Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey,

Just wondering, do you start to produce ball pythons morphs by buying a bunch of w/c animals and see what hatches out, producing your own morphs?

Just curious, I know you can buy hets or current morphs, but I wonder where they came about in the first place...very interesting...

Thanks,

Steve

Generally the founder animal is a visible morph that is either caught in the wild or hatched in Africa from wild-bred eggs. It's just a numbers game; out of enough hundreds of thousands of dug up ball pythons and eggs some are going to be morphs.

Then some breeder pays big bucks for the imported visible morph with the hope that he or she will be able to get it to breed and that it will be genetic. If it lives, breeds, and turns out to be genetic then maybe after as much as a decade in some cases the initial investment is recovered.

Of course there are a few exceptions where a morph pops up in captivity with little investment or where the initial investment in an imported animal is recovered quickly due to being inherited in some sort of dominant fashion.