Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Well here goes,
I traded for a het for albino male ball python a couple of years ago, and i saved and borrowed a lot of money to get a het female for him the same year! I bred them last year and got five eggs only two made it and i got 0 albinos. I thought oh well next year i will have better luck. this year i got 5 perfect eggs and they pipped today 0 albinos again. Now i am a liite pi$$ed so i did some more research on the guy who sold me my het female and i guess I am the 4th person that he has done this to. I trusted him because he used Dave and Tracey Barker as a reference and said that they were good friends. He also sent me a copy of the paper work on the snake. I guess i chalk this one up as an expensive lesson learned

can i get the name of that breeder so i dont ever make that mistake

When breeding a het to a het, sometimes you may not get the morph you are after,,,,it happens. The first year with only 2 eggs, you may just not have had good odds, the second year, I would be questioning the genetics if I was you, but I had a friend who bred a het to het albino boa, with lots more babies than just 5, and he only got ONE albino baby. Good luck though, this is case in point why I buy from the Sutherlands, Ben Siegel, Jeremy Stone, Peter Kahl, Brian Sharp and the like. 99% of my MORPH animals are from these breeders.

Dave

Sleeps well at night with hets from the above mentioned....

Sorry about your struggles, try it one more time, and then go nuts on the breeder...or breeders!

Sorry to hear that. I hope that it does not happen to me. I have bought a few Hets this year and not from the big boys, so i am hoping.

Just got to try again. If you would have got the opposite results, you would have been praising the breeder. So give it one more year.

Also, if you can e-mail me the name so i can see if i bought one from him or so i can maybe not buy one in the future? Thank you... Good Luck... JAZ

Odds geek here ...

1 – 0.75^7 = 86.7%

You only have about an 87% chance of getting a homozygous baby out of 7 from het X het (it doesn't really matter that they were across two years). So it's still possible you where just the unlucky 13%.

Did your belated research include a site that can't be mentioned here? I've recently re-discovered that site and found it useful for this sort of thing.

It's also possible your male isn't a het. Has he proven to be one with another albino gene carrier female?

n/p

Hey there.
I'm sorry to hear you didn't get any albinos! I know I would
feel bad also if I were in your shoes. I would also start
thinking that maybe I got screwed on one of the hets. I
don't blame you.

I wanted to let you know about the odds of getting an albino
from a het to het breeding. I'm sure you know that you have
a 1 in 4 chance (25%) that any egg will be an albino. That
means there is a 75% chance that each egg will NOT be an
albino. "On average" you will get 1 in 4. However, you could
have 20, or 40, or more eggs and not get any albinos. Of
course the odds are astronomically small, but it is *possible*.
I'm sure if any of us got that far, we'd swear we were screwed (and
we'd probably be right).

You said you had 7 eggs to date. Each one has a 75% chance of
NOT being albino. So the odds of NONE of the 7 being albino
are: (.75 * .75 * .75 * .75 * .75 * .75 * .75) = 13.3%
That means that ~1 time out of 7-8, when you have 7 eggs, you
will get 0 albinos! Translation: It can happen!

Now, you also mentioned that 3 other people had similar
experiences, so I'm guessing you got taken (and I'm sorry to
hear that!). Just thought I'd throw a little math at you...

By the way, the odds of having 10 eggs and no albinos is: 5.6%
By the way, the odds of having 20 eggs and no albinos is: 0.3%
By the way, the odds of having 40 eggs and no albinos is: 0.001%

Good luck next year!
ChrisS - SanJose