Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Are there visible signs when a snake is an albino het?

I'm curious now since a poster seemed to get upset when someone mentioned how his albino hets showed similar patterns and colors that were different than average normal balls.

Anyone else notice something like this?

Right now I'm under the impression there's some knowledge out there someone is trying to keep quiet. If I'm correct, knowledge such as this is the kind that can ruin a reputation real fast and cause the entire industry to have problems.

Is there some way to be confident a snake is or is not an albino het by looking at it's appearance?
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Rob Talkington

yepper..........

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"people suck......snakes are a pain???).......better?......
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lol
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It is his first love!!!!
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RicK @ BbI

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buy corns....try it?

why not.......?

bored?.....

buy them?

ok..here's one for ya then.....

after sex breeding clots....

they do bleed............

ok? no ok?

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"people suck......snakes are a pain???).......better?......
...........................LEARN!!!...KNOW!!!.......

I think that some hets might have "signs" but you cant be 100% sure that just because a snake looks a little different that it is a het.

Some het pieds have a double black stripe down the belly. I have a poss het pied male that has produced more than 20 babies with this trait. But he is still a poss het and his offspring are still unproven. The het pied female that I have looks like a plain old normal. Some have it some dont. Because of this you cant really rely on signs to pick out hets. The only true visual hets are pastels they are het for super pastel lol. Same for yellow bellies and fires.......

All snakes have "genetic" traits. Certain normals produce babies that are carbon copies of the parents. So if you have a light het albino male he might produce light poss het babies but it doesnt mean that all the light babies are het albino.

It is cool to see signs. I have many hets and poss hets that are killer animals but I also have normals that are just as good looking.

Hope this helps

Raul

To the best of my knowledge there isn't. These myths have popped up for a few morphs. There's been talk about pied hets having black lines near the bottom third of the snake that run parallel on the underside where the pattern meets the belly scales. True my het pied has that but, many other pied hets dont. Also I dont remember if it's caramel or clown but that myth is if it has the ruby red eyes similar to the morph than it's het for that. again this is all theory that no one has taken the time to prove. Balls vary in so many ways & everyday people are trying to scam the unknown with b.s. & false promises. If you want hets get them from a trust worthy source (Big Breeder, friend, etc.). If you see a snake you may get that feeling about (Het myth) just keep in mind that there's a much greater chance it's nothing. I bough a 50 poss female het albino from someone at a show. She will hopefully be big enough to try & prove next year. I wil say though out of the clutch he had I did pick the girl with the most outstanding amount of yellow among them. Now does that mean anything...no.....but she gave me that feeling & even if she don't prove out she will be a great pet & hopefully make pretty pastels. That was the first & last time I have gone on a hunch so far. It just doesn't seem worth it right now. If I start making money then eventually I would like to play with poss hets & marker theories but I can't focus on that until I at least produce a good amount of morphs & have the time & money to dink around.

I agree that if you are going to go for 100% from a reliable source (of course), then you don't need to worry about signs.

I’ve heard there is question that someone may have been picking out captive hatched with this pied sign and selling them as hets. Of course that is unacceptable. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them where actually hets as several wild piebalds have been collected so the gene might well be fairly widely distributed. If distribution where completely random, then 1 in 200 het rate would result in 1 in 160,000 homozygous (perhaps one a year from Africa). However, it would also result in 750 hets a year from Africa if they export 150,000. I guess it comes down to how common is it for non-hets to show this marker as to what your chances are of a ch with it being a true het.

Back to captive bred possible hets, I think possible hets are the place to start if money is tight, not something to wait to move onto later. Of course they may not be a good investment in time if that is a more important consideration than money.

What have you heard about the caramel eyes? I remember Skip Nelson posted pics of some babies and it took a while for me to figure out what he was talking about and then I posted a question but didn't really hear any more. Have you heard of this from other sources? If I remember right, Mr. Nelson's where double hets and it would be nice to have more evidence anyway.

It's not out of the realm of possibility. Het for Anophthalmic White Syrian hamsters can be identified by looking for a little ruby color when shinning a bright light into their eyes.

Also, is there a correlation between black back and Jolliff and/or VPI axanthic? I’ve heard that there might be and seem to see a lot of blackback VPI hets but maybe it’s just other genes in the line. But then there are Corey Wood’s line where it looks like all the hets are black back. Maybe the pattern and the color are connected some way.

The eyes on my het caramels have nothing different about them.
I bought mine directly from NERD so I know they are real hets.

Maybe there is something different with Skip's hets if they are a different line, or maybe the double het thing???

TomChambers

well with the caramel thing I had posted awhile ago myself about the pied theory & someone who replied had mention that the eye color being a marker as in the hamsters you speak of. I have not personally seen a caramel that close but i guess some have more reddish eyes & that's what the theory was that a normal with that eye color was a het. I was just repeating all the myths i had heard in the past. as far as what i meant buy playing with the het theory later on i just meant after I become more finacially stable & have more morphs to play with I want to dink around with a pair or two & see if any of the myths hold up or not, just a for the hell of it. have you heard any other myths that i did not mention?

Sounds like maybe I was the one who replied to your last post so it's just the one Skip Nelson case and no additional public cases of caramel hets with caramel like eyes. Next time I get a good flashlight I'll look at my 66% chance caramel's eyes again but of course he has a 33% chance of not being a het even if they weren’t picked through. Also it might be another sporadic thing not seen in all hets (if it is even regularly seen in any).

I've heard vague things about clowns and stripes but not much detail or evidence.

This is the male, the female is in shed so that does no good.
looks like a normal eye to me.

you had me wondering so I had to go look anyway
TomChambers

yea i don't notice anything unusual .......now is the snake upside down or the pic..lol

neither, I just held him behind his head so his jaw was perpendicular to the ground then cropped the picture to get just the eye. lol
you can see the flashlight and the camera flash reflecting in his eye, what shotty photography, lol
TomChambers

I don't think there is a sign for het albino. I suspect that some rather nice patterned individuals have been bred into the albino line and those separate genes account for the nice pattern they are seeing. Then again I’ve only owned a few for sure het albinos but I didn’t notice any tendencies for them to look out of the ordinary.

I do think there are some "recessive" mutations that sometimes show in the hets. Remember that the concept of being completely recessive is just something people made up and may not always fit neatly with the way things really are.

There is pretty good evidence in Burmese pythons that some het granites have the puzzle pattern and that some het greens have the cinnamon pattern. Why all hets don't show it I don't know. I also don’t have a good feel for how often it shows in hets and if/why some lines might show it more than others. However, in both cases, the hets that do show have intermediate patterns between normal and the homozygous form. This is what got me on the lookout for sporadic het signs in ball pattern mutations.

The evidence seems to be mounting on the sporadic het pied sign (white belly with dark black lines on the edge). With pieds it looks like the white comes up from a white belly and they have the two black lines in the "normal" areas. It might be that the white belly with black lines at the two edges seen in some hets is an intermediate form between normal and pied.

It would be nice if all hets had it to the max and no normals had anything even remotely like it but unfortunately nature doesn't always work out that neatly. I think we should stay on the lookout for het signs, especially with pattern mutations since there is precedence with the burms. It complicates marking possible hets but it is also a useful tool to speed up the proliferation to meet the industry demand for these morphs.

IMHO the best policy is to openly discuss any possible het signs so that all buyers can make an informed decision after weighing the available evidence. Otherwise you get a situation where those with information could unfairly take advantage of those without. I haven’t seen any evidence that het signs have been used unfairly, to the contrary, I think the policy of selling whole clutches was an attempt to get around the issue without disclosing the information. It just bothers me that the potential is there (i.e. a breeder could hold back all the sign animals for themselves or their friends and then sell all the ones without it as full chance animals).