutch outcome, meaning ratio of normals, etc..

The questions over there get answered in a heartbeat if you go to the "cultivars" section.

~Doug
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"a snake in the grass is a GOOD thing"

serpentinespecialties.webs.com