Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have talked with many people who breed snakes from beginners to pros and there seems to be a lot of disagreement as to where the blame goes when things go wrong when attempting to breed snakes. Some of these things are discussed matter of factly, yet other people will say nothing could be farther from the truth. I will attempt to begin this discussion by asking everyone who replies to NOT mention a specific snake. This is not important right now.
Example number 1 will be the recommendation which comes with some snakes that we should not breed morph to morph but het to morph, or het to het instead, to assure better chances of producing healthy offspring.
Example number 2 would be advising against breeding offspring back to a parent.
Example number 3 would be breeding sibling to sibling.
Rumors of defects and tragedies coming from these pairings includes
1. One eyed snakes or snakes with no eyes at all.
2. Kinked backs and tails
3. Eggs that go full term only to leave fully formed babies dead in the egg
4. Eggs that come out infertile from day 1, or go bad soon after being deposited
Seems like I hear about these things quite often, but there's many questions that should be asked. Size and age of the breeding pair, cage temps, brumation times and temps and incubation specifics. Most importantly it seems like many people fear failure two years in a row so after a pair doesn't produce they switch the snakes to be bred to a different mate. This makes it even harder to find out what went wrong the first time. There's still not enough people discussing these things for proof of any theories as to why they did not get healthy clutches from any given pairs of snakes. A very experienced breeder friend of mine tried to explain it in the sense that he may have over 20 pairs of one type of snake. And that even accurate gathering of info from his colony would still only be a tiny piece of the puzzle that needs to be put together before anyone can rightfully say something like,"You didn't get any good eggs from that pair because you bred morph to morph". This is just an example but as mentioned in the beginning I don't want to start naming snakes and have anyone be insulted or threatened due to rumors surrounding a snake they may specialise in. I could contradict myself til cows fly on this subject, I have heard of certain types of snakes being inbred over and over with no downside and others that outcrossing was mandatory. One of the first questions that should be adressed is does anyone feel that any of the 3 examples listed above applies to any one certain snake or snakes, or will anyone stand by what they assume to be facts that say the opposite, that in no cases do any of the 3 examples amount to anything? I hope I wrote this correctly as it is hard to summarise. Especially when trying to keep from naming specific snakes to specific rumors. All replies are appreciated, but be prepared to explain how you came to your conclusion on the subject. Tom

Good questions but unfortunately no really good answers. I am an advocate of limiting inbreeding. Notice I said limiting not eliminating. Even in the natural state some inbreeding occurs. Evolution would not work without it.

I specialize in a small form of North American milk and can tell you that I’ve had great success with a local line that is inbred to the max while at the same time experiencing difficulty with another inbred local line of the same form. Sometimes all other things being equal you decide out breeding is the appropriate course. Other times you might conclude that some other factor was in play. Given proper day-to-day care and ignoring the out breeding thing, the most common causes of poor fertility IMHO are:

Breeder age – we often associate maturity with size alone. I can only site this anecdotally, but an 18 month old female that is 22” long is more likely to have reduced fecundity than a snake of the same size that is in its third of fourth year.

Condition – IMHO there is an optimal range for breeders. Too fat is just as bad as too thin.

Hibernation – Some forms require longer and colder hibernation cycles and failure to provide this often has negative effects.

Timing – Some forms ovulate right out of hibernation. If you do the classic thing and wait till the after the first shed to introduce the male you can miss a very narrow window of opportunity. Seem to remember this being documented in speckled kings.

The best way to learn what is affecting poor fecundity is to keep good records and compare notes with other breeder. Even then without testing you still just have antidotal evidence. In the end all we can do is stick with what works.

As for morphs and fertility, I’m unaware of a single case where poor fecundity is directly associated with a morph. IMHO, when there is an indication of poor breeding performance it can usually be attributed to what I call the opportunity factor. This is where we tend to feel the need to produce while the price is still high. As a result we power feed and end up trying to breed animals that are too young, over conditioned and haven’t been adequately cycled. Not to say that this can’t be done its just that we shouldn’t be surprised when things don’t go as well as we’d planned.

Tony,

I expected your reply would be well thought out and it didn't disappoint.

RE timing, and the need to breed some snakes right out of the cooler: my experience this year (immediate breeding, great results) and last year (waiting for first shed, horrible results) suggests that is certainly true with L. pyro pyro. Others with more experience with that ssp testify to that timing's effectiveness.

And considering other causal factors, it's not just age, size, etc., there's a lot of inexplicable individual differences in herps, just as in people. One example: I'm just now breeding most of my snow-project females for their second clutches, yet at the same time, only yesterday did one of the females commence breeding for her FIRST clutch. These are all proven breeders, having been here for years under the same conditions, and all experiencing the same brumation and out-of-brumation treatment here this year. Double hets are NOT generally examples of inbreeding, since they're actually the result of an OUTcross (albino x anery in this example) and the breedings this year were to a snow which could NOT have been one of their sibs or parents. Yet such diffs exist, begging other explanations.

terry

As an FYI, I'm a relative noob to snake keeping and husbandry and have not bred any of my snakes yet.

I'm fascinated by the two posts already, and hope the thoughtful discussion continues.

In a nutshell, I do agree with the second poster who thinks definitive answers will not be be possible. Let's face it, the scientific method and the realities of commerce are frequently at odds. But this is the kind of thread I love, one that has the possibility of enlightening all and maybe, just maybe, creating some answers to the original poster's questions.

Yay!
Some of my snake shots

Tom,

First of all, i think you expressed your question exceptionally well.

Second, I think most breeders would agree that given an alternative, they'd rather not inbreed. Inbreeding/linebreeding can express both strengths and weaknesses. A canary breeder might inbreed to produce a "line" of bigger canaries or canaries with better songs. Conversely, you could linebreed humans to produce children with cystic fibrosis, a fatal inheritable condition. CF is a recessive trait, as is albinism in cal kings, for example. So inbreeding can improve offspring, or weaken them, depending on the genetics of the parent stock. In the case of color morphs, people line breed or inbreed to produce more of the desired color characteristic. Others might line breed for size, or reproductive vigor, or to preserve the genetics of a locale.

Keep in mind that it's easy to construct an example in which a het x albino pairing would be MORE closely related than another pairing of two relatively unrelated albinos. The analyses here require really clear thinking!

Third, I'd ask respondents to this thread to also answer this question:

Have you ever bred two unrelated snakes and gotten any of the following outcomes:
1. One eyed snakes or snakes with no eyes at all.
2. Kinked backs and tails
3. Eggs that go full term only to leave fully formed babies dead in the egg
4. Eggs that come out infertile from day 1, or go bad soon after being deposited

My intent in asking is probably transparent: Yes, breeders get those results from unrelated specimens, too. It would take a huge data pool to determine whether the undesirable results occur more often from inbred pairings than unrelated pairings. I personally suspect they would, but not with much statistical significance. The problem is that when any of those undesirable outcomes occurs people seek an explanation, much as early humans described Thor hurling lightning bolts to explain the consequences of thunderstorms (hope i got that right!). Reports of genetic defects need to be examined with just as much skepticism as reports of divine intervention or paranormal experiences.

good post, tom, i look forward to seeing what develops.

peace
terry

I started this thread with intention to get to yet another important thing. I myself fall into this category, of using 1 basic method for incubation for all of my colubrids. They're all in 1 incubator and all on the same substrate with the same water to substrate ratio. I think details on things like this could be very very important for success. I think it would be interesting to take 5 pairs of any given snake that were all kept and cycled under identical circumstances, and then incubate their clutches in 5 Hovabators with slight differences in temps and humidity. Continue this experiment for a decade and examine the results. I am keeping in mind many many breeders would have to do this before any data brought in would even be taken seriously but I find it annoying that people speak so matter of factly about why things went wrong when they did not produce. It is always, "the parents were too closely related, or I should've bred het to het" or something. Not often enough do we ask, could it have been something else? You would think that with the huge amount of breeders in this hobby we would have a a few more answers. Not to mention some snakes may get an undeserved bad rap and shy people away from deciding to work with them, and that would be a shame. All thoughts are welcomed and appreciated Tom

>Have you ever bred two unrelated snakes and gotten any of the following outcomes:
>4. Eggs that come out infertile from day 1, or go bad soon after being deposited

Back in the 1970s, I had a Burmese python male that was wild caught (AFAIK) that mated with a captive bred female. How closely they were related is anybody's guess. The female laid eggs that went bad fairly early. I opened one that I thought was bad and found an embryo with a beating heart, so I know that one was alive, but the entire clutch didn't last much longer than that one. The female died about a month after laying the eggs. She would not eat and developed the oddest looking skin I've ever seen, partly from the scales developing a sawtooth edge. When I examined a piece of shed skin, it was at least twice as thick as normal shed skin, and the skin was irregularly thickened rather than uniformly thickened. I had four Burms at the time, and none of the rest showed what that female did.

Paul Hollander

Nice post Tom,

We should talk about these things more often. I have two comments:

1. Kinked spines most often occur when eggs are incubated at a steady temperature, then a spike in the incubation temperature happens (even if only for a day or two). I have bred "kinked" snakes and had babies come out normal, so I don't think it's genetic.

2. Inbreeding snakes seems to prevent the animals from reaching their maximum size, as recorded from examples found in nature. The "average adult size" for several types of snakes common in the pet trade is significantly smaller than what those snake are are out in the wild, despite the captive snakes having a relatively constant supply of food.

Of course, these are merely my opinions.

Keep up the good work,

Tim Spuckler

Hi Tim,

These are interesting hypotheses. I take your kinked spine observation to mean that you have experienced a spike in incubation temps and then experienced kinked babies? So you've at least experienced a coincidence, and maybe there's a correlation. Your experience breeding kinked snakes and not getting kinked babies is a powerful anecdotal argument against the inbreeding=kinked babies theory.

But I think your second example is a case of noting observable fact (many captive snakes aren't as big as the average adult sizes reported for wild-caught specimens in some books) but i don't see any particular reason that data leads to your conclusion or opinion: it could just as easily be that the authors of several books took only the larger wild caught specimens to be "adults", which would automatically bias the reported sizes:

Example: Suppose i catch 100 black rat snakes. They range from 15" to 7 feet. Maybe there are 20 in the 3 to 4 ft range, 20 in the 4-5 ft range, 20 in the 5-6 ft range. I might conclude the 4-6 footers are the adults, making the average adult around 5 feet. But maybe the 3-4 footers are reproductively mature too, and thus should also have been considered "adult". That changes the average of those three groups to 4 feet. See what i mean? (and remember that the older snakes get, the bigger they get, or at least i assume that's true in the wild, so if the snakes range from one to ten years old, the older ones would be bigger, and the sizes reported would be as much a function of age as of size. These reported "average sizes" should be viewed with considerable skepticism.

Lastly, the field guide data could just as readily lead to the conclusion that inbreeding is taking place to a harmful degree in the wild: The really big specimens for most ssp were reported, LONG, long ago--take that 8 1/2 foot black rat snake that's cited, for example. How come none like it have been reported since then? Is it merely a statistical aberrancy? A rare 20 or 25 year old specimen with particularly admirable genes--the Shaq or Yao Min (sp?) of obsoleta? Or is the absence of equally large black rats being found in the wild proof that (since the hypothesis is that it's INBREEDING that stunts sizes, inbreeding must be eliminating ALL the "big 'uns" in the wild now. (And, yes, some might argue there's been a lot of habitat destruction resulting in more inbreeding, but anyone who's flown over the southeast knows there is--relative to snake populations and movement--unlimited forest where those obsoleta lunkers could continue growing).

In the end, a thread like this one has as much to do with thinking imaginatively about what data MIGHT mean, what other factors might be involved, etc., as it has in interpreting some very modest data points.

peace
terry

>> I have two comments:
>>
>>1. Kinked spines most often occur when eggs are incubated at a steady temperature, then a spike in the incubation temperature happens (even if only for a day or two). I have bred "kinked" snakes and had babies come out normal, so I don't think it's genetic.
>>
>>2. Inbreeding snakes seems to prevent the animals from reaching their maximum size, as recorded from examples found in nature. The "average adult size" for several types of snakes common in the pet trade is significantly smaller than what those snake are are out in the wild, despite the captive snakes having a relatively constant supply of food.
>>
>>Of course, these are merely my opinions.
>>
>>Keep up the good work,
>>
>>Tim Spuckler

"Your experience breeding kinked snakes and not getting kinked babies is a powerful anecdotal argument against the inbreeding=kinked babies theory."

OR...

it could mean that there is more than once cause of kinking.

For instance diet could easily be a factor. I've been thinking for years about calcium transport in snakes and whether the standard captive diet of laboratory-raised mice is optimal. The idea is a little involved but it starts like this. In nature snakes frequently bask, particularly in the spring. We perceive this as for warming but could they also be generating vitamin D3 to boost their ability to absorb calcium needed for egg production and sperm motility? Tying this to diet, by the time spring comes around, wild prey species (mice and rats) have pretty much scavenged all available seed. What they haven’t eaten has sprouted and so they are left with a more "green" diet until new seed crops are produced. Just so happens, green diets are rich in beta-carotenes another group of precursor compounds needed to metabolize calcium. As it turns out nature might be providing rodents, gut loaded with critical compounds just when they would be needed most to start off the next generation.

This is the kind of stuff I was hoping people would bring to the table. Often I have heard people blow this off and say that it's only lizards benefitting from these things. I just can't imagine something or other that comes from sunlight not benefitting snakes in some way. Not to say they absolutely need it, but that it may play some role benefitting its health when exposed to it. Some rodent breeders make it very clear their animals are fed a healthy diet, and most of us want to know that we're feeding healthy food to our snakes.
I also see that when I feed my males during breeding season they are very content with 1 large food item and maintain a muscular healthy body tone. The females have done fine for me on a similar diet but I notice they seem healthier when fed several smaller food items. I would guess nutrients from different parts of the rodents, examined as individual, would add up to more vitamin intake say from the liver.............so in other words the amount of benefit they get from vitamins from that liver is possibly greater from a bunch of small mice than it is from 2 large ones? Or maybe that it is digested in a series of intake per mouse as it makes its way through the snakes system? Realy just guessing here. All I know for now is that my few females that produced in the past had more, and better looking eggs than previously. However after they get close to normal bodyweight after laying eggs, even the females do prefer less food offered to them in larger sizes. Very interesting thought on diet there Tony. Thanks for posting Tom

>>"Your experience breeding kinked snakes and not getting kinked babies is a powerful anecdotal argument against the inbreeding=kinked babies theory."
>>
>>OR...
>>
>>it could mean that there is more than once cause of kinking.
>>
Tony, Tom's experience STILL anecdotally refutes a GENETIC link to kinking, as i suggested, allowing for environmental/nutritional causes instead as your example provides.

Your comments were provocative. In Australia Gouldian Finches' breeding activity is triggered by rain, which produces sprouted seeds and seed heads roughly concurrent with the hatching of Gould eggs. The theory is that in addition to simply providing the necessary volume of seed for feeding young, those sprouted seeds contain elements of nutritional essence for the hatchlings. In captivity, breeders resort to including sprouted seed in diets of adults feeding young. There's some data showing survival rates of Gouldians (they go through a very trying full moult at around 3 months of age) has increased considerably as breeders have adopted those additional techniques to their care.

So, does anyone know, DO snakes need exposure to light of certain wavelengths to convert calcium? I've read many times they don't need natural light. Certainly a lot of babies have been produced from parents who haven't been exposed to natural light in their lifetimes. On the other hand, just to be safe, i mix my fluorescents to include warm, cool, and the variously-branded "natural" tubes to approximate a natural lighting equivalent. But is there any science saying whether or not that's necessary? (Also in the bird world, canary breeders feed food rich in carotene to "color up" their red-factor canaries, but I've not seen anything suggesting those birds receiving those supplements, in considerable concentrations, are any healthier than green canaries, for example, that wouldn't get the supplements).

peace
terry

Terry unless I'm missing something here Tom's experience doesn't refute anything. It just opens another line of inquiry. If the statement were standing that inbreeding caused ALL kinking then I would agree but if that's been said I missed it.

As for the natural light thing, I don't see how it could hurt other than being impractical for most operations. I've taken to using supplements (RepCal & Herpetovite) once a month throughout the season but weekly during breeding season for both sexes and up to egg laying for females. The A vit. in the Herpetovite is a natural precursor that is metabolized as needed so there is no need to worry about over supplementing there. I also USED to gut load my mice and rats with vegetable scraps just prior to putting them down but I've stopped breeding my own so can no longer do that. As for the nutrition fed to breeder rodents, professional breeders generally give them a standard formulation that is geared towards production of mice. I'm sure that there has been no attention to gut contents and phito (sp?) nutrients for snakes in these formulations. If you think these standard diets have no effect try comparing farm raised catfish to the wild variety. Big difference in taste and I would guess nutrients as well.

>>Terry unless I'm missing something here Tom's experience doesn't refute anything. It just opens another line of inquiry. If the statement were standing that inbreeding caused ALL kinking then I would agree but if that's been said I missed it.
>>
Tony, you're right, you and i were coming from different places. Although people often mention incubation temps as a possible cause for kinking, all too often it seems people simply posit genetics as the explanation: "Look: A kink. Damn inbreeding..."

I was just trying to point out that the anecdotal evidence in this thread was enough to refute THAT idea, that all kinking is genetic.

>>...I've taken to using supplements (RepCal & Herpetovite) once a month throughout the season but weekly during breeding season for both sexes and up to egg laying for females.

I'm doing roughly the same, also mixing in some NutriBac on the premise that it helps sustain healthy flora in the gut. Can't hurt, and I had a good season, no observable and undesirable side effects, so I'll stick with the three.

I have no doubt that in the coming years we'll gain more--and very useful--insights into nutrition for our snakes.

peace
terry

I may have said this allready but I had read more than once vitamin supliments are useless with snakes. If people are thinking that's not the case I am sure others would be interested, I know I am. Also right on topic with the " kinked spine? must be genetic comment". I hope things like this will keep popping up on this thread. Tom

Interesting point about rodents having more of a "green" diet in the spring. I've wondered if the eggs and baby birds that various snakes take in the spring also have a beneficial effect on getting the new generation started.

Has anyone seen young snakes that would shed the skin every 2-3 weeks? I had one once, and a vitamin supplement seemed to slow the shed schedule down to the normal 4-5 weeks.

Paul Hollander

np

It's little bits of info we need to know about like this that may prove useful in the future. If you have bred kinked babies and produced non-kinked offspring that is something I have not heard of before, and I do find it interesting. As Terry has reminded me in a talk or 2 that we need oodles of breeders to make the same claim before it is taken seriously but it is still something that may be overlooked by people who automatically just put down the litter of kinked babies,which is understandable in most cases. This is also what I mean by people who would automatically not breed a pair of snakes that produced a bad clutch the following year, in most cases they switch mates hoping for better chances of success. I had hoped to hear more from people who DID breed the same snakes again and did produce healthy offspring. My whole point on these posts is basically every bit of info counts in the long run. We are often trying to mimic natural conditions which reflect upon seasons. Yet year to year things are hardly identical, yet thats what we shoot for in captivity. This thread could blow up into a huge discussion which would be great. But many people would rather say "oh well" and hope for better "luck" next year. I appreciate your comments, and also have to tell you a pair of Creamsicles you produced that someone got for me are turning out awesome. Let's see what else people have to say about this thread. Thanks Tom

>1. Kinked spines most often occur when eggs are incubated at a steady temperature, then a spike in the incubation temperature happens (even if only for a day or two). I have bred "kinked" snakes and had babies come out normal, so I don't think it's genetic.

Do you think that the kinking requires just the temperature spike or the temperature spike after a prolonged period of constant temperature? If the second, then perhaps a daily incubation temperature cycle (as in "stick the eggs in a warm place and leave them alone" ) is superior to a constant incubation temperature.

FWIW, I think that nutrition should go on the list of possible causes of birth defects in hatchlings. Breeders, especially the females, need better nutrition than nonbreeders. And poor nutrition is known to produce low reproductive success and birth defects in a variety of domesticated vertebrates, from trout to cows and chickens.

I don't think that anyone has commented on the eye defects. Just to stir the pot, years ago I saw a young Indian python with one missing and one normal eye. I've also seen a litter of timber rattlesnakes where the babies had eyes of different sizes, from normal to half normal. To the best of my knowledge, those timbers were from a wild breeding. I have also read that turtles sometimes have similar congenital eye defects.

Paul Hollander

Terry, Tom and Paul -

I supposed we'd all agree that unless actual scientific experiments take place with "controls" and "variables," we'll never really know for sure about the kinked spine thing. And it's unlikely that most breeders would want to conduct such an experiment. I can say that I stopped using an incubator for colubrids years ago, due to the fact that when summer temperatures hit the 90s (I have no air conditioning) I often experienced babies with kinked spines, most often occuring just above the vent. This was when the incubator was set at 82 degrees, with no way to reduce the temperature if it got higher than that. I have since let the eggs sit at "room temperature" with daytime highs and nighttime lows being whatever they may be (I'm located in Cleveland). It usually takes a week longer for the eggs to hatch, but the number of deformities has gone way down. I truly believe that in most cases this condition in environmental, not genetic - although I cannot prove it.

Terry, about my maximum length theory: I should probably take into consideration that most people would say that snakes in the wild don't get as big on average as they used to. I was camping with Norm Damm (among others) last weekend and he was telling me how he used to catch 4-foot garter snakes in PA. We only found 2-footers on the trip in Maryland. Is it inbreeding? I suppose genetic testing might hold the answer. It would be mighty interesting if there wasn't a heck of a lot of inbreeding in the wild and average sizes are still getting smaller. I'm not sure what that would mean, but it sure is intriguing to think about. Is the average size of all snakes, whether captive bred or in the wild, getting smaller? It sure seems that way.

Tim

Hi Tim,

I've gotta post pix sometime of a few of my big Hondurans. Not record lengths, but big animals.

Anyway, on the subject of lengths in the wild, and average lengths, etc., we need to remember those are REPORTED lengths. I was just reading a book (The Gouldian Finch, Fidler & Evans, Blandford Press, Dorset, UK, 1986) that noted first that in the wild, the yellow-headed color phase of the Gouldian :

"...is rare and is said to occur in no more than about one per five to ten thousand birds (NOTE: the yellow head is a simple recessive and apparently a recently-occurring one; there's speculation it is slowly increasing in its proportion of Goulds in the wild). "It is probably over-represented in museum collections simply because collectors tend to keep unusual examples in preference to common ones." (To dispel any doubt this possibility is a real one, consider this: one of the authors visited Australian museums and of just over 100 skins, three were of the yellow-headed variety, several hundred times the proportion that would be expected from field study results; three other surveys of samples in the field of about the same size yielded NO yellow-headed birds. So clearly the museum samples represented a grossly unrepresentative survey.)

Imagine how this can also influence sizes reported for snakes.

peace
terry

I think your points bring up some underutilized but inherantly valuable commoditiesbservation,input of peers and common sense.Too many people breeding today are in it for either the $$ or the god complex,not for the overall well being of the future.I personally like morphs because having bred for 15 years(wow is it that many already?)I find that there are fewer "new"things so we end up manufacturing them.SO WHAT.I am behind whatever it takes to keep each individual keepers mind and attention to keep healthy animals.Anyone can now be a breeder,but it is the truest test to continually have not only constant breeding successes but CONSISTENT ones as well.It is no accident that the successful breeders are doing well financially.It is the hard work as well as the scruples needed in any business to be both lucky and good.
Myself,I always seem to be splitting the difference here as I started breeding with locality milks,taught at the feet of many legends here.Morphs in their regard were anomalies to be avoided for a multitude of reasons,but damn I cant think of a SINGLE one of them anymore.Like the horse and buggy some still cling to old fashioned purity,but not many.
As a scientist I understand genetics better than most,and I can sympathize with the person who either finds or breeds new morphs......lucky you! But I dont think many now appreciate the simple uniqueness of these without trying to make a buck.....For me its not the fact that inbreeding HAS TO OCCUR by definition to replicate a morph,the problem lies in the haste and total lack of understanding of basic biology by breeders.To reproduce a morph you have to inbreed at least one generation.Breeding morph to morph to produce single morphs will continue to be a problem until it is addressed by those making names for themselves by doing directly the opposite.Responsibly breeding morph to het adds at LEAST 50% more new genetic material(unless they are siblings of course,lol)each breeding.Dont get me started with double/triple/multi morph production because simply put each trait added HAS to be inbred that many generations MINIMALLY.Granted,a single outcross is needed to produce double/triple/multihets but from there their genes can sweep through collections completely anonymous until they finally do poke their head up.Maybe its not today,likely its not a kinking problem....but it should and likely will happen.WHY on earth would any responsible keeper knowingly weaken the very line of animals they are working on?? $$ doesnt seem a good enough reason to me.Besides,any economist knows that the price will stay higher longer with fewer morphs being produced....but most are afraid that someone else will beat them to it and take that market share away.
We do have many things in common here,not the least being that we are into these types of animals TO BE DIFFERENT from "normal" people in the first place!! LOL. There will never be any kind of consensus on any issue here because of this,I have come to accept this.The most we can do is share knowledge,drown in our beer together,celebrate the individual accomplishments done for some other reason than the almighty $$and attempt to inspire what TRUTHS we have learned to the next generation of breeders/keepers.
These TRUTHS may never be found,I for one hope they dont.While they may lead to more good questions that will also likely signal a further changing of the guard here again.I have met many good people,getting to know them better through educational discussions.I hope those that read my followups take the time to understand what is behind the product,I do....Jeff

financial motivation is always part of the genetics discussion, so allow me this disclosure: I breed the animals I do because it's such a fascinating challenge and the results are so satisfying. That it can be profitable is an added advantage i do not disdain. I'm breeding the two kinds of subspecies (hondurensis and pyromelana) that I find personally interesting and I'm not breeding any number of other species that might be more profitable (ball pythons, for ex.,). I think very, very few herpers can be neatly lumped into either the "i'm just doing it for the money" or the "I don't want money, I just love to make baby xxxxxx snakes..." (sounds like an old tire commercial!) . I think most people have found something they love doing, find satisfaction in doing it well--that is, it feels good when they succeed--and the fact that the rarity that makes those snakes so intriguing to them also makes them appealing to others and thus valuable, is coincidental, not the primary motivation. GENERALLY speaking. End of speech. (audience applauds.)

terry

In many cases anything that is described as being a quality product has a high pricetag. You get what you pay for. Wether it's 25 dollar snakes or 2500 hundred dollar snakes judging by the appearance and health of a snake you should get an idea of who is in it for the money or not. Taking this back to the initial topic of this post, sometimes it seems like a new snake has been reproduced very quickly and suddenly many people have them. Then you [sometimes] see lethargic babies with lousy muscle tone and still they have the "new on the market" pricetag which is steep. Then people like myself wonder, was it due to inbreeding? Many people I know would assume it is, and other people have the opposite opinion. I guess it's luck of the draw. If the first albino of any given snake is weak.....then it could spawn a legion of weak offspring until it is outcrossed with a healthier mate. I would personally rather give my cash to someone who apparently has outcrossed their snakes when it comes to morphs. If it was not neccesary from the beginning with hatchlings from the first litters appearing perfectly healthy than great. However 1 snake I wanted from the get go was rumored "flawed", and now people who have outcrossed it claim the babies[being morphs] are as healthy or even more vigorous than the normals they work with. To sum it up, I am one of the people who believe with some snakes it matters a lot, and with others it matters very little. For example[example only!] I will say outcrossing is mandatory in kings but not milks. A few friends of mine have similar thoughts. To finish it up, I had inquired about buying a snake last week, a desert snake. I asked about bloodlines, the reply was something like " being concerned about bloodlines isn't too important when you're talking about desert snakes". Does it ever end? LOL Let's talk some more! Tom

Jeff, a few questions, observations, information...

You said, "Breeding morph to morph to produce single morphs will continue to be a problem until it is addressed by those making names for themselves by doing directly the opposite.

Who exactly are those people? From reading the forums it seems like most of the "names" acknowledge the merits of outcrosses; and by specializing, whether it's in pyros or getula or putuophis or whatever, they're able to keep larger groups with more genetic diversity within the projects they're working on than many smaller breeders might have in a group of "normals". Is the problem perhaps not with serious breeders, but a challenge for all of us to continue the mantra to those less experienced, that inbreeding holds potential risks, outcrosses are good, and to continue explaining why, why not, etc?

You said: "Responsibly breeding morph to het adds at LEAST 50% more new genetic material (unless they are siblings of course,lol) each breeding."

In fact, can't two homozygous animals -- "morph to morph" as you say, -- be LESS related to each other, share fewer genes, than a given pairing of two hets? I can think of any number of ways in which this is possible.

And let's consider the status of the gene pools we're working with right now, using Hondos as an example.

If you want single-morph traits outcrossed, then you'd want albinos outcrossed. When albinos were very rare, $3,000 each and unattainable for several years even at that price because of waiting lists, didn't almost all buyers lucky enough to get one cross it out to normals to produce hets, because there often weren't opposite sex hets available, either? And even if a het was available, a male could be (out)crossed to multiple normal females to produce more (valuable) hets. Every one of those breedings to normals, whether out of necessity or to increase production, constitutes a huge outcross, considering that almost all those normals came from generations of U.S.-bred stock, and the albinos were produced in Germany from generations of european-bred animals?

You said: "Dont get me started with double/triple/multi morph production because simply put each trait added HAS to be inbred that many generations MINIMALLY."

Isn't it true that double hets, quite to the contrary of your suggestion that they represent even more exaggerated inbreeding, are almost always by definition more what you only hint at--they're LESS inbred, resulting from the OUTCROSS of one morph line to a second almost always unrelated morph line? The snow hondo can be used as an example. We just talked about how outcrossed albinos are today, relatively speaking, no pun intended. Ditto for anerys. So (out)crossing an albino and an anery to produce double hets--the first such crosses were done only a couple generations ago--really represents a signfiicant outcross, not doomsday inbreeding, imho.

Sure, the details can be managed with more or less concern. Managing these genetic realities is why i keep two different male snows for my breeding collection, for example, two snow males that were produced from two different pairs of double hets, that were in turn...well, you know what i mean.

Consider further (but briefly) the history of the albinos: The first one wasn't produced, in Europe, until perhaps a dozen years ago. Louis Porras didn't import his first few specimens into the U.S. until 1995. As reported elsewhere, "he worked out breeder loans...to cross his amelanistics to an outstanding tangerine (which would have been virtually unrelated), to a(n) (anerythristic) the first step in the two-generation quest to produce snows, and to a striped aberrant."

So what do we have? ALbinos outcrossed and producing babies in the U.S. for the first time in 1996 (though some babies were produced, too, from related mates) by both Porras and, separately, from related animals imported from another but related source by Brian Barczyk, who also bred both related animals and outcrossed to unrelated animals. So we have the majority of albinos being sold for the first time in 1996 and 1997 from related parents, and the majority of hets being sold with them in those first years being the result of directd outcrosses. Assuming those animals bred for the first time at 2 yrs, an optimistic assumption, the next round of babies produced in 1998-99, the first generation from animals produced in the U.S. often as the result of outcrosses, were themselves more often than not (homozygous x heterozygous pairings, at least) the result of outcrosses, and the same would be true more often than not of the het x het breedings in those years--only five years ago!

Again, since most people would cross some of the precious albinos they got from those animals X normals in order to produce hets, or to other morphs (also unrelated) to produce double hets, just how inbred are today's albinos, really?

You wrote: "Granted,a single outcross is needed to produce double/triple/multihets but from there their genes can sweep through collections completely anonymous until they finally do poke their head up."

Jeff, that passage sounds like Republicans making devils out of Democrats, or vice-versa. "Sweeping through collections completely anonymous" (huh? you mean, genetic traits are inherited, and we don't always know what's there? Maybe a gene for greater fecundity? Size? Or, yes, genetic flaws. But demonizing it like this is unfair rhetoric, imho.

You said: "Maybe its not today,likely its not a kinking problem....but it should and likely will happen. WHY on earth would any responsible keeper knowingly weaken the very line of animals they are working on??"

Well, why should it happen? Do we know kinking is genetic? there's some evidence to the contrary. So what, exactly, should and will happen? Plus, about those responsible keepers--i doubt many would knowingly harm the animsl they're working with. You have made a leap, from acknowledging line breeding can express desirable or undesirable traits, to people intentionally weakening a line of animals. Yeah, some might do that--I'm not denying there may be someone who bought a pair or even a trio of albinos three or four years ago and has for the last year or two bred them only to each other, knocking out albinos from morph-to-morph breedings--but even that is not knowingly weakening them unless ksome flaw has appeared, imho.

Remember, i favor outcrosses, i favor maintaining genetically diverse groups, I acknowledge the realities of inheritance (heck, my parents would say i PROVE the risk!) But the dearth of albinos in kingsnake classifieds suggests nobody's really cranked up much of that kind of operation yet, and i'm not aware of any known inherited defect that's shown up in any of the numerous honduran morph lines, so all this seems to have gotten off target. So some of the arguments--not yours, specifically, but the genetic discussions that go on generally--deal with fears of the unknown, and remind me of the letters our local newspaper published in the past few days from people convinced flouridated water is silently destroying our children's skeletons. Well, maybe, but...

Given the recent origins of our honduran morphs (and the same is true for almost all the lampropeltis morphs) plus the outcrosses necessary to produce double morphs that many breeders are pursuing, it seems to me we're dealing in a pretty genetically diverse group of honduran morphs at this time.

And just this little thought: Just because you're breeding two albinos together, it doesn't mean they have ALL the same genes, it just means they have the same gene for albinism. Even if they are siblings, they have some of the same genes, and in other places do not. Yeah, line breeding may have led to their having more genes in common than two unrelated snakes, but they won't have ALL the same genes. That's important to remember. And this is true even before you get to the positive consequences of the outcrosses that have occurred in the backgrounds in most single morph animals and all double morph animals.

So where's the beef?

Obviously this situation would be a little different (the double-morph situation) in the few instances where two morphs have emerged from a single group of animals. Only two such examples come to mind--Brian Barczyk's pyros that have produced both hypos and albinos, and the brooksi mentioned this week on the kingsnake forum, that produced both white sided and axanthics, if i recall correctly. Only in those instances, imho, are double morphs potentially more inbred than any single morph population. And I know in the case of the pyros, at least, people tend to get them and breed to produce more albinos, or to establish a hypo line, and since homozgyous animals of those morphs are in the $2k and $1500 ea range, you can bet they're being outcrossed to normals too.

Good thread, and jeff-obviously your contributions were provocative! I like that. We'd have some rollicking times in person!

peace, out (crowd cheers again)
terry

You saved me a lot of time and Jeff two hypo neonates! Some people just don't recognize thin ice do they. LMAO

The grayband anery/hypo line as well as some ratsnake morphs.I am almost certain that there are others.....J