As Christmas draws near, I’m finding myself a little on the depressed side as a boa enthusiast. Why is that? Well, simply put, I’m jealous of all the morphs the ball guys have! You’d have to be blind to not enjoy all the eye-popping mutations the ball morphers are playing around with these days. Now I have NO intentions of abandoning the “boa ship” and heading for “greener pastures”, but I AM going to dream a little here… What the Boa World needs is this: a white mutation that in the het form creates an actual visual het!
Why do we NEED a white snake with a visual het in the Boa World? Simple. A white snake that produces a visual het can be utilized to tweak everything else that we make. But if you look at the white snake hets in the Ball Python world, many of them not only tweak other mutations, they make something completely unexpected – something crazy! The advent of such a mutation, when or if it is found, would be the proverbial “game changer” for the Boa World.
Before everyone “cries foul”, I’m not forgetting about Jeremy Stone’s recent revelation of his Princess Diamond boa. It is possible that the Diamond Leucistic hets are visual (although Jeremy himself has labeled the mutation as recessive). The Diamond mutation does in some way shape or form alter the Motley mutation. However, the Diamond hets that we have seen (in the absence of another mutation), which are very few to date, do not appear to be obvious visual hets – at least not compared to “normal” boas. It’s still early to be making any concrete assertions regarding the true nature of the mutation, but I look forward to seeing this project develop over the next few years.
I’m not really all that well-versed in ball mutations, but as far as I know, most (if not all) Leucistic pythons produce a visual het. There are probably close to ten forms of this in the Python World (including burms and retics), depending upon how you define it.
As examples, Yellowbellies, Mojaves, Lessers, Butters and maybe a couple others make virtually all white snake when in homozygous form. An even better example of what I’m wishing for is the Mystic/Super Mystic mutations and the Special/ Super Special mutations. Each of these incomplete dominant mutations results in a drastically different, unexpected Super form, while still having the bonus of a visible pattern. Plenty remains to manipulate beyond the pure white snake. With ALL of these “white snake type” mutations, breeding the homozygous form to other mutations often creates completely unexpected crazy results!
To illustrate…
This is a Mystic Ball Python:
This is a Mojave Ball Python:
These two together make a Mystic Potion:
Two Mojaves make a Blue-Eyed Lucy:
It’s insanity isn’t it!? The day we can start doing crazy stuff like this with our Boas will be a GOOD day!
But why has the Python World been so successful in identifying visual hets? And why shouldn’t those visual-het-producing-Lucys be every bit as frequent in the Boa World as they seem to be with pythons? I think the answers are simple – and even connected.
In the case of Boas, the variability of the “normal” or “wild type” phenotype is so drastic that identifying those visual hets is about a million times more difficult than it is with pythons. The normal burm or ball is a relatively consistent animal in terms of lightness and darkness as well as the nature of their patterns, making “different” animals stand out more readily than they do with boas. Boas have all shapes, sizes and frequency of pattern as well as light and dark individuals in the same locality types. Even within single litters, making the identification of possible mutations is a “needle in the haystack” scenario. In my first boa litter, each wild type boa produced could VERY easily have come from entirely different litters their patterns and colors were so drastically different! Due to this variety, identifying “something special” is a wild shot in the dark, with success rates rivaling those of the mega-lottos! While this should not make it impossible to identify those special animals, it certainly makes it trickier.
What the Boa World NEEDS is a homozygous white (or nearly all white) boa that in its het form produces something COMPLETELY different than a normal boa – something that will stand head and shoulders above its non-gene carrying siblings. Oh, AND something that will REALLY mess with other mutations when they’re introduced. Come on, Santa… is that really so much to ask?
(Photos are all the property of Royal Constrictor Designs and used with permission. http://www.royalconstrictordesigns.com)
