Reptile & Amphibian Forums

So after pairing two normal westerns I had (both with normal patterned bellies and lots of color) I had a baby hatch out with an almost solid black belly.

Being curious I googled this and discovered a thread in which a few folks were mentioning normal checkered bellied hogs producing black bellied hogs.

Anyone know anything about this little 'trait'? It's a really neat affect and I'm just curious if anyone has officially labeled it (recessive) or if its just a random multi-allele kinda thing.

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4.4.4 Western Hognose
1.1 Ball Pythons
1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

I'm not really sure if anybody has really done the work towards understanding the heritability of solid black belly hogs that are not Anacondas. It's a project I've been meaning to work on for many years now as I had a solid black belly male, bred him to a normal checkered belly female and out of 4 eggs, produced 2.1 solid black bellies and a 0.1 99% black belly (which I just sold and shipped today), so 75% turned out solid black, kind of an interesting percentage.

I did breed one of the male siblings to his all black belly sister a couple of years ago but I lost that clutch (and unfortunately several others due to excessive incubating temps) and I've never bothered to try breeding them again due to many other projects that always prioritized themselves.

More linebreeding as well as outcrossing will hopefully determine what is at work here and whether or not we are dealing with Mendelian traits.
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

As I said below, I'm really curious to find out what's going on here.

Especially since as far as I'm aware, there are no anaconda's in my collection.
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4.4.4 Western Hognose
1.1 Ball Pythons
1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

I started working on this project two years ago.I got a little sidetracked though. I had a female that I noticed threw out about 1/4 to 1/2 black bellies in each clutch no matter what male she was paired with. unfortunately i lost that female last year. I now only possess one male black belly from her offspring and an unrelated black belly male i came across. currently i have no "normal" females to pair them with nor did I hold on to any females from her clutches. the male produced will be ready to breed next year and i hope to get this project rolling then. Still a lot of work to do on it though. I am hopeful.

Well I hope some answers about this are uncovered. I'm really curious as to what is going on genetically.

So far, it would appear that 2 out of 7 are 99% black with only a few yellow specks.

Still waiting on the last egg to pip, and there are two more that are still hiding in their eggs...

I will definitely have to keep some of mine and see what happens. Also not sure if the trait came from the male or female. The male has an excessively pretty belly (a lot of orange and yellow) the female has some yellow specks.

This is a pic of the male...I'm guessing it must have come from the female, but I don't want to rule him out 100% either.

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4.4.4 Western Hognose
1.1 Ball Pythons
1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

This is the female

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4.4.4 Western Hognose
1.1 Ball Pythons
1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

Just a little update. 3 out of 7 have almost solid black bellies with some minimal yellow specks.

The last one still has yet to leave the egg.

I was gonna move on to another project, but I may have to keep these guys around and see what happens.

I'm curious as to the gender of the visual babies. I'm not sure it would make sense if its an allele with multiple traits, but I'm wondering if maybe its sex-linked as it seems to be spread by females?

Just a passing thought.
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4.4.4 Western Hognose
1.1 Ball Pythons
1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

I'm curious as to the gender of the visual babies. I'm not sure it would make sense if its an allele with multiple traits, but I'm wondering if maybe its sex-linked as it seems to be spread by females?

Like I said in my previous post, the father to my F1 black bellies was a solid black belly himself and the mother was not. To further prove that my female did not have any such influence, she's laid 2-3 unrelated clutches afterwards and never once did she produce any more black bellies, the only ones came from that original male. So at least in my animals, if it is sex-linked, it would have to be from my male but I'm thinking it's not sex-linked at all.

It's definitely an interesting and often overlooked thing to experiment with though. Good luck with yours!
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Troy Rexroth
Rextiles

Good point. I missed that when I read over your post earlier.
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4.4.4 Western Hognose
1.1 Ball Pythons
1.0 Everglades Rat Snake

This is my unrelated black bellied male with a light background as you can see. He does have a few deep orange flecks on his belly. so it isn't solid black.

Most of my DH lavender hypos have solid black bellies but neither parent has a solid belly.

Furthermore:

Some of the het lavenders I produced last year from the same male lavender bred to a different (normal)female have solid black bellies.